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Strategies & Market Trends : Watching the market collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pater tenebrarum who wrote (26)	7/30/1999 1:56:00 PM
From: paulmcg0	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 150

"there is a whole bunch of people whose jobs depend on a continuation of the bull market" Yes indeed... a lot of highly overpaid people who contribute little of real value to society. For example you have: * "Full service" stock brokers. This is really a group of glorified salespeople. They expect you to help make their BMW payments by giving them commissions for punching a stock order into a computer, something anyone with ETrade or DLJ can do themselves at a much lower price. And what about their so-called research on stocks? Most people don't realize how that scheme works. Basically, their brokerage acquires a large block of a company's stock for inventory, issues a glowing research report, then has their brokers get on the phone to call people and convince them to buy the stock. Basic telemarketing, the usual "dialing for dollars". Brokers call these stocks the "flavor of the month" and won't tell you what kind of "spiff" they are getting to push the stock. (A "spiff" is an extra amount of money in addition to the broker's normal commission.) Market makers The function of a MM is similar to that of a pimp, matching buyers and sellers, while taking a large cut of the money. MMs could easily be replaced by computer systems and probably will be to some extent because online brokerages like ETrade and Datek are already "crossing" their trades internally, for popular stocks, without going through a market maker. Financial columnists and newsletter publishers These people are like the touts at the horse racing track who sell tip sheets that claim to know what horse is going to win. Of course, like any sort of fortuneteller, they proclaim their successful predictions constantly while never acknowledging when their predictions were wrong.