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Meme stock trading: Just assume everyone else is mad, or drunk, or both

2 thoughts on “Elsewhere”

  1. The problem with the idea that we, as humans, should be adept at medium-term trading because of our skills at assessing our competitors, is that we’re no longer assessing our competitors. We’re assessing anonymous numbers on a screen, or in some of the cases you mention anonymous social media accounts.

    I’ll be honest – I’ve never owned or traded a share in my life. But I have made a living for 31 years backing horses, and the last twenty of those, now that the action has moved entirely online, have been way harder than the first eleven. It is so hard to pick the right moment to place your bet and obtain the best price from staring at pixels.

    Twenty years ago, on-course, it was possible for a punter to use his eyes, his ears and his experience to predict where the market on a horse was going, and gauge the right moment to back it. You learnt from experience which books extended horses because they genuinely knew it wan’t off, and which ones did it just because they didn’t like the horse in the paddock or because the Sporting Life hadn’t tipped it. You could see which ones were desperate to lay the favourite to get cash in the hod to pay out the previous race, or because they had a lunatic sticker-in.

    Sometimes it was as obvious as seeing a mate of a horse’s connections standing next to the joint.

    You can’t see any of that now just by looking at numbers on a screen.

  2. And that, is a truly interesting contribution, and I hope that Paul, Somerset (stick a “Bloke in” somewhere, it sort of works around here) might hang around until I’m sober. Ish. Probably tomorrow morning, maybe, as this is a type of market that OGH perhaps rarely pretends to muddle with.

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