Word: trader
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...manager and his secretary thought they knew Mark Barton when he walked into the Atlanta office of All-Tech Investment Group last Thursday afternoon. They greeted the day trader by name, and he commiserated with them over the news lighting up every trader's terminal: the Dow's nearly 200-point slide. He seemed to be the old client they were familiar with. No one knew that Barton was packing two handguns; that on Tuesday he had murdered his wife, on Wednesday his son and daughter; that he had just been at the building across the street, at another brokerage...
...would have sympathized with the plight of Barton's kids if the case went to court. The company stipulated, however, that $150,000 go into a trust for Mychelle and Matthew. With the insurance windfall, Barton soon allowed himself to be swept into the risk-loving fraternity of day traders who try to make a living hunched over a computer terminal, betting on the daily gyrations of individual stocks (see accompanying story). By this year Barton was a full-time day trader. But things turned bad this summer. Barton had lost about $105,000 since June, almost...
...there's nothing easy about it. Jake Bernstein, author of The Compleat Day Trader, estimates that only 15% of those who take up day trading make much money at it. Many lose big because they don't have the discipline to sell immediately when a stock moves against them, or they leave a lot of money on the table by being too quick to capture profits when a stock starts to move their way. Often mistakes are a result of making overly large bets. "If you have too much at risk, you're prone to acting on emotion," Bernstein says...
...successful day trader has to be able to stay calm while absorbing painful losses. "It's easy to get suckered into this game," says Ari Kiev, a psychiatrist and trading coach who wrote Trading to Win. "You start to lose, and you try to make it back, but you lose more. You lose the rent money and then the college money. That activates feelings of inadequacy, failure and catastrophe. You start blaming everyone but yourself. It's very destructive." Authorities believe something like that occurred with Mark Barton...
...Clients open accounts with minimums of about $50,000 and are allowed to use fully equipped trading posts, which include a telephone; monitors displaying the bid-and-asked-prices of stocks and other data; financial and general news wires; and a direct link to markets where a trader can make dozens or even hundreds of trades in a day. The same tools are generally available at home or in the office via the Internet, though they are less easily managed and access is slower. The day-trading firms make money by taking a commission on each trade. Day traders...