Monday, April 6, 2009

Real Life Trader

Once again I am apologizing for not posting, however this is a little different.

I haven't been spending much time on Eve last few weeks, and I have a good reason. I made a ton of cash in eve as a trader. I don't know exactly how much I am worth in eve, but I have had as much as 3 billion isk in cash, plus a few extra billion in assets, e.g. Obelisk, 2x billion isk iterons (rigged), 6 rigged occators, 2x battleships, many t2 frigates, etc etc all rigged, not to mention a few billionion in minerals out in wayward corners of my trade routes.

So anyway, this game has very much become a job. Not a fulltime job mind you, but at least a heavily involved part time job. I decided to do something about that. I am now taking the skills I honed in Eve online, and applying them to the real world. I have been trading on the stock markets for last few weeks. I started out with $770 in cash which I was saving for the sole purpose of burning on the stock market. Last Monday I made about $300 on a good and lucky trade, and on Friday I lost $50. So for the week I am up $250 and that puts me around $1000 in my trading account. Last week I cajoled my wife into letting to put another $1000 into trading, and that will clear today or later this week, and then I can upgrade to a margin account which doubles your buying power. Margin is very similar to but not quite eve online margin for buying stuff). When I finally close a day with $25,000 that will allow me to upgrade my account to a Pattern Day Trader account, which grants me 4:1 buying power (so long as I close my trades by the end of the day), and will let me make MANY trades in a single day rather than having to wait for trades to "settle" before being able to perform another trade with my money. Settlement is like waiting for a check to clear. You have to wait 3 days before you can use your money again just to make sure the round trip(round trip means you made a buy trade, then sold it again) trade went through properly. So with a cash only account, you are stuck with one trade every 3 or 4 days. With a Margin Account, you can make as many trades as you want, because you have margin, but there are other rules that limit the number of trades you can perform. Pattern Day Trader rules limit your trading ability until you qualify to be a pattern day trader. A pattern day trader by law must have $25,000 in their trading accounts to be eligible to perform more than 3 intraday trades in a single week (5 business days). If you make 4 or more intraday round trip trades in any week, your account gets frozen into cash only again for 90 days. Yuck.

If I continue to have forward momentum and grow the account naturally through trade, I will try and get my wife to give me some more money which will be coming to us hopefully soon. It all depends on how well I perform before then. If I can perform I am already certain she'll give me every penny if she thinks we are going to make money with it. Again it all depends on me.

I don't know how interested anyone will be, but I will keep everyone up to date here on a weekly basis. It might be fun to learn how well someone can take their eve skills and apply them to real life.