I met a hardworking guy who sees day trading as his ticket out of poverty. “Sometimes I make $500 a night!”. It made me want to weep, scream, howl, and laugh. Out of all the wretchedly bad ideas on how to misuse the amazing stock market, this one is one of the most unkillable, despite innumerable studies demonstrating, “no, you really don’t know the future”. Ironically, Jill Schlesinger had just written about the disastrous effects of market timing (getting 4.66% return instead of 9.85%). Rick Ferri also has a good post on this.