Barron's Interviews Mudgins

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Duref Mudgins

Following is an advance excerpt from the featured article of the next issue of Barron's:

Dr. Duref Mudgins, famed researcher on the psychology of securities traders, has sponsored and won acceptance for a new mental health disorder: Elite Trader Syndrome (ETS). ETS has been accepted by rigorous peer review into the upcoming fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (the famed DSM). Peer review by esteemed colleagues Professor Emil Kraepelin and Dr. Arthur Deco contributed mightily to ETS's recognition as a valid, diagnosable and treatable syndrome. In this exclusive interview, Dr. Mudgins explains how he came to discover this obscure cluster of bizarre perceptuo-behavioral symptoms.

Barron's: Dr. Mudgins, welcome, and thank you for taking your valuable time to participate in this interview.

Mudgins: Not at all, I am pleased to offer my time so that an understanding of ETS may reach a wider audience.

B: It a nutshell, can you tell us what ETS is?

M: Certainly. ETS is a broad cluster of symptoms ordinarily associated with a wide variety of tightly defined classical syndromes, not unlike the clustering found in Borderline Personality Disorder. It includes, in no particular proportions, illusion, delusion, grandiosity, paranoia, hostility, scatology, obsession, compulsion...well, everything regrettable in human behavior, to be precise.

B: How did you come to suspect that this was a separate distinct psychiatric disorder?

M: When I found myself drawn into its maelstrom in its terrible dark spawning ground, the perniciously infective website elitetrader.com.

(to be continued)
 
B: Alas, I know that din of inequity all too well. Some years back my twelve year old grandson borrowed my ratty old copy of Edwards and Magee and convinced a sizeable constituency on ET that he was an elder statesman of trading. He's now "75", I think, and still having a ball leading innumerate cretins on an endless merry chase that does the ghost of Lewis Carroll proud.

M: There you have it in a nutcase.

B: But pray summarize for us some of your case histories.

M: With pleasure. In the community at large, some women think they are men and some men think they are women. So it is not surprising that in the delusional hothouse of ET some pikers will fantasize that they are successful traders. They continually seek the trading equivalent of a sex-change operation. But they are forever unsatisfied, because real traders want pikers to remain putzes, so they continually misdirect and mislead.

B: I have heard, though I do not know it for a fact, that "The Street" regularly commissions frauds and mountebanks to achieve this end on ET.

M: Sadly, I believe this to be true, for the more preposterous the lie, the readier ET is to embrace it.

(to be continued)
 
B: You mentioned delusion. Can you give us an example if illusion?

M: Easily. Innumerable academic studies have proved that markets behave stochastico-chaotico-manipulatively. But the great mathematical unwashed, on ET, as in the populace at large, wouldn't know leptokurtosis from halitosis. So they imagine that they see order in disorder. Trend lines. Channels. Support. Resistance. For some reason that I have never understood, pure price is as terrifying to modern man as the legend of the Gorgon was to archaic man. Neither can look directly at what they fear. Homer's Odysseus could only look at the Gorgon in a burnished shield. EliteTrader can only look at the Gorgon of pure price through the mirror of oscillators and indicators.

B: And ET perpetuates that fear?

M: Worse. ET is the mirror of all traders' fears. Every hour of every day, ET offers to assuage traders' fears with false palliatives which only lead to more failure and more fear.

B: I like this ET and their failure! It puts money in my trading account.

(to be continued)
 
B: I would ask you to give us examples of other lamentable behaviors on ET, but I think we already know too well what they are. Rather let me simply ask this: Why?

M: I answer simply: Why not? Why is there not an elitebrainsurgeon.com? Or an eliterocketscientist.com? Because legitimate potential members would be so few that they would already know each other by reputation, would already have a pecking order, and would have little need to impress each other. And they would instantly catch out any would-be phonies. You cannot fake competency in brain surgery or rocket science. But any fool can punch the "trade" icon, and therefore fancy himself to be a trader. And none will catch him out. The true trader will post "Bravo!", "Bis!", "Bien fait!" to keep the fool a fool. For therein lies the true elite trader's income.

B: How arrogant of you! Do you consider yourself a true elite trader? If so, tell me the secret to mastering the markets!

M: I tell you humbly, the secret is persistence. Persistence in learning. And persistence in the trend. Any cretin can see reversal. Only the truly wise can measure persistence.

B: Then tell us how you measure the persistence of a move!

M: How ET! I can't fucking believe you asked me that! This interview is fucking over!
 
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