Hello rosehill,
Nice observation of the market behaviour. If we take yesterday activities as an example, then there were a series of little pops following the largest pop (almost 2%) after 76% of the day volume has been traded. This would be a good situation for a day-trader who is willing to take a 2% increase on about 3700 PRB shares (buy then sell quickly to lock in 2% increase at around 10am). If the day-trader is brave enough to wait until about 2pm then the gain would be some 5%.
Reason for 3700 shares? This would cost $10k (assuming that the trader has 10k as play money, i.e. not grocery money) for a gain of $200/day, at about 10am (or $500/day after 2pm). There are some retirees (snow birds) in Mexico who are doing this for years, and has been lucky enough to get more right timings than wrong ones, hence living quite confortably on the daily profit from a $10k play money (they also have a good pension, so this is just a game to keep busy during a leisurely breakfast. They would close the positions after locking in the $200 profit, then go to the bar on the beach for some liquid lunch...and then play on the warm sand, building sand castles, as aging, but rich enough, beach combers during the afternoon.
$200 is quite a good sum of money in Mexico or some other places with good internet connections... so that they can do this on the laptops sitting on a beach. If they are lucky for 200 days of a year then that would be more than enough to support some decent living, especially if they already have a roof over their head. The pension money can sit in the bank collecting dust, or put in some safer investment such as a 5-year GICs to earn some small percentage, about 3%/year, that is $300 for the whole year for a $10k deposit (no pain, no gain).
The above is not intended for encouraging people to retire to Mexico and start a day-trading routine, which could be a dangerous sometimes, if you are not lucky enough or your timing is consistently out-of-wack.
Let's see if this can be sucessfully applied to PRB trading with some non-grocery money.
GLTA
goldhunter
