Let's get everybody caught up as to the
marsman situation.
● At the beginning of the month he started a thread in the Trading Forum that was totally irresponsible, suggesting numerous ways to skirt the law and quasi-legally conduct illegal activities. It was removed and he was warned.
● A short while later, in the middle of the night, he got into a heated back 'n forth with Pekelo (and others) in his journal and hit the Report button 9 times complaining that there was no moderator available to immediately address his concerns. That won't get ya banned, but it was annoying.
● In the midst of that he posted this:
marsman said:
HEY ASSHOLE STOP NOW! YOU STUPID SOB! YOU HAVE SPAMMED MY JOURNAL
WITH YOUR SHIT SILLY QUESTIONS, YOU SICKO!
That also didn't get him banned, but did get him a warning.
● Later, against ET policy, he posted:
marsman said:
Everybody who wants to profit from our trading performance can
join us by investing into our "private hedge fund".
We offer this possibility to let the trading account grow much faster to say 100k.
Currently we are at about $16k, and when the other option positions expire next Friday then we'll be at least at
$21k.
PM me if interessted to participate in our success.
That kind of stuff will normally get ya banned, but despite the huge
EGO that was mentioned earlier in this thread, it didn't.
● And at another time he posted:
marsman said:
We are just in the paperworks for registering our firm (a so
called Mini-GmbH in Germany, similar to Ltd and LLC I think, and soon also a similar one in Latvia or Estonia).
And: the success we had and have is a joint effert, as was already said.
Again, easily enough to ban him, but I didn't. Instead I sent him yet another warning, reminding him of our strict
No Free Advertising policy and alerting him to the new Vendor Account. But to someone who was supposedly killing it in the market even that inexpensive option was too costly.
● Then he took one of my PM warnings and posted it publicly. I guess he didn't understand that the P in PM stands for
PRIVATE but, once again, it was very annoying.
● Next, within his journal he started multiple posts complaining about the moderation, letting readers know that the mean ole mod said not to PM him regarding his solicitation for money (and in doing so reminding them of a non-public way to contact him outside the journal). He was warned that a trading journal wasn't the place for such complaints but he continued posting them anyway.
So while any number of things could have legitimately gotten him banned it was the accumulation of offenses... where enough was enough. I wish him success at T2W but as far as Elite Trader is concerned everybody is now up to date.