Do video games/online poker help you be a better trader ?

[nkruger]

Have a read of this first.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Gaming helps traders score big-time

Do any peeps agree ?

 

[BSD]

Interesting.

Could well imagine that gaming skills come in handy if your style is heavy-metal scalping, doing hundreds or thousands of roundturns / day.

I do believe that there are a select few who make a good albeit not compoundable living at that, but I'd assume that for most traders scalping is just a quicker way to the poorhouse.

On the other hand I suppose that teaching their incoming crop of newbie traders a churning trading style that generates massive commissions is probably the main source of income for quite a few prop trading firms.

That's just my opinion though, I certainly don't have any hard facts on how many traders at prop firms are net profitable, or, of those that are, what kind of a living they can make there.

Be interesting to hear some insider info on that.

 

[luckyd1976]

Good article,

I agree that VGames are an asset to traders. Keeps Hand/Eye/Mind sharp. Recognizing and reacting on the platform is such a huge part of some styles of trading. I would bet videogame players make less platform errors.

I think playing poker in person would be more beneficial though than VidPoker.

 

[faro0485]

I believe this is mostly rubbish just to promote online gambling. Then again I would like to see what video games were used in the assessment and if this is done by other companies. I don't think I can recall any speed puzzles with maths games.

 

[prop]

yep agreed, gaming is def good for the trading, know a guy who says trading is just like playing fifa on whatever games console he has got !

 

[Crap Buddist]

Well, I'd like to see how the wife reacts to that one! I dont think she'll buy it. LOL. You fellas come up with some classics!

"Yes darling,honest! If I Play poker everynight online, I become even better at trading"

Ping PoowwW BifffF.

 

[JTrader]

Not essential for someone who trades off daily or weekly charts.

 

[Crap Buddist]

Not essential for someone who trades off daily or weekly charts.

Even more so I'd say JT, what else you gonna do with your time ?

 

[PualoP]

Even more so I'd say JT, what else you gonna do with your time ?

Yeah, definately helps stop overtrading!!

 

[shadowninja]

Thought it'd depend on the style of trading you do. Swing trading is more akin to a strategy game. If you're playing it like a FPS game then you're going to lose.

 

[faro0485]

Trading is stressfull enough... hmm... so.. what's the most stressful game out there?

Ah yes a real hard one would be any first person shooter, any game that lets you build up and the more you build the more riskier it gets for all of that to come crashing down.

 

[CHRISTO9HER]

So glad that all those hours blowing the crap out of terrorists on Call of Duty 4 wasn't a waste of time

 

[counter_violent]

Online Poker...yep very much like trading....and if you play tournaments with say 5000 entrants...if you can get a top 50 finish, thats good...the standard is very high....a true test of the best computer ever invented...the brain.

This excersice does'nt need to cost money either...plenty of free events with minor prizes available....good training in skills and disciplines for traders.

 

[Aspire]

For me trading pretty much is a computer game, only my score ends up printed on my bank statement rather than just the high score table..... but playing on a games console wont improve your trading anymore than playing FIFA 2008 will improve your Grand Theft Auto score.

Your time will be much better spent focussed on learning to trade than playing computer games. You will get more than enough hand-eye clicking practice while the rest falls into place on your path towards making good money.

 

[BSD]

Good read from some years back.

Bob Bright is or was a regular contributor on ET and seemed a pretty good sort.

"Wednesday, March 3, 1999

Blackjack Whiz Bob Bright Makes Stock Trading a Genuine Gamble

By Ianthe Jeanne Dugan Washington Post Service

LAS VEGAS - Bob Bright has $100 on the blackjack table, a five of spades and a six of hearts in his hand. He laughs and chatters and swigs an alcohol-free beer to hide from a hovering Harrah's manager the complex calculation running through his head.
In seconds, Mr. Bright figures out what cards are left in the deck - ''count'' them - and ciphers a good chance of hitting a high card. He peels another $100 bill from a wad and lays his cards on the blue felt, doubling his bet and summoning a winning queen. The dealer pushes a pile of chips toward the burly, bespectacled gambler and starts firing out another hand.

It's 9:30 on a Monday night. Mr. Bright has been gambling professionally all day. But he walked into a casino only five minutes ago. His first bets of the day were made in a different kind of gambling arena - the U.S. stock market.

Mr. Bright placed his first high-stakes bet more than 15 hours earlier at a drab professional park two miles away. The wager: $300,000 that America Online shares will move up when the New York Stock Exchange opens in six minutes.

It is the first of thousands of wagers generated in a single day by Bright Trading Inc., a thriving firm that applies the tenets of blackjack to the new game called day trading, embodying the oft-debated affinity between gambling and playing the markets. Bright Trading is now one of the biggest of a controversial wave of day-trading firms that help amateurs buy and sell thousands of shares a day, typically eking profits out of small movements in stock prices before they cash out completely at day's end.

The rise of day trading in the past year has, for many traders, turned the stock market into an invisible nationwide casino where they can play the odds without having to venture to Atlantic City or Las Vegas.

''Wall Street's not about investments anymore; it's about numbers,'' said one of Mr. Bright's traders, Earl Van Alstyne. ''Who cares whether it's a car company or a chemical company? Who cares what they're going to be doing in 2000?''

Mr. Bright, in a Southwestern drawl, said: ''The discipline's the same, the focus is the same, the edge is the same.''

''Edge,'' in Las Vegas, means advantage. ''Edge,'' in Mr. Bright's lingo, is when the probability of winning is greater than 50 percent. ''Edge'' is a word Mr. Bright says a thousand times a day, a staple in his stock-gambling tongue that turns peers into ''rooks'' and rewards top traders with ''comps'' - the same free meals and show tickets that casinos give high rollers.

Mr. Bright, after all, learned how to trade stocks after being barred from most casinos that caught on to his lucrative card counting. Like an exile heading to the promised land, he took his money and parlance to a place where he could wage much bigger bets with less scrutiny - Wall Street.

Now, at 25 offices from Bethesda, Maryland, to San Diego, people who used to be doctors, construction workers and Wall Street pros use Mr. Bright's millions to trade an average of 10 million shares a day - mainly household names such as General Electric Co. and Citibank that are listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Mr. Bright also operates a new day-trading school.

''It's either day trading or blackjack,'' said Kevin Feller, explaining how he landed at Mr. Bright's school. The 21-year-old with a pierced eyebrow had hopped from snowboarding to blackjack dealing. ''I have buddies who work on Wall Street and they told me there's a lot of money to be made.''

Until very recently, stock trading was reserved for professionals at the exchanges and large investment companies such as Merrill Lynch & Co. and Goldman, Sachs & Co. But new technology and market reforms have extended the reins to virtually anybody who wants to trade.

The business of finance in the United States was once concentrated in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, but now a quarter of all stock orders are placed on the Internet.

Bright Trading is one of about 70 day-trading firms offering desk space, high-speed market access and large loans, giving individuals immense new power to move markets. Thousands more amateurs trade at home. Collectively, these day traders account for an estimated 12 percent to 15 percent of the volume of the Nasdaq Stock Market, and increasingly they're permeating the New York Stock Exchange.

Day trading arrangements vary from firm to firm. Typically, customers put down at least $25,000. Other firms call their customers limited partners and pool their money in order to secure bigger loans and thus trade bigger blocks of shares.

At Bright Trading, there are 300 ''firm traders'' - essentially independent contractors who must be registered with the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, where Mr. Bright has a seat. Mr. Bright basically lets them trade with his money - tens of millions of dollars a day - following individual limits based on experience. Last year, Bright Trading processed 1.5 billion shares.

The traders put down a $25,000 ''performance deposit,'' to cover losses. They pay Bright $600 a month for overhead, a penny a share in commissions, plus 25 percent of all their profits - if they have profits.

In the eyes of securities regulators, the burgeoning new field is fraught with danger. Trading firms say they help investors by countering the sway huge Wall Street firms once held over stock prices. Foes say many day-trading firms stoke volatility and lure people to risk life savings with false advertising of quick riches.

Massachusetts and Texas recently sued several day-trading firms for false advertising, fraud and failing to screen customers. Philip Feigin, president of the North American Association of Securities Administrators, recently declared day-trading was enemy number one. He is fond of telling day traders: ''Go to Las Vegas - the food is better.''

It is the pitch-dark hour of 6:30 A.M. in Las Vegas when the New York Stock Exchange opens on the East Coast. Mr. Bright settles his 6-foot-1 frame in front of a computer, squinting blue eyes buried beneath wire-rimmed glasses. The room is rimmed with 17 gray desks and decorated sparingly with Venetian blinds and flimsy inspirational posters.

The desks are filled mainly by men in jeans, as if to underscore their new status as self-employed. ''I don't have to deal with customers or government rules anymore,'' said Barry Pozmantier, who sold his Houston travel business in July. Above his head, a framed print reads: ''Risk. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.'' He will trade 65,000 shares of stock today, only to break even.

Two women are at the machines, including Mr. Bright's daughter Tammy. Her sister, Kelly, answers the phones.

CNBC competes with a speaker blaring something that sounds like a horse race - the disembodied audio of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which trades a security known as futures on the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index. Essentially, S&P 500 futures allow traders to bet on the direction of the market, and the performance of the index provides clues as to where sophisticated investors think the market is headed. The audio gives the room the air of an off-track betting parlor and it gives Mr. Bright the edge he needs to place his first bet.

The futures index indicates the market will open higher by about 1 percent, so Bright assumes a stock that closed at $100 will open at $101. When Bright counts cards in the casino, he presumes the outcome of the round. In the stock market, too, that edge comes from information.

The stock market is opening in six minutes. ''Where did America Online close Friday?'' Mr. Bright yells out. ''What was premium over the S&P fair value?'' He wants to know how many percentage points higher AOL's shares climbed compared with the basket of stocks in the S&P 500, which includes AOL. The question elicits a shrug from Mr. Bright's brother Don, who plays electronic blackjack during trading lulls. ''That would require math.''

Tony Gentile, an ex-Pacific Stock Exchange trader, is Mr. Bright's top trader. ''Eight percentage points,'' he tells Mr. Bright, suggesting that AOL will trade higher in the morning.

Mr. Bright types ''buy'' into a box on the screen, preparing a bid for 2000 shares. The odds are best in the morning, Mr. Bright says, before the ''noon balloon'' from 11:50 to 12:05 Pacific time, when the market typically rallies. He encourages traders to amass stocks early and sell during these 15 minutes, which his East Coast traders call the ''3 o'clock train.''

When the market opens, AOL slips and Mr. Bright scrambles to dig out of his bet. Other traders are in the same trap. Mr. Bright calls one of his branch managers about someone on the ''watch list'' of people losing too much money. Trader AQ2, it seems, has bought 1,500 shares of AOL, going way beyond his limit. ''Tell him if he does that again, he's cut off,'' Mr. Bright said. ''In fact, tell him he's cut off.''

Mr. Bright's business has raised the eyebrows of regulators, who worry that traders ultimately are risking their own money. Mr. Bright maintains that he only taps traders' $25,000 deposits if they decide to stop trading when they are sitting on a loss, so technically they are not risking their own money day by day.

So far the worst offense inspections have turned up is overzealousness - Mr. Bright opened offices in Massachusetts, Nevada and Colorado without a license. Nevada regulators, for instance, only discovered Bright Trading last year when they spotted the company's Web site. ''We checked our books and found no trace of Bright,'' said Charles Moore, the chief of Nevada securities regulation. The firm has since been licensed in all three states.

Even Wall Street professionals who made a living working on exchanges are migrating to firms like Bright for lower overhead costs and higher profits. Mr. Gentile, with more than 300 trades a day, said he takes home an average of a penny a share - $200,000 last year. He earned far less at the Pacific Stock Exchange, where he paid $25,000 a month in expenses and half his profits to trade for himself.

The most common way to make money in day trading is scalping, in which traders chase a stock to capture small price improvements. Many trade only two or three stocks at a time, though they may trade each one hundreds of times a day. Most of the time Mr. Bright concentrates on Merck and AOL - along with some casino stocks.

Mr. Bright learned about ''edge'' in 1974, when he read a card-counting book (''Beat the Dealer'') by Ed Thorpe, a blackjack guru and mathematics professor. He quit his job as a financial executive at Johns Manville and moved to Las Vegas, with $3,000. ''I was tired of living payday to payday,'' he said.

He earned enough by 1978 to leave the scrutiny of the casinos for the floor of the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco and, later, the Chicago Board Options Exchange. Mr. Bright took a clobbering in the crash of 1987. So he headed back to Las Vegas to wait out the storm.

That year, individual investors, who could not get orders processed during the crash, began complaining to regulators. Market reforms ensued, making it easier for small traders to get their orders accepted quickly by the big firms. Sophisticated new software proliferated, linking the markets to traders virtually anywhere in the United States.

The innovations to aid small investors gave Mr. Bright the opportunity he was looking for. In 1994, he opened his firm for trading, with partner Eddie Franco, a former electrician he met at a blackjack table.

''One hundred years ago, farming was the casino. If you had good crops, you had a good year,'' Mr. Bright said. ''Then the industrial revolution had everybody gambling on new products. Now, we're in the information age.''

The information age has given Mr. Bright the edge he needed to trade the stocks, providing fast and up to the minute knowledge. Instant data feeds help him capture ''price improvements,'' the rare cases when a buyer pays more than the price being offered. Such an opportunity hits after Mr. Bright pays nearly $1.49 million for 10,000 shares of Merck -$148.625 each. He offers it for $149.875, surprised instead with a $149.9375 sale. In minutes, he has earned $13,125, including $625 from the price improvement alone. ''This'' he said, ''is an edge.''