My buddy Adam B. (who's one of the guys that started Heeb Magazine) is a crazy-ass high-stakes day trader. For a few months he'd been offering to show me the ropes and help me get started, so after I finally got back into town after traveling, I took him up on his offer and went to his day trading office in Union Square for my first lesson. Fast forward 2 hours later, the market's about to close. Something crazy happens and I watch Adam lose $40,000 in, ooooh, about 15 minutes. After the bell sounded and trading stopped, he turned to me and was like "Well, you win some and lose some." I was like "Uh, dude, you just lost a lot of money, right?"
He was all cool and calm like "Yeah, but I'm still up a ton of money for the year. You gotta take the long view. Some days you're going to lose a ton of money - you just gotta take the loss and come back the next day and act normal. As soon as you start acting all crazy and taking the short view, you're fucked." And that's about when I realized that "day trader" is not an occupation for me!
