Driving home tonight, I saw a huge billboard off the freeway from Charles Schwab which said:
"I did everything perfectly right.
Then everything went wrong."
That captures the essence of everything a financial services firm wants a customer to believe. That is, when the customer is making money, it is because they are so good; and the customer is losing money, it's because of uncontrollable outside forces.
You win? Endogenous excellence. You lose? Exogenous malevolence.
I have a simpler explanation. Most people have no idea what they are doing. None. They didn't know during the bull market, but it was very hard not to make money buying stocks. And they certainly don't know now, when hardly anyone is able to make anything.
I think a more honest billboard would be more along these lines:
"I got lucky. But my luck ran out."
One other comment about all the emotional chatter this weekend; one fellow wrote in to say he thought the reason people might be peeved is because I don't provide stop prices with all my trades.
For those of you who might expect stop prices, allow me to disabuse you of that notion. I rarely have time to provide them. Even if I do have the time, I probably won't bother. I might be in a trade 5 minutes or 5 days. Ideas that are offered should be given the same weight as you would glancing at a random ticker symbol scrawled in crayon on a piece of paper. A chart worth looking at out of curiousity. Nothing more. Don't expect a stop. Don't expect guidance. Expect little more than good conversation among, by and large, an intelligent and self-sufficient group of traders.
