over these past few days it seemed like the college bribing scandal was reported everywhere, & ppl generally seemed 'outraged' at what was probably an open secret in some circles
i remember reading one of the reports and they cited the capuchin fruit study as an analogy to how anger at unfairness is seen with other primates as well, lol. apparently the capuchins got super angry/ completely went ballistic when they saw others getting juicy, succulent grapes instead of some tasteless bit of cucumber.
maybe it just strikes a nerve, evolutionarily speaking, to see the brazen unfairness out there in the open
but then i would argue that in the trading ecosystem, there are also instances of unfairness that have been swept under the rug. this is not talking about the secret quant formula/ hush-hush proprietary algo type of 'edge', but more along the lines of unfair built-in issues that favor some in the game w/o necessarily being correlated to skills in the game, eg:
- certain brokers charging different margin rates for different customers, also the practice of changing margins at very short notice. maybe the more unscrupulous ones would have incentive to do this to shake ppl out of positions
- restriction of eligibility to buy private placements to certain individuals, eg. i'm sure most of us would have recognized the potential of facebook, uber, airbnb if presented with the chance to invest in them early, but for the most part these few companies' shares haven't been/wouldn't be made available to the public until their IPOs at sky-high valuations, which is pretty much the time for insiders/early stage private investors to cash out their winnings at 100-10000x return on their initial investments. i mean, according to some reports, Peter Thiel made like $1 billion on an initial $500k investment in FB. I'm sure if the investment opportunity wasn't restricted to a few family offices at that time most of us would have invested - totally landscape changing, stratospheric addictive growth, advertising cash flow like the search engines, no legit competition. At that rate of return, every 10k would have turned into $20m cash at IPO. Pretty solid for those who got hold of the early private shares. probably on the same scale for uber, airbnb, etc -- it's not so much as the skills in investing that makes a difference in those, but rather the opportunity to even access their shares early on before the huge capital appreciation. comparatively speaking, what happens to those shares after ipo are like small blips/ the skin of the orange compared to the juicy pulp that already been squeezed out
You have to play the hand you're dealt. There's no crying in trading.
If you are treated fairly, according to the insidery standards, which I assume most of the posters are enjoying and have no idea of how those banksters treated us, newcomers.
over these past few days it seemed like the college bribing scandal was reported everywhere, & ppl generally seemed 'outraged' at what was probably an open secret in some circles
i remember reading one of the reports and they cited the capuchin fruit study as an analogy to how anger at unfairness is seen with other primates as well, lol. apparently the capuchins got super angry/ completely went ballistic when they saw others getting juicy, succulent grapes instead of some tasteless bit of cucumber.
maybe it just strikes a nerve, evolutionarily speaking, to see the brazen unfairness out there in the open
but then i would argue that in the trading ecosystem, there are also instances of unfairness that have been swept under the rug. this is not talking about the secret quant formula/ hush-hush proprietary algo type of 'edge', but more along the lines of unfair built-in issues that favor some in the game w/o necessarily being correlated to skills in the game, eg:
- certain brokers charging different margin rates for different customers, also the practice of changing margins at very short notice. maybe the more unscrupulous ones would have incentive to do this to shake ppl out of positions
- restriction of eligibility to buy private placements to certain individuals, eg. i'm sure most of us would have recognized the potential of facebook, uber, airbnb if presented with the chance to invest in them early, but for the most part these few companies' shares haven't been/wouldn't be made available to the public until their IPOs at sky-high valuations, which is pretty much the time for insiders/early stage private investors to cash out their winnings at 100-10000x return on their initial investments. i mean, according to some reports, Peter Thiel made like $1 billion on an initial $500k investment in FB. I'm sure if the investment opportunity wasn't restricted to a few family offices at that time most of us would have invested - totally landscape changing, stratospheric addictive growth, advertising cash flow like the search engines, no legit competition. At that rate of return, every 10k would have turned into $20m cash at IPO. Pretty solid for those who got hold of the early private shares. probably on the same scale for uber, airbnb, etc -- it's not so much as the skills in investing that makes a difference in those, but rather the opportunity to even access their shares early on before the huge capital appreciation. comparatively speaking, what happens to those shares after ipo are like small blips/ the skin of the orange compared to the juicy pulp that already been squeezed out
The topic of this thread should include more themes, which I hope, OP will agree.
Here is my account, coming from our direct experience and war.
It looks like I am coming from another planet, from another reality', where most of ET's posters have never been and choose to not believe that it exists or do not care.
To summarise:
- for the huge part of the world except USA, Canada, UK, Australia and some skilled advanced Europeans, the markets are wild places to avoid. No one is bringing this knowledge in large scale to the rest of the world, which would increase the number of participants, volumes, fairness;
- the novices, like us ten years ago, find themselves trapped in Swiss and other "trusted" money managers traps: theatrical scenery, where newcomers most likely will never test real market environment. This creates double damage: the market losing volumes from novices; potential new players will most likely never come on, being discouraged by first hits insinuated artificially, which distorted them from reality of the markets, maybe forever; making them haters of trading etc.;
- the weak old mentality/practise to prosper from privileged position, which became illegal after Madoff's case, looks to not be punished yet. And it is hard to describe how much damage it creates on those who can be one of us, traders. And the simple balance of fairness: why are those dump money are held in white collar criminal's desks, without ever reaching market, where we will profit from them but in the meantime they will learn?
- churning, fictitious trading becomes illegal. But more names about industry's loop holes still need to come up
- in the short time I am here, there were at least two threads with the traders to be , exposing to be scammed by fake brokers, who allegedly made them believe they were participating in USA's markets, USA's listed securities. It looks like this type of "business "is not yet persecuted, and from other side there is very little solidarity among traders, when this scenario happens.
