john! you give good post!... i like the bible, i like shakespeare more, but ... i like some of it. it gets a little preachy. :)
i write only short stories or novellas. one published in a computor disk mag. under a pen name which i keep secret so as to hide my politics from my friends.
the House thing: the house is us, and the players are us too. the MMs are the dealers and bouncers and bartenders, lubricating the machine, and getting big bucks for it. it's very simple: we are playing against ourselves, like two carnivores tangling around until both are dead. MMs et al get the scraps-- which are dinosaurian--think of the numbers of small investors, more&more on a global scale now. these "pros" use special statistics to help them predict our actions: number of odd order lots, read: the numerical model of impulsive decisions of all the "little people" upon whom they feed. what few seem unable to grasp is that we are all competing against each other, in addition to against the pros.
pros can work for you when a fund represents the so-called support in a stock's price, and the manager is reluctant to get out. but basically, when one person gets gains, another's money is those gains. one loses, one wins. no one wins unless others are actually losing. sure, a lot win in the market, more than do in Las Vegas, and the losers may eventually win, but until and if then, they have at least lost to Time. i developed these ideas after reading "Trading for a Living"--by Elder (1st name?); and High Return Low Risk Investing, by Drach and Herzfeld. These authors tell the simple truth: the market = prey vs predator. but the MMs et al are not the predators, we are. as we are, also, the prey. or, another analogy: we're gladiators in a cage having tea before we go out in the whatever it is to hack at each other. MMset al provide the cage, and the audience, etc.
i'll look for Darvas's book, sounds good. another good job at describing the actual market is the PBS show on the 1929 crash. the motives for establishing the market as we know it were less than noble: how to get legions of suckers into your game. the song "Blue Skies" played at the end tells it all. extraordinary, deep rendition, tho i don't know by who (Al Jolson?) |
