The current day trading boom will end as these frenzies always do: in tears. While we wait for the inevitable crash, let’s review not only why day traders are doomed but also why most people shouldn’t trade, or even invest in, individual stocks.
Day trading basically means rapidly buying and selling investments, hoping to profit from small price fluctuations. Brokerages have reported a surge in trading and new accounts this year, starting with March’s stock market crash when investors rushed in looking for bargains. As pandemic lockdowns kept people from their jobs and classrooms, trading continued to soar, especially among young adults.
The poster child for this gold rush is Robinhood, a commission-free investing app that uses behavioural nudges to encourage people to trade. Robinhood added over 3 million accounts this year and in June logged more trades than any of the established, publicly traded brokerages. More than half of its customers are opening their first investment account, the company says.
People can start trading with small amounts of money because Robinhood offers fractional shares. In addition to stocks and mutual funds, the app allows trading in options, cryptocurrencies and gold. Customers start out with a margin account, which allows them to borrow money to trade and amplify both their gains and their losses.
Alexander Kearns, 20, is one example of what can go wrong. The University of Nebraska student killed himself after seeing a $730,165 negative balance in his Robinhood account. The novice trader may have misunderstood a potential loss on part of an options trade that he made using borrowed money as a loss on the whole transaction. In reality, he had $16,000 cash in his account when he died.
Research has shown that the vast majority of day traders lose money, and only about 1 per cent consistently get better returns than a low-cost index fund. A rising stock market, and a flood of inexperienced and excitable investors willing to bid up stock prices, has convinced more than a few day traders that they’re part of that 1 per cent. They’re being egged on by the few people who actually will make money: the hucksters selling seminars, e-books and strategies that purport to teach you how to successfully trade.
The biggest potential cost is that every trade exposes your portfolio to the many ways we humans have of messing up our money
Stocks overall are an excellent way to gain wealth over the long term. If you can weather the downturns, stocks historically have offered good returns.
Those downturns can be doozies, however. Stocks lost half their value during the Great Recession that started in December 2007. The market lost nearly 90 per cent of its value in the early years of the Great Depression.
Extended downturns have popped previous day trading bubbles, including the one that formed during the dot-com boom. The Nasdaq composite stock index rose 400 per cent in five years, only to lose all of those gains from March 2000 to October 2002.
Markets that go down eventually come back up, but that’s not true of individual stocks. Any single stock can lose value, sometimes all the way to zero, and never recover.
The sensible way to hedge that risk is diversification. That means buying stocks in many, many companies, including companies of different sizes, in different industries and in different countries. That’s prohibitively expensive for most individual investors, which is why mutual funds and exchange-traded funds are a better bet.
The biggest potential cost is that every trade exposes your portfolio to the many ways we humans have of messing up our money. We’re loss-averse and we want to avoid regret, so we hang on to losing stocks. We think that we can predict the future or that it will reflect the recent past, when this year should have taught us that we can’t and it won’t.
We also think we know more than we do, a cognitive bias known as overconfidence. If you’re determined to trade, or day trade, don’t gamble more than you can afford to lose, because you almost certainly will.
Liz Weston is a columnist at NerdWallet, a certified financial planner and author of Your Credit Score.
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
Benefits of first-time home buyers' scheme
- Priority access to new homes from participating developers
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- Mortgages with better interest rates, faster approval times and reduced fees
- DLD registration fee can be paid through banks or credit cards at zero interest rates
BULKWHIZ PROFILE
Date started: February 2017
Founders: Amira Rashad (CEO), Yusuf Saber (CTO), Mahmoud Sayedahmed (adviser), Reda Bouraoui (adviser)
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: E-commerce
Size: 50 employees
Funding: approximately $6m
Investors: Beco Capital, Enabling Future and Wain in the UAE; China's MSA Capital; 500 Startups; Faith Capital and Savour Ventures in Kuwait
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The biog
Name: Marie Byrne
Nationality: Irish
Favourite film: The Shawshank Redemption
Book: Seagull by Jonathan Livingston
Life lesson: A person is not old until regret takes the place of their dreams
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: HyperSpace
Started: 2020
Founders: Alexander Heller, Rama Allen and Desi Gonzalez
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: Entertainment
Number of staff: 210
Investment raised: $75 million from investors including Galaxy Interactive, Riyadh Season, Sega Ventures and Apis Venture Partners
The biog
DOB: March 13, 1987
Place of birth: Jeddah, Saudi Arabia but lived in Virginia in the US and raised in Lebanon
School: ACS in Lebanon
University: BSA in Graphic Design at the American University of Beirut
MSA in Design Entrepreneurship at the School of Visual Arts in New York City
Nationality: Lebanese
Status: Single
Favourite thing to do: I really enjoy cycling, I was a participant in Cycling for Gaza for the second time this year
The biog
Name: Ayisha Abdulrahman Gareb
Age: 57
From: Kalba
Occupation: Mukrema, though she washes bodies without charge
Favourite things to do: Visiting patients at the hospital and give them the support they need.
Role model: Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, Chairwoman of the General Women's Union, Supreme Chairwoman of the Family Development Foundation and President of the Supreme Council for Motherhood and Childhood.
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
Mohammed bin Zayed Majlis
AI traffic lights to ease congestion at seven points to Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Street
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The specs: 2019 Haval H6
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Key findings of Jenkins report
- Founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al Banna, "accepted the political utility of violence"
- Views of key Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, have “consistently been understood” as permitting “the use of extreme violence in the pursuit of the perfect Islamic society” and “never been institutionally disowned” by the movement.
- Muslim Brotherhood at all levels has repeatedly defended Hamas attacks against Israel, including the use of suicide bombers and the killing of civilians.
- Laying out the report in the House of Commons, David Cameron told MPs: "The main findings of the review support the conclusion that membership of, association with, or influence by the Muslim Brotherhood should be considered as a possible indicator of extremism."
