This message isn’t for everyone. After all, we know a fraction of leveraged retail traders are successful. But...
Look, you need to stop 🛑
You are just not good at this and there is no easy way to say it.
You tried to make it work
But you just. keep. losing.
It’s not a joke. You think it’s funny? We should not joke about this. Look at your balance sheet.
You’re losing over and over, no matter how you cut it. And it’s not even just the painful realized PNL — you keep on paying money for new systems and vendors and data providers and license this and credit that and...
...and it’s just not working 🛠️
You did it all. You studied the gurus, opened the margin account, talked your spouse into letting you DoLLAr CoSt AVeRage your way into a pervasive level of fixation that should only be prevalent in patients with substance use disorders.
And then just what did you do?
You bought more monitors; you upgraded your RAM (or at least you thought you did) and whatever was causing the fan to run so loud has stopped so at least you can think straight, but are you any more happy than you were when you first opened a spreadsheet and saw how fucking rich you could be? Just ask yourself:
- Are you trading assets or are you trading indicators?
- How much time do you spend fucking with your system**?
- Really break it down, what your yearly ROI vs time spent? (And yes, that includes “research“)
- Did you have any idea that you’d end up here?
Also, what the fuck? What are you up against right now? There are probably a dozen PHDs competing for the best price, and you think you’re going to beat them with your piece-of-shit-expensive computer?
What is the evidence? 🔬
You might have a plan, but the data tells a different story. What you’re not seeing behind all these charts and studies is that forced liquidation and increased trading costs cause leveraged investors to lose money.
Looking at data on an annualized basis, three years, covering 733 trading days between January 2014 and December 2016, researchers at UCLA found a decrease in individual investors’ daily gross (net) return by a factor of 13%.
Leverage has a tendency to reduce investors’ returns.
In other words, borrowed money = less money for you. (And no, your leveraged bitcoin returns aren't going to outpace this fact either).
Know the full story 📖
Highly leveraged traders make money because they have the funds to withstand the draw-down. You probably do not.
If you do not have the funds to meet a margin call, don’t use a margin account. If you constantly need to add in your account before every trade, you need to stop what you are doing.
There is a difference between responsible cost averaging and feeding an addiction.
- ...and the only limit order is yourself
- ...and you're ignoring your failures
- ...and you're failing the test
What have you lost?
Does any of this resonate with you? We are a small group with history working in financial trading services and put this piece of shit site together in reflection on the practices and behaviors we observed.
If you (or someone you know) have ever paid for a system, subscribed to an indicator, or otherwise received a margin call that you did not know you were about to receive. We want to hear from you.