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Device Protects Day Traders From Emotional Trading
Philips Electronics, a Netherlands-based company, has come up with a device designed to protect day traders from emotionally based trading decisions. The Rationalizer measures your galvanic skin response and lets you know when you are under stress. An online trader can then take a "time-out, wind down and re-consider their actions," according to the company. This may have come too late for us, but at least future generations won't have to live through the horror of angry day trading.
Now all day traders will be making rational, informed decisions instead.
If every /. poster had to use one, life would be much duller :-)
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
. . . and trust me, giving them a device that will tell them when they are stressed is about as useful as taping a stethoscope to their chest so they can check whether their heart is beating.
Day traders are *always* stressed. Always.
I was stressed out about how I needed to make this trade RFN so I could retire to a small island nation - MY OWN!
Stupid galvanic response thingie made me wait until after the bubble burst.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
"Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. "
This is something new from Google Labs, right?
#DeleteChrome
I can just imagine if this is used for drivers. You get stressed by the heavy traffic, or the twit who blocks you when you try to merge, and the car suddenly pulls itself off the road and won't start again until you calm down.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Dunno why they'd have to invent something to do this: it's been known for almost 200 years. Build a Wheatstone Bridge with your body as one of the four legs of the bridge, and measure across the middle. I was building these when I was 10. Add a transistor to drive a meter and you have most of a Scientologist's E-meter. Use this as the input to an analog input channel of an Arduino and interface it via RS232 or USB to your computer and you can easily write something to automatically log you out of e-trade or whatever. I'm not really sure where the innovation is here, although Philips usually comes up with great ideas. I guess you could use a sparkfun xbee unit to make it wireless, since anything that contains the word "wireless" seems to be patentable these days, but that just makes me even more irritated.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
This sounds like it could be equally as useful to an online poker player (I know many). All it would take is some marketing to the poker community.
I'm wondering how day trading, as an activity, benefits society. Sure, if done right, it can benefit the individual, but what use is it to the average person? It seems to promote the tragedy of the privates. That is, privately owned resources will be used unsustainably and depleted because the owner can simply take the profits and reinvest them into rapidly depleting some other resource. Communally managed resources will be used sustainably because no one person can abscond with the profits and reinvest them in some other resource depletion scheme. Day trading seems the perfect example of this. Day traders have no connection with the companies they trade in, no commitment to them, no stake in them at all.
With other industries, one can easily see how they benefit society, yet day trading seems to provide no benefit. Maybe someone who understands the function of day trading better than I do can explain what purpose it serves besides making a few individuals rich at the expense of everyone else. Day trading seems more like gambling than responsible ownership. Doesn't it create an unacceptable moral hazard?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It's not only part of the job.. I suspect that for most traders it becomes the main reason to continue trading.
"Users wear a device called the EmoBracelet that senses stress and makes an accompanying lighted bowl, or EmoBowl, change color and flicker from yellow to red as emotions become more intense." Something makes me think this is being targetted towards a younger market.
Day traders create and provide liquidity.
Read, refresh, repeat.
I'm a trader by profession (although not a day trader) and making emotional decisions is about the worst thing you can do. The only worse thing is NOT making a call because you happen to be excited.
It's a learned behaviour, but a trader needs to be able to abstract away from the trade. You almost need to pretend that somebody else is doing the trade and you're just watching. I think any trader who stays in the job learns this skill eventually. The first time I traded a few million dollars of risk, I was down to few last red cells in my adrenaline stream. If I kept going that way, I'd be either an unemployed or an alcoholic (or most likely both). Instead I learned not to take it too personally. Now a large trade barely increases my pulse.
I don't think a device can replace this behaviour. In a fast market my heart may be way up due to working on several things at once and trying to keep up with the information. I still need to make trades, I just need to stay rational. A glorified heart rate monitor won't help with this.
Is this a quasi-legitimate use of an E-meter? I hope the Church of Scientology doesn't get wind of this, we all know how litigious they are.
Thanks for the informative answers, that makes a little more sense to me now. It's amazing our economic system works at all. Of course, it also can fail spectacularly as we've all seen. I've never understood the people that think a bunch of unregulated greedy jackasses all trying to make a buck will somehow magically make a fair and sustainable society and economy.
Sure. Day traders lose money (on average), which is then distributed to people who aren't day traders.
Dividends, which is what you are talking about, have not been paid in years.
Dividends are alive and well where I live. I haven't looked at the US market in a while but I thought it was only the tech stocks that weren't paying dividends.
Without dividends, all that is of interest to investors is the stock price increasing, and for that to happen, the company must report increases and logarithmic growth year after year, which is unsustainable in the long or even medium term.
Without dividends, the earnings simply stay in the company itself instead of being paid to you. They don't vanish. Look at it this way... image the company doesn't pay them to you but instead puts them in a company bank account. The price of the stock must rise because the assets on the books are now higher than last year and, as a stockholder, you own a portion of those assets. You make it sound like the earnings will cease to exist if they aren't paid as dividends. But they still do exit. They're just in the company (which you own) instead of in your bank account (which you own). And if you trust the company enough to buy their stock in the first place, then you probably aren't going to mind if they hold on to your dividends. This simplifies your taxes and allows them to use the money when opportunities arise to make the company still stronger and further increase the company value.
Devon