A couple of weeks ago I noticed a new follower on my Twitter account going by the name of Little Miss DayTrader. I usually don't follow day traders as its not my interest, but having looked at her blog and some of her tweets I decided, more out of curiosity than anything to follow back. I'm not a big Twitter user, don't always follow back if only because the number of tweets can get too much in that you struggle to sort the wheat from the chaff, but something stood out about this new follower that suggested one way or another there was a story here.
First, here was a young woman who supposedly had been an analyst for RBS, who had traded for many years on her own account and who seemed to have a decent enough knowledge about the market. I even re-tweeted one of her early blog articles on trend trading which seemed well written and worth reading.
However, something didn't quite sit right about Miss DayTrader (MDT). From the start she claimed not to really be a day trader, but interested in the bigger market moves. Her "system" seemed to be based around moving averages over different time frames, how price would bounce off these or fail under them. She talked of chop zones and had a thing about how stops of the retail traders would be deliberately taken out before price would then bounce. Fib numbers were also introduced, some charts had indicators on while others didn't and you needed to be able to interpret candles as well. Her system seemed to be a mishmash and not as simple as first suggested. It suggested that anyone trying to copy it might just need some help to get it right. Early on there was no suggestion that the help would come at a price.
As time went on however, most of her trades seemed to be of the day trade, very short term (i.e. a day or less) variety, although she would often have a go at the scalpers and the "let's make 10 points quickly" type trader, even though she seemed to be doing a lot of this herself. Her trades supposedly time stamped, although as she seemed to send out lots of tweets, only her hard core followers that read every one might believe that she was on to something. I didn't read them all, mainly because they were relentless, about a thousand tweets in a few days, I couldn't be bothered. The question was, what was all this leading to, what was the pay off?
After a few days the first cracks began to appear, firstly due to the fact that Twitter suspended her account, apparently for over following or over Tweeting. MDT promptly set up another account and tweeted and followed just as much.
But now we get to what MDT was probably all about. On her blog a post appeared which suggested that she had received many requests to set up an online trading room, where real time trades could be had. She proposed to do this, but could only do so at around £75 a month, but with a full refund for any months when there was a loss. Oh she seemed to suggest that a couple of hundred points a week was easy to make, so losing months weren't likely. However, the original trading room idea was quickly dropped as she said it wouldn't fit in with her life at this time. It would be back to just blogging and Tweeting apparently.
What happened next was the sting in the tail and some well respected people seem to have fallen for it. MDT began contributing a daily market analysis to Spreadbet Magazine's blog on their website. Not only that, she appears to have got an invite to be part of the opening of Zak Mir's new trading cafe which goes live on 14th August. Zak Mir is also the new editor of Spreadbet Magazine and one assumes that he must have been impressed by all the technical analysis that MDT was posting on both Twitter and her blog to have made such an offer. The truth was that MDT wasn't all that she seemed.
