After all, reason day traders, stocks may go up or down, but volatility is inevitable. That's the theory. The truth is that day traders, hyped with technology that puts them on virtual trading floors, usually lose everything they've invested in the anarchy of short-term, random price variation. Dumb Money tells how day trading really works, the near-death experiences most traders suffer as their bets go terribly wrong, their elation when bets go right. The book's message is that living at the market's edge to scrape profits off wobbling price changes is probably bad for players' health and wallets.
Day trading is also a weird way of life.
Anuff and Wolf say that to a generation raised on video games, sucking on caffeine-laden Mountain Dew in front of a screen while your fortune goes either up or out the window can seem sensible. I stepped up to the trading screen from a childhood of Asteroids and Pac-Man and Doom, where little graphical symbols convincingly represented missile fire and cannibalism and mass murder. Dumb Money makes no ethical argument against day trading. Anuff and Wolf just predict that most players will lose their shirts.