Billion Dollar Day - Documentary 1986

BBC Documentary on Currency Exchange (Forex) - 1986

5 parts

very impressive

Cool. Thanks for sharing.

great video man!

i thought i'd continue the old school theme with this Paul Tudor Jones one from 86-87 as well...........its a really great vid enjoy


http://www.zshare.net/video/7438370851539581/

Thanks for vids. Hard for many of us think people traded with nothing more than a telephone and were still profitable.

Wonder where all these guys are now or how long they lasted?

Thanks !

Enjoyed it .

( wonder if they have a 2010 version )

Thank you for sharing this, very interesting learning....I like this sentence on part d on youtube.

"We used to be more agressive....but the market changed er..completely, so at the moment when we trade, we just wait and ..wait and when we see a situation, then we jump in, very fast very quickly. And er...Then it has to be right, if it is not right, we cut it, and we stay away again"

Paul Tudor Jones was wildly successful.......look him up

Were these guys taking these huge positions w/o using charts back in the day? If so, I can't believe it!!! It appears that they are doing nothing more than reading the tape and using gut instinct. Amazing!!

That was awesome! I wish they made documentaries like that more often. This one and the one with PTJ are both over 20 years old. Anyway, thanks for the link.

It's so easy to trade w/ other people's money isn't it?

Yeah, notice how these guys weren't looking at charts...

So what does that say about S/R, Fibonacci levels, lovely head n shoulder patterns, Multi Time frames, pin bars, etc... ???

Notice how people didn't use toilet paper during the Middle Ages. Now what does that say about toilet paper, eh?

The fact is that charting software is widespread these days. It wasn't like that back then. Times have changed. I'm sure there are still people who trade without chart, just by looking at the quotes. But in the end, it's profits that matter, not being 'pure' or 'trading naked'. Some people like to fetishize naked trading, but if a person is able to make money using fibs, pin bars, indicators or whatever, does it really matter how he makes the decision to buy or sell? If one is bad at naked trading, should he just quit, even though he feels at home using indicators? I'd say no. Use whatever gives you an edge.

Is that a touchscreen in the first part?

Interessting to know that even the Commies traded currencies back then.

It says that they invented toilet paper so they can charge you for it and they will make money . People use water to clean their butts, they still do today around the world. Only the Capitalist/Westernized world that don't.

Yeah it looked like a touchscreen.

Then again, they already had the electric car back in 70's.

these guys were market makers................they dont trade off off charts bc they dont need to. Back then they more or less controlled the market with their large orders bc there were less players in the game. Retail and buy side trading is much different than sell side trading. Same goes for today, go look at futures pits do you see them looking at charts? hell no.......they set the prices which everyone else trades from

I suspect it is the fault of technology, the ease of information. In the ancient times, one of the richest merchant (ie trader) of china has information centers seperate all over the provinces. When province A has a drought and urgently need rice, the messenger there rode horses all the way to the nerve center, which then send out an order to province B with the lowest rice prices, and started moving rice shipment to province A. Rice/lumber/wood/weapons etc. Hence information was power.

So candlestick was also one of the legendary 'information' center that made the Japan family super rich. However, as more and more people get to know about candlestick (pinbar, doji and all that), IMHO this 'information' become a self fullfilling prophecy.

I once read a book called "Whose cheese can I move" (Not the original who moved my cheese). In this book, the first mice who found the horde of cheese became rich, so it was smart that it stopped going out to hunt for cheese. It established schools, train wizard mices and started diploma course on "10 ways to find cheese", "The secret fibo-mice tail length to point to cheese", "The ancient china tai-chi waves of cheese acupoints" and so on. This mice got richer and richer when more and more mices bought the products, "Educated" in the Phd/master of cheese hunting.

It doesn't matter that there is less and less cheese out there, just the story that the rich mice has found the treasure ancient time ago.

So all these S+R, ichimoku, fibs, waves etc. All could have worked in the past (when people don't know about them), but now? It became a self fullfilling prophecy as people short the 2nd lower high, place their stops above the 1st high, target their profits at 50% fib, looked at waves, follow trend and bam.......

I was just wondering, those traders at Japan Central Bank, whose jobs maybe is to intervent at a certain price level, do they use S+R, ichimoku etc? I guess they just have a single alert set. If Yen ever cross that single price, the program buying will kick in.

Got to know a trader who used to be like the guys in the video.

Price coming out from their mouth is the price. Story like how he was screwed by Malayan bank who asked to buy 1 or 2 billions usd of thai baht during the asian financial crisis and baht rise after he sold. But this trader is also bastard because baht is comprises of basket of currencies mainly JPY. He went into the market and sold JPY.... and make the baht dropped.. lol !!!

He is no longer in the institutional and trade privately his own money. He uses 123 price action and breakout on daily & 4hr chart now. Bank side and retail trading is 2 different thing.

I remember there was an old trader who posted once. He said he was like 50 something at that time of posting. He mentioned that in the old days, they would manually plot the candlesticks on a peice of paper with a ruler and pencil.

They basically had a rough idea of what the market was doing or where it might be going for the day. The rest was duking it out on the pits.

Profit!

Back then, I believe these guys had some knowledge of where the supply/demand was from a big picture standpoint. Someone in this thread mentioned how pit traders didn't use charts......however, they did have knowledge of pivot points. Heck, they invented them. Were they staring at charts all day.....no....but as soon as these pivot points were approached or exceeded(supply/demand)....they would react to it. The demise of the retail trader today, is a belief in indicators and black box systems vs. looking at the markets from a simplistic perspective.