more.... Social business is important because it addresses very vital concerns of mankind. It can change the lives of the bottom 60 per cent of world population and help them to get out of poverty. Grameen's Social Business Even profit maximizing companies can be designed as social businesses by giving full or majority ownership to the poor. This constitutes a second type of social business. Grameen Bank falls under this category of social business. The poor could get the shares of these companies as gifts by donors, or they could buy the shares with their own money. The borrowers with their own money buy Grameen Bank shares, which cannot be transferred to non-borrowers. A committed professional team does the day-to-day running of the bank. Bilateral and multi-lateral donors could easily create this type of social business. When a donor gives a loan or a grant to build a bridge in the recipient country, it could create a "bridge company" owned by the local poor. A committed management company could be given the responsibility of running the company. Profit of the company will go to the local poor as dividend, and towards building more bridges. Many infrastructure projects, like roads, highways, airports, seaports, utility companies could all be built in this manner. Grameen has created two social businesses of the first type. One is a yogurt factory, to produce fortified yogurt to bring nutrition to malnourished children, in a joint venture with Danone. It will continue to expand until all malnourished children of Bangladesh are reached with this yogurt. Another is a chain of eye-care hospitals. Each hospital will undertake 10,000 cataract surgeries per year at differentiated prices to the rich and the poor. Social Stock Market To connect investors with social businesses, we need to create social stock market where only the shares of social businesses will be traded. An investor will come to this stock-exchange with a clear intention of finding a social business, which has a mission of his liking. Anyone who wants to make money will go to the existing stock-market. To enable a social stock-exchange to perform properly, we will need to create rating agencies, standardization of terminology, definitions, impact measurement tools, reporting formats, and new financial publications, such as, The Social Wall Street Journal. Business schools will offer courses and business management degrees on social businesses to train young managers how to manage social business enterprises in the most efficient manner, and, most of all, to inspire them to become social business entrepreneurs themselves. Role of Social Businesses in Globalization I support globalization and believe it can bring more benefits to the poor than its alternative. But it must be the right kind of globalization. To me, globalization is like a hundred-lane highway criss-crossing the world. If it is a free-for-all highway, its lanes will be taken over by the giant trucks from powerful economies. Bangladeshi rickshaw will be thrown off the highway. In order to have a win-win globalization we must have traffic rules, traffic police, and traffic authority for this global highway. Rule of "strongest takes it all" must be replaced by rules that ensure that the poorest have a place and piece of the action, without being elbowed out by the strong. Globalization must not become financial imperialism. Powerful multi-national social businesses can be created to retain the benefit of globalization for the poor people and poor countries. Social businesses will either bring ownership to the poor people, or keep the profit within the poor countries, since taking dividends will not be their objective. Direct foreign investment by foreign social businesses will be exciting news for recipient countries. Building strong economies in the poor countries by protecting their national interest from plundering companies will be a major area of interest for the social businesses. We Create What We Want We get what we want, or what we don't refuse. We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us, and that poverty is part of human destiny. This is precisely why we continue to have poor people around us. If we firmly believe that poverty is unacceptable to us, and that it should not belong to a civilized society, we would have built appropriate institutions and policies to create a poverty-free world. We wanted to go to the moon, so we went there. We achieve what we want to achieve. If we are not achieving something, it is because we have not put our minds to it. We create what we want. What we want and how we get to it depends on our mindsets. It is extremely difficult to change mindsets once they are formed. We create the world in accordance with our mindset. We need to invent ways to change our perspective continually and reconfigure our mindset quickly as new knowledge emerges. We can reconfigure our world if we can reconfigure our mindset. We Can Put Poverty in the Museums I believe that we can create a poverty-free world because poverty is not created by poor people. It has been created and sustained by the economic and social system that we have designed for ourselves; the institutions and concepts that make up that system; the policies that we pursue. Poverty is created because we built our theoretical framework on assumptions which under-estimates human capacity, by designing concepts, which are too narrow (such as concept of business, credit- worthiness, entrepreneurship, employment) or developing institutions, which remain half-done (such as financial institutions, where poor are left out). Poverty is caused by the failure at the conceptual level, rather than any lack of capability on the part of people. I firmly believe that we can create a poverty-free world if we collectively believe in it. In a poverty-free world, the only place you would be able to see poverty is in the poverty museums. When school children take a tour of the poverty museums, they would be horrified to see the misery and indignity that some human beings had to go through. They would blame their forefathers for tolerating this inhuman condition, which existed for so long, for so many people. A human being is born into this world fully equipped not only to take care of him or herself, but also to contribute to enlarging the well being of the world as a whole. Some get the chance to explore their potential to some degree, but many others never get any opportunity, during their lifetime, to unwrap the wonderful gift they were born with. They die unexplored and the world remains deprived of their creativity, and their contribution. Grameen has given me an unshakeable faith in the creativity of human beings. This has led me to believe that human beings are not born to suffer the misery of hunger and poverty. To me poor people are like bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a flower-pot, you get a replica of the tallest tree, only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted, only the soil-base that is too inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong in their seeds. Simply, society never gave them the base to grow on. All it needs to get the poor people out of poverty for us to create an enabling environment for them. Once the poor can unleash their energy and creativity, poverty will disappear very quickly. Let us join hands to give every human being a fair chance to unleash their energy and creativity. Ladies and Gentlemen, Let me conclude by expressing my deep gratitude to the Norwegian Nobel Committee for recognizing that poor people, and especially poor women, have both the potential and the right to live a decent life, and that microcredit helps to unleash that potential. I believe this honor that you give us will inspire many more bold initiatives around the world to make a historical breakthrough in ending global poverty. Thank you very much.
sigh. i always have a hard time with people getting preachy on forums like this. i believe if someone is in the position to preach about a subject like trading, they would not be wasting their time on an internet forum trying to 'enlighten' relative newbies to the trading game. <b>to the people saying noone will ever give away systems or information on systems for free.</b> in the magical land of academia, people consistently give knowledge (often valuable knowledge) to the public domain based on the concept of the 'greater good' or maybe even good will / karma. I wouldn't be surprised if someone is willing to offer up a profitable system to the public (on ET or elsewhere). That being said I would never ask for it, but I'm not going to waste my time telling teens and students not to ask. (unless i am REALLY bored) <b>to the people saying the market is unmodellable </b> / the only true way to make money off the markets is to scam people into buying your market related services or play the guppies. we are able to model how bird flock together, how fish swim together, how hurricanes form and how traffic flows. it would be naive to assume it is outside the realm of possibility to be able to model how humans buy / sell varying equities as their underlying value changes. and realistically the system only needs to be right slightly better than 50% of the time to be profitable depending on costs. i could have completely misunderstood points many posters have made due to the useless level of convolution. i think the difference between myself and the preachers is that they post hoping to enlighten others and gain 'respect' / a following. i post hoping someone will go against my beliefs and end up actually teaching me something useful. guess that makes me selfish.
As the acknowledged master of delusion (I practically invented the concept), I wish to contribute my favorite in the realm of trading: the Complexity Delusion. Perhaps because so many modes of thought (subpersonalities) war inside most traders' heads at any given moment, the resulting gestalt is that trading must be a complex endeavor. So many ideas and purported systems to sort out. For example, to this day, despite intense therapizing by my friends Art and Emil, I still hear Jack's voice in my head. "Draw your channels!" Like mother reminding me to brush. Uck. The simple fact is that it's all about range. You trade the time frame where there is range and where your anxiety is the least. For example, I am most comfortable scalping when the recent range on a one minute chart is about 20 ticks. A minute is an eternity for me (ADTD, attention deficit trading disorder). Five minutes and the universe is due to start contracting. Add to that knowing when price has reversed and you can make money. Which bring me to indicators. You all know in your hearts that they are all, the same. I once stacked twenty up like layers of a salami sandwich and they all turn about the same time, usually AFTER it is perfectly clear visually that price has reversed, 3-4 ticks. So you don't need fancy charts. Three overlays will do. One slow one for the current trend. A faster one to show the recent price range. And a really fast one to see price reversals. I quantify all this with studies and red light/green light helpers, but it's really that simple. In whatever time frame you're comfortable with. It works just fine for one minute or one day. So how do you know if you suffer from The Complexity Delusion? Do you have big screens? Multiple screens? So many panes and studies that your neck and eyes hurt from trying to scan them? Torpor after watching the market for as little as 30 minutes? Contradictory signals? Keeping on trading after the range goes to four ticks because your indicators tell you to? Are you Jacking (and I don't mean off)? Personally, I use all my other computers and monitors to keep a steady stream of soothing porno videos running. And a great big motivational screen (for that great big snatch) of last week's best Britney picture, to remind me of what my aspirations are.
Dr. Duref, your admirable balance or work and play during the trading day reminds me of the powerful delusion I recently overcame, The Diligence Delusion. I used to feel guilty that trading is fundamentally parasitic, scaring impoverished widows nearly to death hourly as they watched the values of their portfolios fluctuating wildly due to the actions of intraday speculators and peculators like me. I felt that if I WORKED at it all day, like it was a JOB, I'd feel less guilty, and somehow respectable. Influenced by Jack, I tried to identify every trading opportunity during the day, chasing the elusive threefold multiple of the daily range with trades of dramatically differing expectorancy (many not worth spit). Then I noticed that my calmest and most profitable trades were no-brainer scalps, and I said to myself, why am I making trading WORK? Why don't I just take the morning money and run? So now I revel in my social inutility, drink my Gloria, and nap away most of the afternoon, waking only to mark my charts with report and subsistence levels for the next trading day. Now if only I could conquer the delusion that I am a trading genius...
Here in the Mumbai Coffee Shop and Trading Corner were are avidly following the ET. We are keeping careful statistics on the postings and the opinionings and the advisings. Then we trade against the majority sentimentals. But that is not why I am to you writing. It is to be pointing out a fellacy we have observed to be gaining increasing creedence: The Autobot Delusion. It is being said on ET that the individual trader cannot now make money intraday because the move is over when the indicator triggers. Because autobotting is making it so. Being the world's greatest mathematicians and algorithmicians, we have found that it is not being so. Every algorithm developer holds close to his heart this guiding principle: keep the algorithm dirt simple, or weeks later you won't be able to remember why the fuck you wrote it that way in the first place (cheap brokerage clients won't pay for algorithm description documents). So we here in Mumbai have been deconstructing the actions of the trading bots. And they are SIMPLE. You are hereing it hear first. Abandon the tonal for the nagual and you will see for yourself that it is so (we are proud to be current in our knowledge of American literature).
So there I think we pretty much have it. We have identified and analyzed the major delusions in trading: Altruistic Charitable Disclosed System Physical Linguistic Semantic Complexity Diligence Autobot. Is ET any the wiser for it? As a trader, I certainly hope not! Thank you all for your inattention. You may now feel free to do what you do to all serious and well-intentioned threads.
wrong. for every circumstantial proof i could give you a counter example of why it is not always a delusional concept.
What? Are you attempting to have a rational dialogue on ET? Doesn't work. Rather than circumstantial I would characterize these arguments as circumferential. Fell free to debate. NQ is trading at an alpha filtered volume level of 112 cars/minute, so I am all ears.