Addicted to the Digital Debris: What Day Traders and Stock-Market Analysts Have in Common

It's Harder than Ever to Step Outside the Flow and Make Sense of It

Sell-side market analysts and day traders have a lot in common. They’re kindred spirits, different sides of the same mercurial coin.

They each feel a compulsion to do something — sometimes of questionable value — every day, if not every hour. Sell-side analysts can at least excuse, or at least explain, their activities by citing the nature of their vocation, inclusive of professional obligations. Put simply, it’s their job; they get paid for navigating the daily twists and turns of market madness. If they occasionally reverse a position they took on a stock just a fews earlier, you understand — don’t you? — that it’s the nature of the high-stakes game. Buy, sell, or hold positions are fluid, necessarily subject to change, and to changing circumstances.

Day traders? Well, they’re a little different proposition, but the stimuli are the same. They willingly and gleefully choose willingly to wade into the volatile market fray, zigging and zagging frantically, perpetually reacting to minor data drips and major information torrents. They might be better off, as investors, by taking a long-term position and sticking with it. But where’s the fun, the adrenaline buzz, in that? Day traders are slaves to the action, addicted to the emotional highs and lows that attend compulsive risk. They can’t stop, and most of them don’t want to stop. On top of everything else, just like chronic gamblers, they love to boast about the bets that paid off, the big fish that they caught. Of course, they refrain from mention of the bets that went wrong, all the fish that slipped through their nets.


The affinity between sell-side analysts and frenetic day traders is that neither group can allow a weekday to pass without passing judgment on it, without making something of it, even if that something is practically nothing.

Still, you can only push the relationship so far. I don’t think many Wall Street analysts have day traders in mind when they issue their alerts, reports, and updates; their clients, for the most part, are not day traders, but institutional investors, large funds, and high-net-worth individuals. Some day traders might subscribe to analyst research, and they might even act on published reports from the analysts, but the latter aren’t calibrating their every move and utterance to assuage the itchy trigger fingers of day traders.

Introducing Shakespeare and Descartes

Those caveats aside, the two constituencies have much in common. They both, to paraphrase the long-dead William Shakespeare, make much ado about next to nothing on a daily and perpetual basis. I realize that we, as humans, can convince ourselves or nearly anything, no matter how improbable or ludicrous that thing might be. There are people today who are falling in love with ChatGPT, or, after anthropomorphizing the chatbot and conversing with it as they would the Oracle of Delphi (also a creature of legend and superstition), have fallen down a virtual rabbit role of into an abyss of self-delusion. We like to think of ourselves as rational, reasonable beings, but, really, have you looked at the world — physical or virtual — lately? Equanimity is not in the driver’s seat, and I would contend that it’s not even having much influence as a backseat driver.

There’s simply not enough happening, substantively speaking, on a daily basis — especially as we enter the summer months — to justify day traders’ constant card shuffling. If action is its own reward, however, who needs justification?

I paraphrased William Shakespeare above, so now I’m going to go one better — or worse, depending on one’s perspective — and paraphrase René Descartes, whose first principle was rendered in the Latin phrase, “cogito, ergo sum,” which translates into English approximately as "I think, therefore I am”. Day traders might think — I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt — but they’d revise Descartes maxim to something more like, “I trade, therefore I am.” For these folks, the compulsive activity of trading is proof of a certain existence, their raison d’être. Some of them might even make money at their relentless daily grind, but, given that they have a lot in common with gamblers, professional and otherwise, I would bet, ahem, that there are more losers than winners among their cohort.

Why do they do it? Because they can, of course, and probably because we live in a time of socioeconomic mania, pickled in a crisis of confidence. We’re moving exceptionally fast, and we seem to view nearly the falls into our temporal possession as dispensable and disposable. The perceived relevance and value of events and artifacts have never been so ephemeral and tentative. You sometimes catch yourself thinking, as you read the least tweet or clickbait article, “Does any of this matter? Do these events, to which I am devoting my attention and time, posses even the brief lifespan of a head of lettuce in a supermarket?” We’re distracted nearly all the time, and it increasingly seems as if there’s nothing we can do about it.

When I was in the daily cultural flow, I must admit, I didn’t entertain these thoughts about the contrast between cultural transience and historical permanence. Well, perhaps some of these ideas, if I might be grandiose enough to designate them as such, flitted through my turbid mind, but I didn’t intercept those mental flows long enough to subject them to meaningful interrogation.

Something changed (for me), though, when I stepped away from the daily hustle, which included the economic and professional imperative to say something about nearly everything in my designated domain of expertise. I’ve learned that some things, no matter how narrowly defined your professional or vocational scope, won’t stand the test of time, even if the test is limited to the sweep of a 24-hour clock. We feel we have to respond to nearly everything, no matter how inconsequential and evanescent. The truth is, we don’t. We can be more discriminating, more perspicacious, but we have to focus to do it. More to the point, we have to swim against the prevailing current of digital scroll.

Curating the Flow

I’m looking at a list of headlines now on a relatively reputable news website, curated by a venerable news service, and I have to say that much of this stuff just doesn’t matter in any pragmatic sense. Many of these items, though admittedly not all, could pass into eternity without leaving a trace. Within a shockingly short passage of time, nobody will care or remember that they happened. Even so, endlessly consuming this stuff is how many of us fill our days and minds, even if it’s with flotsam and jetsam.

That’s the dilemma of many sell-side analysts, whether they’re covering Nvidia or Tesla, Microsoft or Google. Every day, they have to take a position, and if the position the next day contradicts the position they took yesterday, what are you going to do about it? The point is activity, not coherence or consistency. Day traders are merely exemplars of the zeitgeist, and sell-side analysts, who once were more circumspect in changing their scorecards, are contaminated by the same milieu.

Here’s the twist. You don’t have to be continually distracted by events that dissolve on contact with scrutiny. You can play a longer, more meaningful game, which is perhaps not a game at all. You can look beyond the noise to find the signal that matters, in your career, in your investment portfolio, in your personal lives, and in your daily regimens and routines.

The first step is developing or honing your powers of critical thought, which are likely to be more important than ever amid an AI-inflected landscape where artificiality increasingly poses reality.

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