Why is everyone long on vodafone?

[UKtradergirl]

We have the opposite positions and have been consistantly cleaning up, apart from the mentioned ftse and euro which dragged down the points tally at the end.

[/QUOTE]


I can't believe they are all long!!!

Thanks for taking the time to experiment on this- has been great fun.

 

[options]

My thanks added also LMQ. It has been amusing and interesting.

Perhaps we should have a daily poll on here of a few trades and compare to the paddy ones?

 

[barjon]

........................I have witnessed them just trading against any trend in the hope of a reversal which never comes. To be fair as a group they are good at ftse and euro/usd and we got spanked there, ok'ish at oil, but completely inept at dow and dax plus everything else that popped up on their list...................

Lightning

Shouldn't come as that much of a surprise. Despite the oft quoted the trend is your friend it seems that even here on T2W the overwhelming temptation for inexperienced traders is to look for reversals - threads and posts of the "are we at the bottom/top" type abound - which is a dangerous game. I suppose you could say that I, too, fall towards that camp by trading pullbacks since it's basically looking for a reversal to the pullback but at least in the context of a primary trend.

I would hazard that much more success for the inexperienced comes from "buy high, sell higher" rather than "buy low, sell high", although there are plenty of experienced and successful traders who do otherwise.

good trading

jon

 

[foredog]

The average punter only sees where stuffs been not where it could go...

How many bought

Northern Rock
Marconi
QXL
Bradford & Bingley
Lastminute.com

If it's been £10 before it can go back there, yes or go to 10p!

 

[bigbadboot]

Looks like you got the call about Vodafone spot on UKTG

So is the conclusion from Lightnings portfolio, that it's best to do the opposite of what the masses are doing ?

I would guess that's probably right. If you assume that the market is in equilibrium then if 90% of people are long and only 10% short then the traders with the short positions must have average position sizes 9 times greater than the average long position.
Therefore the big money players are in the minority (in this example short) and they wouldn't be big money players for long if they made a habit of losing...