Product Description
Interview: Uncovering The Layers With Jea Yu by Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan
Digging Deep
Jea Yu is cofounder of UndergroundTrader.com, a virtual trading desk and trader
education site. Yu is the author of Trading Full Circle, UndergroundTrader.com
Guide To Electronic Trading, and Secrets Of The UndergroundTrader, as well as
several trading videos: Swing Trading Secrets, Short-Term Profit Hunter, Level
II Trading Warfare, and Beating The Bear, published through Wiley Trading and
Traders’ Library. His latest book, Way Of The Trade: Tactical Applications Of
Underground Trading Methods For Traders And Investors, was released in August
2013 by Bloomberg Press and John Wiley & Sons. Yu has been a contributing
writer for Benzinga.com, TradingMarkets.com, Trade2Win.com, and Active Trader
magazine. Together with Benzinga.com, he produces The Morning Profit Maker
service on Marketfy.com, based on his proprietary patterns.
Stocks & Commodities Editor Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan interviewed Yu on
October 8, 2013, about how the markets have changed since he first started trading
in the 1990s— from the daytrading bubble of 1999–2001 to the rise of algorithmic
and high-frequency trading — and how he has responded to some of the changes
in his own trading.
Jea, tell us a little about yourself
and how you got interested in
the markets.
While in college, during the early 1990s,
I had a roommate who had discovered the
stock market. He showed me quotes in
the newspaper. That’s when I caught the
bug. I opened up an account with Charles
Schwab & Co.. After college, my buddy
became a broker at Smith Barney.
I went the normal route. I did my research,
and I would read the stock quotes
in the paper, but I always had a tendency
to want more current quotes than I could
get in the printed newspaper. I would bug
my broker about 20 times a day and ask
what a stock was trading at!
Most people tell you to focus on the
fundamentals of stocks, which is one
way of looking at it, but why does a
stock price fluctuate from day to day,
or from minute to minute? There was
always some type of disconnect there
for me, and that’s what got me started
on my journey.
I didn't have a lot of money back then,
so I was playing small stocks and putting
together research reports. One of my internships was at Prudential Securities,
and I put together a couple of research
reports on some of these small stocks. On
my first day there, I met with a broker
who said he wanted to give me a lot of
opportunities. So I showed him my folder
and told him that I had five stocks he
needed to look at. But he just turned me
over to his sales assistant, who gave me a
stack of envelopes and a stack of letters,
and asked me to lick the envelopes and
mail them out. That was the extent of my
internship at a brokerage firm.