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Non-Tech : Derivatives: Darth Vader's Revenge -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IngotWeTrust who wrote (322)	10/4/1998 12:27:00 PM
From: ahhaha	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2794

Fact is "we" are getting fewer every day. You have to be at least 50. If you talk to someone in their 30s, it's just some text book stuff. Merriweather and others went wrong and will continue to go wrong because of the pretense to knowledge. More directly when the scale of wealth rises the operators can get by with bigger manipulations. The scale permits it. Remember Milken and Vesco? Willie Durant? Of course, they eventually exceeded their bounds because they can't see the forest, the trees of business as usual gets in front. Then the image and identity of what you have created and what appears to the outside world as greatness forces you to make concessions. You take bigger risks to hold all that you think you own. As it erodes you lose control little by little. At no point do you think you can't manage it or do you think you can't take the loss. All good traders know how to take a loss, but sooner or later they can't take it and it busts them. It is the success that they can't let go. To be successful at that you have to be completely indifferent towards money. just paper in a game. It's possible to do, but it requires living in poverty like a monk and never spending a dime. What's the point then of all those gigantic efforts? AG and anyone within the FED aren't privy to all the nuances of what is going on. You can't write laws to stifle every possibility. Someone always comes along to find a way around the existing system or finds a way within the system that requires ever growing leverage. It is the banks and the brokerages that are at fault here. They let Merriweather get out of control because they didn't know the extent of his operations. What he was doing is unimpugnable from an intellectual position. Experience transcends intellect. Experience teaches that what intellect cooks is vulnerable to the unknown, a factor which can't be assessed by intellect. You can't put a stable error term to handle the unknown. It is inherently unstable. Sometimes it is so only because of autocorrelative feedback. That means what you are doing is creating the thing that is killing you. Intellect revulses at that and rejects the indeterminacy of it. That's why university types don't generally make it in Wall Street. You have to be an animal to survive there.