Agreed. And shocking numbers! Wow! I truly think all of this gets back to the dumbing of America. We have SO many new technologies, but in 2011 are dumber than ever. (I'm not talking about the people on ET. I'm talking about the masses, the sheeple...) How did we get into a place where .25c out of every dollar goes into compliance???:eek: I was watching John Stossel on Fox recently, and he was doing a show on ignorant disclaimers which are absolutely compliance related issues. Can you believe for example, that the dust masks people often use to mow their lawns with have a disclaimer on them that say, "Caution! This is not an oxygen supplying mask." I sat there saying, "duh! There are no tubes hanging from it, nor an oxygen tank!" The next piece he did was for a kid's bicycle. There was a photo of a kid sitting on a simple bicycle, and under the picture read something akin to: "Caution! This is a dangerous and deadly activity. The person in this photograph is a trained expert." Really? An 8 year old kid is a trained expert? Unreal!!!!!:eek: Last, check out John Stossel's 3minute interview with Ron Paul called "the road to serfdom." Ron Paul REALLY speaks my language, and I can't help love the guy! http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/s...ica-on-the-road-to-serfdom/?playlist_id=87530
I know, it's shocking. And the worst part is we don't get $0.25 in fraud reduction. Fraud is institutionalized AND we pay for the promise of prevention. So, we pay and regulation worsens our lives. Of course we're getting dumber! Look at the state of government monopolized public education! The whole point is to dumb down the population. The evil cabal of the NEA can't compete with actual teaching and so they fight school choice. God forbid people should actually become educated. I am a huge fan of Stossel and Judge Napolitano. I Tivo every episode. And I'm a huge fan of Hayek, Friedman (including his son, David) and Hazlitt. Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" should be required reading in high school. Politicians, the trial bar and regulations are sucking productive Americans dry. And then they blame the horrors they create on this non-existent "free markets" in the U.S.
Well, you're probably closer to Libertarian as am I. I'm just a common sense. no b.s. kind of guy, and it's looking like Libertarian is the "shoe that fits me." I can only wish that the US will wake up sometime damn soon, and put the common back in common sense. .25c for every dollar wasted by this kind of OVER regulatory/Compliance nonsense is far, FAR from what our Founding Fathers would agree on.
The bottom line is this Series 56 exam is going to weed out a LARGE percentage of traders in the prop industry. Believe it or not, a good percentage who are profitable traders just might not be able to pass this exam being they been in the biz a while and haven't taken a test in over ten years. A few veterans on our desk been pulling their hair out over this one and think their career is done. The traders who will be passing this exam are the fresh college grads who need a "training program" and you can kiss this model goodbye. So who will be left? Not many, the whole reason to join a CBOE firm was to avoid any exams. Shops will be closing up! Unfortunately.
This is exactly what I'm talking about!!!!!!! The common in common sense is FAR gone in the US!!!! I'm a Performance Only RIA, and also still have my Series 7. I can promise you that I could NOT pass the S7 if I had to sit and take the 250 question, six hour test right now. Not a chance! I just can't believe this is going on in a "free" Country! And what's going to happen to prices if for example, a few hundred prop desks go empty, and volume drops considerably as prop traders trade large amounts of volume, and provide liquidity...:eek:
Some traders I have spoke with on the floor said screw this, I'm heading back to my country where I don't have to pay taxes or worry about any of these stupid exams we take in the U.S. It makes you really think twice, I wouldn't mind a nice resort on the beach in St. Thomas for a few years.
Hey, man, if the libertarian shoe fits.... I sort of pride myself on my support of free men and free markets as well as my lack of willingness to use violent force to coerce peaceful people to bend to my will.
What would be the motivation for wanting to get rid of daytraders? Aren't daytraders producing commissons and profits for the industry? Or do you think that too many are successful and they're viewed as competition to be stamped out? I don't have any problem believing in hidden agendas but I'm not sure I understand the motivation here.
The Odumba administration is at war with speculators, and ANYONE making over $250,000/year for that matter. i.e., if you take a risk for a possible reward, they frown on that. They believe the big, massive government is more efficient, and smarter than all of the entrepreneur's that built this Country.
I confess that I'm not familiar with the daytrader business model, but my understanding is that these firms extend certain privelages that used to belong only to professional traders to anyone who is willing to comply with the daytrading firm's terms and conditions. Correct me if I'm wrong. If that is the case, then what was once available only to floor traders who were under tight Big Brother surveillance in one physical location, is now available to the public. A fact for which I will always love technology. A public, mind, that is out of the grasp of Big Brother. The government hates not being able to spy on and control the banal minutia of every citizen's life. I wish this were hyperbole, but just think about the number of daily decisions you make in which government has somehow controlled your access to information, products, rights to dispose of your own property, etc. in your private life. In business, it is much worse. I can think of no business that is not regulated in the United States. It is the job of regulation to exclude. The primary purpose is to build barriers to entry and protect the model that is not only easy for government to understand, but easy for the government to control. Who favours such a model besides government? The existing insiders. Less competition from them (although, not all of us feel this way). Imagine the access and innovation that destroys. Imagine the cronies that creates. These tests, not so incidentally, are imposed by the SEC because other exchanges resent the competition from the CBOE that results from the low barriers to entry in Chicago. I applaud and admire the Chicago exchanges for holding on to these low barriers to healthy competition. This, btw, is also the reason that the SEC has been desperately trying to control hedge funds. Screeching "shadow banking" and "systemic risk", the government has been trying for years to bring the hedge fund industry under its direct control - to submit to the power of the central government. Turns out the only system risk we had was within the walls of the diseased, poorly incentivized, crony-controlled and politically privileged super-regulated banks already under government control. Hedge funds blew up left and right in 2007, 2008 and 2009 without any impact on the financial system. But, government finally found a way to tie the noose around the hedgies' necks too. Using the crisis (a disaster of the government's making) as a pretext, the congress passed Dudd-Frank and brought even tiny hedge funds under its control (so they can screw them up the way they've screwed up banks, ratings agencies, and the housing market - among many other things). This is not a conspiracy - it's merely the same old government war on private enterprise. On liberty. Hedgies and day traders are merely the latest victims of encroaching government. I remember when portfolio margin was introduced in 2007, a mass of locals escaped the iron fist of FINRA into customer accounts. The relief among them was palpable. Even if they made less money, most were rich enough not to care and the freedom from not complying with the inanities of over regulation was worth every forgone penny.