| Date: | May 18, 2007 / year-entry #176 |
| Tags: | other |
| Orig Link: | https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20070518-00/?p=26803 |
| Comments: | 12 |
| Summary: | Remember day trading? All the cool people were doing it. Glamour stories of people who tripled or quadrupled their stake in a single day. With all this money available for the taking, you'd be a fool not to be day-trading! During the era of day trading frenzy, I got a particular chuckle out of one... |
Remember day trading? All the cool people were doing it. Glamour stories of people who tripled or quadrupled their stake in a single day. With all this money available for the taking, you'd be a fool not to be day-trading! During the era of day trading frenzy, I got a particular chuckle out of one PC manufacturer who produced a Precision Online Trading Workstation, equipped with dual monitors and dual processors and preloaded with financial software, so you can see more stock quotes, crunch those numbers faster, and lose more money more quickly than you ever thought possible. I imagined the logic that went into this product: "There's a lot of stupid people out there. Stupid people who are going to lose all their money one way or another. They may as well lose some of it to us." |
Comments (12)
Comments are closed. |
"The Fed will be lowering rates, get your money out of T-bills and put it all into waffles! Tasty waffles with lots of syrup! Waffles! Buy waffles! Waffles!"
"…that provides home investors with the same advantage as professional traders" – apart from the home investors have to use their own money…
Extracting money from stupid people is tried and true business plan. Casinos come to mind as a first rate example.
Same old story all over again. Some people dig for gold and go broke. Others sell shovels and live in mansions.
Looks like 4 monitors are the ticket these days:
http://www.xview.com/ameritrade/turnkey_landingpage.html
<i>There’s a lot of stupid people out there. Stupid people who are going to lose all their money one way or another. They may as well lose some of it to us.</i>
You say that like it’s a <i>bad</i> thing.
So possibly on a par with those Intel ads that told you to buy a Pentium 4 so you could "get into the Internet"? Seems this sort of business isn’t limited to smaller PC companies ;-)
4 is not alot; a friend of mine in London works for a company where everybody has 9.
Selling shovels might be good business, but sometimes digging appears so popular you can struggle to give shovels away.
When half the people are digging, and the other half are selling shovels, I’d suggest that’s the time to say (in a loud voice)……
"HEY LOOK UP THERE, DEAD PIGEON"
That’s the point where you grab the nugget, at the bottom of the hole, and leg it.
I conclude that being wealthy is more to do with amorality than acumen, talent, or intent.
I know it may not be appropriate anymore in the USA, but Property has been this decade’s quick-n-easy money making bubble. I think there are still many ‘become a property millionaire’ seminars about today.
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Barry:[Extracting money from stupid people is tried and true business plan. Casinos come to mind as a first rate example.]
What he said.