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Denver, Colorado
Posts: 59 since Aug 2014
Thanks Given: 0
Thanks Received: 44
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I joined and was a member of Troy Peterson's Gap Edge Trading, a website that specializes in finding and utilizing the opening gap in equities.
At the time Troy Peterson had a screen up and would enter his trades in the "box" for all to see, then would break down the morning action and explain what was happening in the price action of the stock being traded. I was a member for five months and at some point I could no longer take the pain, and realized that something was wrong.
We were in the midst of a raging bull market, and Troy had the tendency to short everything in sight. We took about 5 long positions in those five months, and routinely he'd rather make +0.11 on BBY short rather than +6 points on a long entry in LNKD. At some point I got sick of making nickels and dimes on small stocks and realized that Troy was not only costing me money by taking nothing but short trades, but that it was an insane problem of opportunity cost. Why take dimes when you can take points?
Further cracks began to show. Typically Troy had a good natured personality and soon that went away to reveal another egomaniac, often insulting those who disagreed with his trade calls and those who went long. I distinctly remember the day when the market was screaming higher and Troy insulted everyone who would think to go long by stating derisively "anybody can trade like that!!" At the end of the day, Troy has a problem with some sort of obsession with shorting, and it cost some people dearly.
His biggest cheerleader in the room went bankrupt, as did another long time member, and they later complained to Scott Andrews of Master the Gap, who immediately put on a clinic to help those who had been hurt. To his credit, and Scott Andrews is awesome like this, instead of telling those to join him, he merely pointed out the problems with gaps in equities and some mathematical realities of trading. He didn't try to sell anything, he just pointed out the dangers.
Another thing I noticed was that Troy was super aggressive in the first two weeks of the month, and if he got ahead, he took insane risks during the last two weeks of the month to "press his advantage", which usually ended in another losing month. It was also during this time when he called out a trade, and I noticed that only 400 shares traded in the five minute candle, and this told me all I needed to know--Troy is small time, if he's using money at all. It was also at this time that the alert from TradeStation stating "ORDER FILLED" was no longer audible in the chat room. Cute.
Maybe things have changed, but I don't miss his Mr. Rodgers voice telling us our short position with a massively wide stop will be okay when were already down 0.50 on a $9 stock.
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