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Pastimes : Brokerage-Chat Site Securities Fraud: A Lawsuit -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jon Tara who wrote (2088)	7/23/2003 12:32:21 PM
From: CountofMoneyCristo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3143

Because as Jorj said as a trader you need a cool head to oversee the markets and we trusted Rea to be that cool head. making $100,000 over the course of 6 months and then losing it on one stupid play as you watch it tank for more months is a lot easier to see than making $50,000 in a morning on one play you hold for say 3 hours and then losing it all back on 10 other quick plays. We TRUSTED him. We had many reasons to. He betrayed us. If you believe it was easy to see in this environment, it was not. Even after I told many traders about the kickback scheme they could hardly believe it was true. Such was the extent of the deception. Traders all around claiming huge gains on Rea's calls, when it was all a lie, not real traders at all. Now who except the most paranoid person is going to start suspecting that? At one point, before I started this investigation, and learned there indeed were legions of traders, I once joked to my family: "You know that list of how many members in the chat? It would always say 592 or some such number. Maybe in reality there were only 10-20 of us, all being creamed by Rea and the brokers. Who would think that your own broker would conspire like this? I've been called paranoid here. I wish I had been this paranoid back then. But even then, there's no way for traders starting out to have any idea that this was going on. The Brokerage Defendants just made a stupid mistake in their briefs saying we were all highly sophisticated market players. Whatever. We were not sophisticated enough to know of the kickback scheme and the offshore accounts, who could except insiders? That's another problem they've got. If this was no big deal then how to explain my experience as an analyst at TP? Had I not worked there, I could never have seen the truth of what happened. As Jorj said, as a trader all sorts of things go through your mind but questioning your adviser during rapid markets is not one of them. The only way I finally saw it was when I was above the fray, being able to see exactly how many crap recs Rea, C2 and the others were making, and then wondered why, and then found out. because I knew they were better than their recs. Actually, they were very, very good at dressing up the kickback calls to make them sound legitimate. For instance, Rea would say take some profits off the table - but not all. Well, that sounds smart, protect profits. But he'd say that 10 times. Why? Commissions. He would first pound the table getting everyone in, then at the first lull say careful, scaring everyone out, then the next run, usually late, scare everyone back in for missing the train, encore, encore, encore, all day long. Now if I was such a good analyst, how could I lose trading? Why hire me if I was a loser and it was all my own fault? They will have to explain that, and they won't have an easy time doing it. They'll also have to explain why when I started working at TP traders immediately noticed the difference in the recs, and finally started making great gains. I earned their respect. That's why after I went public with what Rea and the brokers did, within a matter of months that was the end of TP, most clients leaving. They knew I wouldn't have made it up. And after that betrayal, it was very difficult for those traders to ever trust again. No wonder.