If your friend "kills it" and you asked him what to buy with the intention to buy what he said to buy then you should have bought at 16. Seems silly to ask our opinion.

Yeah I think there a business in handicapping earnings dates. Seems surprising but I've heard a few people talk about it.

lol SPY just fell 0.2% because of an earthquake.

I mean, the big one hitting San Fran is overdue and is about 2%/year it seems, and it'll wipe a good chunk off your portfolio instantly (as well as send BrianTheMick near broke), but this is a bit silly.

Earthquake or nuke test?

POINT TWO PERCENT, sound the alarms boys! Earthquake is going to wipe us all out!

SPY up 6% in 14 trading sessions, I'm sure these are the things we should be worried about as traders.

Nice to see my VLO Valero announce a big buyback and dividend increase today. Prob the only thing that can keep this momentum going. Stock is almost as parabolic as russell growth index...

Got unstuck in a lot of my shorts. WATT RIOT DPW etc

WATT at $33: kicking myself for being stubborn and always getting upside down on these pos stocks

WATT at $18: Shorting is so easy

VRX is down a lot today thanks to two downgrades. One is Piper Jaffray, who says:
The other is Goldman Sachs who initiated at sell with an $18 target.

Their points are solid and it's not a great bet. I hope you didn't listen to your friend.

How low do Trump and company want to take the dollar???

Getting wild

Did you just short outright? I bought a bunch of $20 puts with a 1/19 expiry shortly after the Ajit Pai pump on Twitter and that turned out nicely.

Let's say I have some strategies that require a degree of automation. Has anyone had luck with this without being a programmer themselves? Should I be hiring a high-end programmer? Should I be asking to retrofit an existing trading bot with my strategies, or building something from scratch?

Existing trading bot/program for sure. I wrote my own program for semi-automation (fast entries, algos for beating the spread, complex watchlist parameters, buy/sell buttons spread out how I like), but if it's just an algorithm that buys or sell on a signal you program then you're better off going for an existing architecture. It's tested, it's cheap, it's fast, and it's easy to tweak without knowing code. There are trade stations that allow complex scripting of this stuff that's pretty easy to set up and understand without knowing code. I don't know them well but looked at them briefly before deciding to do my own thing. MetaTrader might be one. There are forums dedicated to this stuff.

This is one of those spots where every time I buy VXX for 3-4 days I always get roaster. Therefor I will not buy VXX.

Typing this just to get the compulsion out of my damn greedy fingers. You dip buyers will surely make money

he said and i quote " theyre just saying these things to lower the stock and get in at a lower price" he also said he added a bunch more at $20. delusional or can he see the future?

Straight up delusional. I was arguing strongly for this short at $100 by the way (although I'm neutral now), so I'm not new to VRX.

buy and hold hvi.to easy game

I think my post actually preceded the recovery today within a few mins. I may be on to something here.

The complex strategy that you probably discovered is called "don't ****ing buy VXX"

Bought ACT the Vice ETF. It has some cannabis stocks. TDY In the aerospace defense sector looks good here. PEG ratio about 1.00. Trump keeps talking about a strong military. Bull flag looks ready to breakout. Looking at the sector etfs ITA XAR PPA . Each very different.

Added STM on yesterdays pull back leading into earnings.

So much dry powder for a collapse in pot stocks. Nice to take a break for a few days as it unfolds.

Can anyone explain to me why hedge funds who are 60% net long are say 120% long and 60% short instead of going say 80% long and 20% short and not using leverage?

Because they figure their longs and shorts are un- or inversely correlated and therefore if the longs are down on average, shorts will be up and vice versa.

I understand why they long and short my question is about the percentages. Why do they use leverage and buy 180% of their account value with 120 long/60 short to achieve 60% net long when it seems the same can be achieved using only 100% of their account value with 80 long/20 short.

fixed...
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