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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (198297)	4/28/2009 5:32:07 PM
From: Smiling Bob	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

From NOW's post Message 25604450 It's so wrong to allow this course to continue --- Access to trading markets is very tightly controlled - it is not like a shopping mall. And it is certainly not magic. It’s just people. A very small number of people, in fact. To give some perspective, even as a junior trader I might get an order to put on a two million share position - that’s shares, not dollars - and I’d do it several times a day. Advertisements for online trading companies try to imply that the market is made up of people like your Cousin Vinny, who buys a hundred shares here and there, but the truth is that Cousin Vinny is irrelevant. Markets are driven by a very small number of very large investors - traders at banks, hedge funds, and mutual funds - who drive nice cars and drink expensive wine. We need them - the financial markets, that is. They are a necessary part of modern civilisation. What is unnecessary, and extremely unusual, is that the people who run them are paid so disproportionately to the rest of us. ...The reason we’ve ended up in the spot we’re in today is not so much our failure to understand economics as our failure to understand human nature. Give a small number of people the power to enrich themselves beyond everyone’s wildest dreams, a philosophical rationale to explain all the damage they’re causing, and they will not stop until they’ve run the world economy off a cliff. It’s not that people in the City or on Wall Street are necessarily bad people, it’s just that they, like almost anyone, will do anything to keep their million or ten million dollar paycheck. They’ll creatively interpret data, they’ll understate risks, they’ll put the best spin on things. Some will lie, cheat, and steal. But most of them, like most of us, will simply resist looking at the world from any perspective other than their own. And if we are intelligent, we will keep a careful watch on them - both now and into the distant future.