The Best Investment.

Behind the Headlines says:
I truly believe that the best investment these days is in yourself – education, your own business, etc..

My Notes: 
These lines are probably worth their weight in Gold. In these uncertain times, improving ourselves through education, our business through investment in time, energy, money is probably a better idea than the next hot tip in shares.

Keeping with this spirit of learning, I am keen to begin a series of simulated and live learning programs for traders.

Missing retail

Why have all the retail investors gone?

Retail is gone because they think the whole thing is rigged. High frequency trading, insider information, overpriced IPO’s, manipulation in mid + small caps, and the like all contribute to the feeling.

Then there is leverage. The average trader can trade 10 times more than his money in futures,  and lose money faster than ever before. Too bad nobody realized that these things are mathematically defined to lose money.

So, can we make money? Sure we can. Stocks and F&O have their place and I am not going away just yet. But let’s take them for what they are – manipulated markets.

Marketing Tricks for selling (anything?)

From Michael Kahn’s blog, Behind the Headlines:

Here’s a marketing trick from a bucket shop. Send out 10,000 mailings – 5000 say buy stock X and 5000 say sell stock X. Let’s say X goes up.
Now take the list of 5000 mailings that said to buy and send 2500 with a buy on stock Y and 2500 with a sell on stock Y. Let’s say stock Y goes up, too.
Now take the 2500 winner names and send 1250 buys on stock Z and 1250 sells on stock Z. Let’s say Z goes down.
You now have a list of 1250 people who think you are a genius with 3 picks in a row. Rake in the subscription money and let reality begin. Who cares? You just sold 1250 subscriptions to people who won’t renew. Say $250 for an annual subscription times 1250 people and you made $300 grand. What if you started with a list of 100,000 names. Now you are making some serious coin.
This is the land of crushed hope and dreams that Wall Street has become. Honest purveyors of financial advice are swamped by the crooks. A good bear market thrashing is necessary to “drain the swamp” as Nancy Pelosi likes to say.