Saturday, Jul 12, 2008
The response to the premise that speculation and short selling in particular is Evil
Ft.com: Why the world needs more speculators
A articulate and reasoned piece. IF you dont understand something just admit you dont understand. Dont send a stupid and worthless petition to No. 10 saying that short selling or speculation should be abolished...... and dont pick and chose when its the speculators fault. Read the article before making off the cuff and daft remarks.
"More short-sellers in the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s, and the housing bubbles of the past few years, would have added a welcome dose of stability and sanity. Alas, there were not enough short-sellers – and given the amount of money they were losing at the time, the only people complaining about them were their impoverished families."
Posted by techieman @ 06:08 PM (616 views) Add Comment
9 Comments
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1. techieman said...
How embarrasing - An articulate even!
2. techieman said...
Dont believe him or me? ok then try this :
I asked a senior Indian official about the effectiveness of banning trading in commodities. “It is irrelevant,” he told me. He went on to say the ban was an easy way to placate public protests, but added: “When a commodity is scarce, its price rises, whether it is traded on an exchange or not!” - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b2344e8e-4482-11dd-b151-0000779fd2ac.html
3. Landedgentry said...
I'm with you techie, if the great unwashed can't understand this then thats their problem.
4. japanese uncle said...
This is the exception mentioned earlier. But I can’t help feeling that the “sell-short, start rumour, make a killing” strategy is more easily planned than executed.
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What a splendidly constructed water-tight logic! Magnificent!!
5. icarus said...
He's simply making the classic case for derivatives/options/futures - farmers, wholesalers, manufacturers etc. can plan future opertions on the basis of guaranteed prices, but some of the plausible theories about the demise of Bear Stearns, for instance, involve the kind of shorting skulduggery that this guy assumes is rare. (If you do it on that scale it can be both rare and highly destabilising.)
6. tick tock said...
Give it up techiman, its almost over, and the times will soon be changing.
This tired old fiction (that has enabled your sleep for a generation) is long exhausted.
7. techieman said...
TT an argument without basis is no argument. erm i dont like speculators because i dont like speculators doesnt work. If you want to participate in a debate eg. icarus and JU - fine but if you just want to throw your dummy out of your pram then your opinion like your comments have no value.
Really you add nothing. If you want to articulate what you mean (hell you can even do it without punctuation if thats why you can't seem to get past 30 words in any response) then feel free , otherwise really go back to the 70s and the 3 day week - because reading between the lines you are starting to sound like a member of the Tooting popular front. Whats the circularion of the socialist worker newspaper again?
8. tick tock said...
Thanks techieman, I now understand what an arguement is. There was me getting my 'comments' and my 'arguements' all mixed up in the comments section, how embarrassing.
Here in Tooting, we always value the advice of a day trader, we often forget which decade we live in, and need putting right from time to time. We also warmly welcome you kind offer to allow errors of punctuation in future posts, along with your advice as to whose comments we should seek emulate in future.
9. techieman said...
I doubt if you will read this but in any case, FYI a day trader is generally considered as someone who trades in and out during the day. In stock markets they generally can only buy the market first before selling it later. Day traders - as a rule lose money because when the term became popular the markets were going up a la bubble style and anybody can make money buying shares in a bull market, and now...... Much like buying houses when credit is cheap and easily available.
Now the point is that speculators add to liquidity. AND the point is that the small specs are almost always wrong compared to the large specs, and if you want to educate yourself to that feel free. Where do i stand? I dont like day traders spouting off how well they have done because they can only trade one side of the equation although to be fair nowadays with the introduction of ETFs that participate in the short side - i.e. you can buy a bearish fund that works inverse to the indexes. And you may feel that i am a parasite of the system, which IS fair comment (but i dont really know what points you make because your first point made no sense to me) . You see your second point also makes no sense as it doesnt stand on its own. There seems alot of anomosity underlying your posts, i mean "What a load of B0llocks" is also fine IF its a prelude to "What a load of B0llocks because i believe the maket does this / that / or the other" . So fine i have no problem with people posting opposite views, so long as they articulate what they are. Else.... why bother?
My overlying points is that detailed in point 2 above. Its a smokescreen whether you like what i do or not is irrelevant - its not the fault of the speculators that markets move (if that were the case you could pin the move down to around 10 dollars in Crude on spculators but no-one seemed to be congratulating them then).