"leech" ? ... Shhtt I have to look into dictionary... Ah I see You know that my philosophy comes from Edwards Demings who is against short-term sighted business and says that the system / management is responsible for most part of an individual behavior and from Milton Friedman which believes in self-interest of the individual and is also blaming for short-term sighted business: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=374360&highlight=friedman#post374360 Milton Friedman : "As a believer in the pursuit of self-interest in a competitive capitalist system, I canât blame a businessman who goes to Washington and tries to get special privileges for his company. He has been hired by the stockholders to make as much money for them as he can within the rules of the game. And if the rules of the game are that you go to Washington to get a special privilege, I canât blame him for doing that. Blame the rest of us for being so foolish as to let him get away with it. I do blame businessmen when, in their political activities, individual businessmen and their organizations take positions that are not in their own self-interest and that have the effect of undermining support for free private enterprise. In that respect, businessmen tend to be schizophrenic. When it comes to their own businesses, they look a long time ahead, thinking of what the business is going to be like 5 to 10 years from now. But when they get into the public sphere and start going into the problems of politics, they tend to be very shortsighted. " So what I want to pinpoint is that speculators are not to blame individually for being leeches, if I want to reuse that term, for most of them are not even conscious of being a leech, I mean that the system have conducted the capable (and incapable) majority to act as such - firms and individuals, including me - because it has become our best self interest and the interest of the corrupted businessmen & politicians we are serving indirectly and this is not the interest of the nation. What I say is that if everybody was conscious that the system is crazy they wouldn't dare to continue such a system but an other where instead of speculating people would rather create true business with true employment: today a business with employment carries much more risk and less benefit than speculation so I laugh when I see some people crying that speculation is so hard: it is much less hard than in real business. In speculation you can easily cut a small loss, not in business especially in a socialist regim - not the case of US yet but of Europe. And why is it such ? Because financial world is competing with real economy and it is far from being fair: it use the power of fake money through credits/leverage and bubbles/psychology effect to pump real money from the economy ... until nothing is left and when people will ask their money for retirement ... guess what (http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=26473&perpage=6&pagenumber=10). Most people in "real life" knows it or rather have this intuition - since many seem not ro be educated enough to even know what a secondary market is - so it's not astonishing that they react badly when they know you are a speculator.