Smartest Move Billionaire Bill Ackman Made

[petetrades]

https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/03/14/the-smartest-move-billionaire-bill-ackman-made-was.aspx

"You win some and you lose some. For billionaire investor Bill Ackman of Pershing Square Capital Management, embattled drugmaker Valeant Pharmaceuticals (NYSE:VRX) may very well represent the worst investment of his lifetime after the billionaire announced yesterday that he'd sold out of Valeant.

However, selling Pershing Square's remaining 18.1 million shares now means walking away with about $221 million. That might seem like peanuts after losing nearly $4 billion, but Ackman deserves credit for realizing his mistake, checking his ego at the door, and walking away with $221 million rather than risk seeing his investment get further whittled down.

In the summer of 2015, shortly after Valeant hit an all-time high of $264 a share, the wheels fell off the bus, and Ackman would be taken for the ride of his life."

Ackman can move on now, he's shown what he can do with big winners and I look forward to seeing him brush the dust off from this loss and make some winning moves. Same principle applies to me and other day traders. You have some startling losses but you know your abilities, the obstacles facing you daily cannot be backtested properly, contrary to snake oil salesman suggestions.

Keep your head up and keep looking for the next opportunity.

If you want consistent income you have to switch to selling snake oil, so handle those losses and keep looking towards the next winner while knowing this is gambling, if day trading could be backtested and put into a conherent system it would have been programmed and reverse-engineered by your brokerage and the smartest minds on Wall St. long ago.

 

[tar]

If you want consistent income you have to switch to selling snake oil, so handle those losses and keep looking towards the next winner while knowing this is gambling, if day trading could be backtested and put into a conherent system it would have been programmed and reverse-engineered by your brokerage and the smartest minds on Wall St. long ago.

What you think the algos are doing ? They make money every day . Fact .

 

[petetrades]

What you think the algos are doing ? They make money every day . Fact .

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/he...ding-firms-have-over-everyone-else-2015-08-13


"Gregg Berman, a physicist who then was the associate director of the Office of Analytics and Research at the Securities and Exchange Commission, said that recent studies performed by the agency said that 39% of all orders were canceled within a half second, or 500 milliseconds, and 23%% of all orders were canceled within 50 milliseconds. Those studies also showed that 27% of all trades were against orders that had been resting for a 500 milliseconds or less and 19% of all trades were against orders that had been resting for 50 milliseconds or less.

Hunsader says that a good HFT is even faster than that. “In approximately 300 microseconds, they can cancel an order in [data center] Carteret from [data center] Mahwah or in Mahwah from Carteret. From BATS, they can cancel/front run at Mahwah in approximately 200 microseconds or Carteret in approximately 150 microseconds.”

Berman told the audience in 2014 that “if the speed of cancellation is much quicker than the speed at which those quotes can be accessed, then I would say quote cancellations are not only fast, but perhaps they are too fast.” He went on to say that given the latencies, or delays in routing data to the SIP, and then from the SIP outward, any machine, or retail trader, “hoping to respond to any exchange quote, fast and slow alike, needs to have exchange proprietary feeds. SIP data just isn’t fast enough.”

If Hunsader’s analysis is correct, a 500 microseconds delay in getting a quote makes it difficult for anyone to compete with high-frequency trading firms. Hunsader describes the HFT business model under these conditions as essentially riskless. “They know how both sides of the trade will come out before they ever press the button.”

A spokesman from Nasdaq declined to comment."