How do people do so well in simulators?

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debrox

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http://milliondollar.cnbc.com

After only a few weeks, here are the top 20 (who started with 1 million):

1 Tracy Sanders Pleasanton, CALIFORNIA $1,980,774.92
2 Tracy Sanders Pleasanton, CALIFORNIA $1,932,100.51
3 Tom McAdam Englewood, COLORADO $1,927,150.66
4 Laurie Dykoski Houston, TEXAS $1,924,302.77
5 Malcolm McGregor Santa Clara, CALIFORNIA $1,910,238.40
6 Trevor Allan Honolulu, HAWAII $1,866,989.71
7 Rajesh Sabat Doral, FLORIDA $1,825,992.84
8 Bradford Pine New York, NEW YORK $1,808,658.52
9 David King Winter Park, FLORIDA $1,803,268.65
10 Greg van de Sande Toms River, NEW JERSEY $1,800,890.78
11 Rajesh Sabat Doral, FLORIDA $1,796,647.89
12 Cornel Munteanu Redmond, WASHINGTON $1,776,211.30
13 john mccoy morrisville, NORTH CAROLINA $1,772,463.64
14 Sung Cho Wayne, NEW JERSEY $1,760,773.19
15 Frederick Sena III Middletown, RHODE ISLAND $1,729,537.14
16 Roman Svetashoff Palm Coast, FLORIDA $1,728,953.80
17 Fred Fulton wetumpka, ALABAMA $1,724,419.09
18 Frederick Sena III Middletown, RHODE ISLAND $1,721,258.8

Keep in mind each day, a player can accrue 6k in 'bonus bucks.' Still, the returns would be really good even without the bonus bucks (which amounts to about 50k by now).

How are they doing so well?
 
Its easy to put all your eggs in one highly leveraged basket and get lucky when theres no risk of ever losing any money. If I gave 37 people a million dollars and told them to put it all on a number on a roulette table, one of them would get lucky and look a hero.
 
tommog said:
Its easy to put all your eggs in one highly leveraged basket and get lucky when theres no risk of ever losing any money. If I gave 37 people a million dollars and told them to put it all on a number on a roulette table, one of them would get lucky and look a hero.
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aye, p'raps debrox will let us know how the bottom 20 are getting on :)
 
Would like to see them trade with the real money! I guess there are soooo many demo traders out there that are 'millionaires'. In a book somewhere i read that you can be the best demo trader in the world, but as we know, trading is about emotions!
 
tommog said:
Its easy to put all your eggs in one highly leveraged basket and get lucky when theres no risk of ever losing any money. If I gave 37 people a million dollars and told them to put it all on a number on a roulette table, one of them would get lucky and look a hero.
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Yep, that's the key to competitions. Go all in as you have nothing to lose and much to gain.
 
shadowninja said:
Yep, that's the key to competitions. Go all in as you have nothing to lose and much to gain.
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Absolutely spot on.

Not that's there's anything wrong with competitions. They can be jolly good fun, what?

Trading for income or capital growth has as its target anything from ‘not lost too much’ to ‘that was a home run of a month’. A wide spectrum of virtually infinite (though bounded) data points. Risk management limits the upper levels achievable over any given period of time. “Security places a premium on feebleness” and to trade sensibly, there is a necessity for a certain degree of feebleness.

Not so with trading competitions. You need to go ‘all in’ on every hand as SN says. It doesn’t have any physical or real consequences when you lose it all in a competition. Contrasted with the virtually infinite number of outcomes in trading for real, a competition just has a binary result: You either Win OR you Lose. And there’s nothing ‘real’ to lose anyhow, so why not.

For those doing the comps, if you’re not all in, you’re less likely to win.

Talking of feebleness, some somewhat older and more conservative friends of mine in the UK had the majority of their considerable joint life savings with a broker who dealt with their funds on a discretionary basis. A well established and well known company with no hint or history of any issues or anything other than the highest professional standards. They’ve managed to accrue for my friends a whopping 5% - over the last five years. This is gross of fees…LOL.

That they’ve ONLY withdrawn 30% to place in gold (oops…) is testimony to God knows what as they are intelligent people who individually made significant sums from their respective businesses before retiring a few years ago. Why would anyone just sit and watch that sort of performance and do nothing about it? Why, on discovering that sort of performance would you leave ANYTHING in that muppet brokers pot? When I asked them this they felt that it was just ‘a bad spell’ and it would pull around as it always does…When I asked about the Gold they said that ‘everyone was talking about it’. I did try, but you can guess…deaf ears.
 
There are no transaction costs and you get 5 portfolios to play with. So you can experiment with entry timing on the same portfolio. For example you could have the same portfolio of 5 stocks/leveraged ETFs, but then open each portfolio on different days/weeks so that you are more likely to catch the bottom or top of a move and then try to compound the gains.
 
Sim trading is very different to real trading. You can use a sim to prove that a particular strategy works, but of course that does not mean that the trader will work :)
 
When you say "All in" are you suggesting all in one stock? or all in the portfolio? because I see the top achievers here have currency still not allocated.

I also have tried numerous times to go 100% into one company but the server never permits me to. I'm thinking that maybe CNBC decided to not allow it since previous winners have won by going all into one company before.

Would sure like to see these folks portfolios.....

I'm only up 200k ...
 
AJoiB said:
When you say "All in" are you suggesting all in one stock? or all in the portfolio? because I see the top achievers here have currency still not allocated.

I also have tried numerous times to go 100% into one company but the server never permits me to. I'm thinking that maybe CNBC decided to not allow it since previous winners have won by going all into one company before.

Would sure like to see these folks portfolios.....

I'm only up 200k ...
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You can only go 25% per company, and I've noticed most of the top have 90-98k currency portfolios, so they tried it, got stung a bit, and left it alone.
 
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