Wave Chasing

The market is on it’s lows for the day and you can’t stop moaning about how “the little guy gets killed in this game.”

You lose money on a stock that you took a blind recommendation on, did no research, and now you blame the person that gave you the idea in the first place.

The market comes a bit off it’s highs for the day and you despair that the Santa Claus Rally has been lost.

You decide that because you suck at the game, everyone else must as well, so you flood message boards with posts to “protect” other people from listening to a particular analyst, commentator, researcher, reporter…

You declare that every market downturn is some sort of conspiracy by the hedge funds/the fed/the big brokerage houses/China.

You cannot comprehend that a speculative stock is just that – speculative.

If one of your holdings goes down and you sell with a loss, researching to figure out what went wrong and incorporating that information into future research never enters your mind – you just want to know who to blame.

If any of this looks familiar, do yourself a favor and start scaling into an index fund, or get a full time money manager – this ain’t the game for you.