To follow up on that post, it begs the question: why pay an investment adviser to give you securities recommendations? Here is the answer, and why Berber, Moor, Rea and Trading Places' fraud was pernicious.
Any experienced trader will affirm that emotion plays a huge role in trading your own account. It has to be checked, which takes nerves of steel, great discipline. Take a loss, very hard not to try to immediately make it back, which can lead to further losses, because you're not judging the market objectively, you're starting with the premise that you just MUST make that money back come Hell or high water.
So, if you have an analyst viewing the market "battlefield" say as a general directing the troops, objective, looking at the big picture, no incentive but to do his job making sure the soldiers get the best quality instructions they can, that's a tremendous edge for a trader. An analyst who is not trading his own securities recommendations, and has no interest in commissions, or any other blatant conflicts of interest that would tilt the recommendations in one way or the other, who is making his best good-faith judgment on trades, much easier to do than a trader watching account capital fluctuate all day long and getting anxious, which leads to rapid-fire in-and-out buying and selling, that's a major advantage and worth the money. That's what TP promised its traders. But, when TP accepted the kickbacks from Berber and Moor, leading to extremely high volumes of calls, the betrayal was a profound, clear one.
One question that's going to come up sooner or later is why, if I was a "loser" who had no clue how to trade, was ruined by Rea and Trading Places' calls, I would ever be hired as a lead analyst at one of the most prominent IA sites on the Internet, with over 500 members at any given time? That makes no sense at all - unless TP et al knew very well that there was no chance to succeed, and knew that I had the makings of a very good trader and analyst. In fact, I accepted the position as an analyst because I was very interested in seeing how I would do when my own capital was not at risk, only my reputation was. When I began to make the recommendations, I was astounded that they were of far higher quality than anything I trade on Rea's and the former skibums John Jordan and Omar Salah's calls ever were. "skibum" was a TP-registered analyst name. Both Jordan and Salah traded their own calls. I never did. I had no similar hidden interest or conflict. During trading days, I could watch Rea and Chris Curran or "C2" constantly making incomprehensible calls, calls that had no relation to market realities, no good reason for being made, which as an analyst I had the time and lack of emotion to see clearly and objectively. Almost from day one I knew something was very wrong at TP, but I stayed in hopes of learning exactly what happened. In time, I did.
So I'm looking forward to Berber, Moor, Rea and Trading Places calling me and all the other traders they destroyed all losers, when the loser bringing this racketeering action in federal court was hired as a lead analyst by Rea and Trading Places. How does that work? For them, the answer is a damning indictment of their widespread illegal activities: they knew traders, even good ones, would be wiped out. |
