Do you think Bolze thought he could continue the ponzi plan forever, or did he believe he would trade back to win at the end. In one interview his wife said he traded until just a few months ago. Why work so hard building that house knowing everything was going to blow up within a year or two? Did he fool himself? Or was he just evil?
I think one real possibility could be that a large "client" determined what was going on and got their money returned. This triggered a cash crunch and the ensuing drama. Just how they forced this would be open to speculation.
Many of these people start of with "good" intent. Then a problem occurs which forces them to be a little dishonest. Which is easy. And thus the problem continues with them trapped in their dishonesty. So they live the good life and keep things "running" until they can't anymore. Sport probably believed his own story. He's an egotistical bastard. Then, with things not working as well as promised he refunded nonexistent profits from the pool. And so it began. In Sport's case some of the local newspaper articles talk about local people pressing him for the refund of their moneys which he promised but left before delivery. It will be interesting to see how many more of these the credit reset bring out.
Yes, his trading work was excellent. There was nothing new in it. Primarily a combination of fib work for price and time support and resistance, momentum indicators to show termination of a pullback and trend resuming at those levels, and market internals to verify the timing of the entry. Combined of course with over all money management (cough) and trade management. He'd be the first to share where he picked up these techniques along the way and how he learned to combine them. This also combined well with that vastly oversized ego to allow him to roll with the small losses and press winning trades to his advantage without falling into the usual psychological traps, "Do I dare take the next one? That last one was a loser". He'd also be the first to remind anyone that you can't clone someone else's trading plan and make it your own in its entirety. Especially for a discretionary approach. We each have our own psychological needs, abilities to see and accept or discard information presented in various ways. I have indeed seen him help a good many traders, but those who have benefited from working with him approached any educational experience with the idea that they would find something he was using to help in constructing their OWN trading plans. The people I've seen fail with his approach are those who thought they were getting a complete recipe where they could just duplicate everything he was doing. But isn't this the case with any discretionary method and the entire learning curve involved with trading? Now about what happened. I'm not completely sure. I think that he was indeed working with the best of intentions. He also wanted to shift some emphasis into more passive investments as he was getting older, and a great deal of money went into the local real estate market. When things started heading south, and very quickly as we all know, it started taking way more of his time and energy than simply sticking with trading would have. It's quite likely that he freaked out completely and misdirected funds to support the real estate ventures, figuring he could pay it all back at some point. When redemption requests started coming in though because his investor's other assets were declining, the whole thing fell apart. Now that's one scenario. There are some factors which point towards a more carefully calculated set of deceptions. At least based on my knowledge and opinions and of course I'm not privy to everything involved in the ongoing investigations. Just to be clear, I am not defending HIM in any way. What he did was very wrong. He hurt me terribly too. Not so much financially but the pain runs just as deep. But I do think that if he had just stuck to trading this would have been a very different scenario. Perhaps he actually had a deep seated need to put something over on people. I don't know. But the trading techniques he represented were and are valid to the best of my knowledge.
Those who are duped by scammers always have excuses why. Defending the mini wannabe madoff. Why? Evedence is clear the guy was a con. Certainly easy to con about his trading ability also. But the sheep still believe
Are you f*ckin' kidding me? Ask the guys who would sell their name for $20MM to form a line and you wouldn't be able to fly out to the end of it in a day. Miserable? They'd be laughing their asses off on a beach in the Caymans.
Sad but true. I think they would end up miserable, but the thought of great richest is very appealing and I suspect that many would take that offer.
Do tell. Enlighten us with your inside knowledge. I copied the follow excerpt from wikipedia. It's not the end of the month yet, but I'm around +$12K for this month. Nothing to pop champagne over, but still decent. So you're 0 for 2. And if you read what Dennis was writing, his trading concepts didn't seem very far fetched. He trade a opening range breakout, same as Mark Fisher. I just thought he was trading some large sizes to subsize his lifestyle. I wonder where Dennis has run to, and if he'll be caught.
I'm sure it did...very local real estate for him. Building that house of his (twice) cost several million. Did any of his investors suspect that he was using their money to build it? Also, I was suspicious about the fire that destroyed the first house before it was almost completed. On the blog, he blamed anonymous posters who was sending him nasty "threatening" messages. This sounds like complete b.s. and just a cover to me. I'm sure he had his share of trolls and enemies online but no one would bother torching his house over it I wouldn't think. Also, it was done when he was out of the country so nice alibi too if he was so inclined. Did anyone ever suspect he torched it to get back some money and then rebuild using the insurance money? I never followed him personally but this guy certainly did rack up the red flags along the way that he might be a con.