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Politics : The Castle -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (3104)	3/11/2004 4:16:22 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7936

Margin accounts are better than nothing. Prior to the 1930s, many people were not required to put up any cash when trading on the markets. I think you where required to put up 10%. Of course people could borrow that 10% from another source and a lot of people did but people can borrow to meet the larger margin requirements today as well. Tim

To: tejek who wrote (3104)	3/11/2004 6:27:19 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7936

Margin accounts are better than nothing. Prior to the 1930s, many people were not required to put up any cash when trading on the markets. And nobody was forced to buy stocks for no money down. They chose to. Choice. It's something I believe in. But it looks as though you don't. Let's clarify here. Do you believe that consenting adults should or should not be freely permitted to make financial decisions that may wind up being costly to them? My answer is yep. You'd feel differently if you had an account at a "stupidity" bank and there was no FDIC when it flatlined. Nope. I would be mad. But I would be mad at myself for being stupid, not at the bank for going out of business. I have been actively investing in stocks for a long time. Forty years now. In that time a lot of companies have gone bankrupt. But I have NEVER lost money in a company bankruptcy. I've probably held the stocks of well over 500, and maybe 1,000, companies over those years. And not just trading -- I'm a long term investor. But I'm careful, and I'm not greedy. I'll probably never make a 200% return in six weeks. But I'll also never go broke. I don't cry when I have to sell a stock at a loss; I look at what went wrong and learn from it. I was out of the tech bubble about a year before it burst. Yeah, I lost some potential gains, but I saved myself from a world of hurt as my friends were moaning and groaning as their Lucent, AOL, ADCT, etc. went crashing through the floor. I'm not bosting here, just explaining. I follow a careful discipline. So could anybody. The system I use is open and available to anybody. (Want to know more? See the Disciplined Investing thread here on SI.) And anybody who chooses not to use a careful discipline, who chooses to gamble, to day trade, to invest in high flyers with PEs of 70, 80, 90 or more, or with footnotes that scream warning from a mile away, like Enron, and loses money, well, that's their choice. It's their right to choose to do that. It's their right to make lots of money if they can, and lose lots of money if that's how it turns out. But it's not their right to expect me to shell out money in insurance premiums to save them from the cost of their stupidity.