Have you ever found yourself thinking things like, “I wish I could be online then,” or “Those guys on the leaderboard must never stop trading,”?  I know I have.  The first statement will always ring true.  There is no way you can always be at HSX at just the right time.  You’ll always miss deals and get burned at other times.  But hopefully the decissions you make while online set you up in such a way that loses become minimal and gains expected.

And what of the second statement?  Are the tops of the leaderboards, guys and gals (and flaming arachnids and doctors of evil), the traders who have 24/7 access to HSX and no life?  I’ll leave the “no life” addage for  you to think about, but the answer to sucessful traders being 24/7 is surprising (to me anyway).

When I first started I was under the impression that to top the leaderboards, you had to spend a fair bit of time at the game.  I had heard rumblings that day traders dominated the leaderboards simply because they had more oppurtunities to make money.  And being an avid (although obviously unskilled) day trader, I had no reason to argue this.  So I decided to ask (hound?) a few of the players who are currently topping the Season/Year To Date leaderboards and ask them what they do in the run of a week.

To my surprise I discovered that very few of them actually day trade.  Sleep and work seem to dominate the day and trades are kept to a minimum.  However, the most frequent times that they do trade are during HSX “events”.

HSX is clearly an “event-driven” game.  The main concept behind HSX is to try and estimate the opening weekend box office of a movie.  Hence the event here is the opening weekend adjusts.  Other “events” include Starbond adjusts on Thursday nights and the MOMMY/”max-ipulated” stocks from the HSX journal.  (Please read Xavori’s”>http://www.the-trades.com/xavori.html”>Xavori’s column over at the Trades for his explanation of Max-o-matic Money Yarn stocks.)  To make a long story short: if a stock is mentioned in a positive light by HSX, it goes up; if it gets thrashed, it goes down.

The max-ipulated stocks, as said, are in the HSX journal (is it even called this anymore?  I guess it’s the “news section” now) which comes out at about 12am HSX time daily.  Several traders tend to gravitate towards this time as there main trading time for the day and let their trades ride from their.  As this is too early in the day for most of us, around quick check of ports.

We’ve also got our group of purely “adjust event” driven traders who pretty much show up on Friday and position themselves for the weekend.  Then on Sunday, after the adjusts they’ll position themselves for upcoming Starbond adjusts.  Some quick trades Thursday with the Starbond adjust money, and then back to Friday.

Surprisingly, few traders up their trading output over the weekend.  Many people would rather spend their weekend doing stuff in real life than spent in front of a computer.  Imagine that?

So you don’t need to be a slave to the grind and toil away at HSX for hours on end each day.  It’s not necessarily how often you trade, but when, that will pocket you the most HSX dollars.  And of course, buying/shorting the right stocks.

All that said, Jimmy heads back to the grind.

                              Off with their hot pants!
                                   
Jimmy Impossible