World Cup 2014 - Daily Report (Part 2) - General

Sergey Golubev 2014.06.26 11:14 #23021

Continued by the famous blogger, famous photographer and businessman Sergei Dol.

Here was about Belgorod International Airport
Here about Kazan
Meeting with Chuvash President and Akatuy celebration
Here - Ulyanovsk and Penza
here - Syzran.
Here - Samara
here - Ufa
Izhevsk
Perm
here - Chusovoy town and Nizhniy Tagil town

Now - Ekaterinburg

Full post here.

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Yekaterinburg

On the road Kachkanar - Chusovoy near the village of Promyshl there is an obelisk separating Europe and Asia:

Church on the Blood - built on the place where Nicholas II and his family were shot:

About millions

It is only newbies, when talking about stock trading, who operate with millions: yesterday I earned 7 million roubles or yesterday I lost 10 million. Some people also like to describe their gambling in cars or flats: at first, all they can think about is how many cars they could have bought with the money they lost when the stock price went down. But then it passes. Professional gamblers measure the results of their game in percentages, because you can go crazy if you think about millions or cars you operate with every day. "Lost 20%" is not "lost my Ford Focus".

And some people do go crazy. I had a trader who, at one point, invested his money, lost everything and started inventing new ways to make money: he offered our clients to buy some wagons, muttering something all the time.

Those who have been on the stock exchange for a long time do not call their activities gambling either: for us it is a job, just like a builder's or a doctor's job.

You study for five years to become a builder, then you go to work and you do not know how to do anything, you learn on the job. It is the same at the stock exchange. People come here after reading books and think that you can make millions in a few days. That's not true. For the first three years you will methodically lose money. Over and over again. You have to think of it as a learning curve. You have to try different playing techniques, get the hang of it, and if you're lucky, get the hang of it and become a trader. But the idea that you can make millions will go away. Because sometimes people win some crazy money, but then it's like a drug or a casino for them - they will always think about that win and try to repeat it until they lose all their money and the won millions. Successful traders earn 20-30% a year and are happy with it.

About the stock exchange

In old American movies at the stock exchange everybody was shouting, waving their hands, trying to sell or buy something. In Moscow, there was such a stock exchange in the early 1990s, located at the All-Russian Exhibition Centre. When I asked him how to find it and which pavilion it was in, he said that you just had to go to the All-Russian Exhibition Centre and everything would be clear. I could almost hear the hum from the metro station. Then I just walked towards the sound. The layout of the exchange is very simple: there are two counters, one accepts buy requests and the other sell requests, and there are a bunch of brokers around who want to make a deal. The first one to shout at the girl behind the counter closes the deal. Brokers at such exchanges are mostly technical people. They execute deals in favour of clients, who do not go to the exchange to shout themselves. Those who make decisions are called traders. Traders can also work for their own money or manage clients' money.

In America, it is said, former American football players were eagerly hired as brokers: they could shrug anyone off. In my time at the Russian voice exchange, I looked for other ways to promote myself: I tried to be friends with the girls behind the counters, bringing them sweets, flowers for 8th March, so that they would stick out and they would notice you.

But now almost all tenders are conducted electronically, the voice exchange has remained, maybe only in America. We have a special programme where you can buy, sell, and see stock quotes and price dynamics. You no longer have to hire brokers, you can do everything yourself.

About people

I joined the stock exchange in the mid-90s. Back then, romantics and adventurers went there. At that time, no one understood what the stock exchange was, what it was for, stocks, bonds - for a Soviet person, all those words were from another world. Except that when I was a child, I read "Know-Nothing on the Moon" and was incredibly interested. I didn't think I would ever have a chance to get involved in it myself.

Of course, what happened then and what is happening in the stock market now are different things. The 1990s were a time of collateral auctions and vouchers. My brother and I used to travel through the taiga and buy up shares in Siberian oil companies from ordinary working people who did not know what to do with them. You simply put an ad on local TV with a running line: come to a recreation center at such a time. People lined up and sold everything for cheap.

We travelled around the cities with a suitcase of money. Sometimes we would run into some people who were buying shares for Berezovsky, or clash with the management of the companies whose shares we were trying to buy.

Then they would come to Moscow and sell them. Even back then, the stock exchange was already in electronic form. Practically no one had a private computer, and everyone hung out at Myasnitskaya, in the Glavpochtamt building, where there was a computer room and internet: the wires from the exchange went there directly. It was possible to make a deal there. I had not seen it myself, but they say that for a while Deripaska was a frequent visitor there. He used to sit at his computer with everyone else and make his fortune. There you could socialise, meet experienced people, seek advice and learn. Now all communication takes place on forums.

Everyone can trade: you go to the bank, open a brokerage account, get a computer programme, and start trading. The minimum amount of the account starts at 30 thousand rubles. There are several types of people who are interested in it: neat and meticulous office clerks, usually with financial background, economic journalists - they just want to try it for fun. There are businessmen who make good money and want to engage in some other lucrative activity. And there are gamblers for whom the stock exchange is a source of adrenaline. After the casinos closed down in Moscow, there has been a considerable increase in the number of gamblers on the stock exchange.

About news and insider information

There are lots of them. For some reason many people think traders are glued to the TV and newspapers, monitoring the news and getting up off the ground as soon as they hear someone berating Russia again or a market crash somewhere in Greece. Working with news and corporate news is only one of many strategies. It is usually where beginners start. But over time, you realise that the market can react to the news in a very unexpected way: Russia has risen in a rating of investment-attractive cities, but the market suddenly falls. Or, on the contrary, something incomprehensible happens in Cyprus, but the market reacts weakly to the news.

But there are people who play on news, primarily corporate news. I myself worked as a journalist for a long time, so I received such news directly, it gives me certain advantages. You interview a big shareholder and he tells you: you're such a nice guy, you know, soon we're going to buy back our shares at a high price. You buy that company's shares, and when the big shareholder starts buying them back, they immediately go up in price and you sell them at a higher price.

Generally speaking, it is illegal to use insider information. But no one has yet figured out how to determine that a particular transaction is based on non-public information, so an insider law has yet to be written.

On the feeling of inferiority

In my work on the stock exchange I practically do not rely on news, I use a different strategy - computer programming. It is a wide-spread strategy now, when a computer program, not you, makes deals. You set certain algorithms: you have to make a deal if the share price has been rising for three days, or vice versa, if the share price has fallen by a certain percentage. You can program anything. To do this, you have to be able to think logically, to understand the processes that are going on in the stock exchange. The machine can make several thousand trades a day and make money on minimal price changes.

But the most important thing is that the machine is free from human emotions. How many times have it happened: the market has moved against you, your shares are getting cheaper, you have to sell. But you hate to lose money, you want to win back, and you are waiting for prices to go up again. That way you can lose a lot of money. Or you look: the price of something begins to rise, it seems that you want to make a good deal and buy a growing stock, but you think that the market is about to bounce back and you buy it at a lower price. But the market goes up and up, and you have already missed your chance to make a good profit.

Mistakes happen all the time, to any trader. It is not easy to live every day losing money for nothing. Because when you make money on nothing, it's kind of normal. But to lose, let's say, a million in one click... Traders live with feelings of inferiority all the time. It can lead to depressions and nervous breakdowns - I see it all the time with friends and I have had problems. But it is not their money that kills them, it is someone else's money that kills them.

About suicides.

At the stock exchange suicides happen more often than anywhere else. In my memory, there have been three suicides, one of which, thank God, was saved. All these people were managing someone else's finances and had lost. In one case it was $200 million, in the other it was even more.

He lost the money, and the clients turned out to be FSB agents and thought that the guy had cheated them badly. So they started to press them, I don't know how they threaten to do it now. In the '90s there were cases like this all over the place. Guys came to you, brought you money in suitcases, you kind of explained to them that there were risks, they said "we understand, we understand", but then, when you tried to explain what had happened, they said "I don't care, give the money back".

Now the situation has become more civilized, if we speak about standard asset management companies: an agreement is concluded with a client, possible investment instruments are described, the maximum possible loss is stipulated. Although people are different.

About customers

The easiest way to work is with businessmen. They face the risks and do not shudder every time their account decreases by 10%. Usually they leave their money for a long period, come back after two years and as a result they make a profit, because in the long term playing the stock market is generally profitable and brings more than a bank deposit.

There are cautious investors - they check the state of their account every day, panic because of any slippage, constantly calling you: "I should have gone to Sberbank". You explain to them that the account moves in waves, that it is a drawdown period, and that there is no such thing as a drawdown. Some of them, in general, can be reassured.

But there are people who have brought you their last money. Not in the sense that they don't have money for food, but in the sense that it's their savings for something, for example for a flat that they haven't yet bought for some reason, or conversely, they have just sold their car or their summer cottage and decided to try playing the stock market as a way to make money. This is the hardest case; such people want to make a profit every day. They usually end up seeing a 2% loss, taking their money and taking it to the bank. They never make a profit.

Psychology of Forex Trading Secrets of your broker Daily market moving news

Alexander Voronkov 2014.06.28 00:17 #23030

If you have sold your garage, flat and summer house,

your wife has left you, your mistress has left you and your dog has run away.

Do you think it is worth it to keep playing the stock market?

Interesting and Humour - page 2303