If you don't farm, build shelters, or cure cancer, you're nothing but a leech. Learn to live with it.
Haven't read the whole thread, but I think we're all just in the Transmission and Distribution business. We deliver products all around all the globe in 50 msec or less. If that's not something to be pround of I don't know what is. We will deliver just about anything you want - stocks, bonds, pork bellies, whatever - but you will have to pay a price. We assume the risk and so we deserve a reward, a nice reward if you ask me. (Of course, if you ask the SEC, you deserve to be squashed like a bug because you are not a big, fat institution that's been around since the House of Rothschild.) The economy starves w/o capital and we feed it that liquid water. Almost every non-governmental job in our country depends on us to take that capital and push it around to every foreign and domestic investor on the planet. And, by the way, don't tell me the brokerages could do it w/o us -we've all seem what market makers will do when you let them run the show. We ought to be pround - dang proud!
One of the reasons I am a day trader is that I don't have to drive a car every day, wasting resources that have taken tens of millions of years to develop and transforming the earth into a toxic waste dump. I don't produce noise that terrorizes the few people unlucky enough to have halfway sensitive ears, like "con"struction workers, truck drivers, "musicians" or that annoying moron whose job is to walk up and down the hotel parking lot every weekend blowing leaves around using a combustion engine. I don't make slimy lotions that barely pass the test of causing cancer in no more than .3% of all laboratory animals subjected to it before they can be thrown at the public in a TV commercial that tells them they need and deserve to have it on their skin every day. As if our skin had evolved for millions of years to be dependent on greasy sythetic products. With the excessive welfare that has developed here, there is now another profession whose members are literally increasing exponentially in number: Procreators. 19 year old females who each keep 12 children by 17 different male procreators in their garages to collect government benefits. I didn't quite feel like doing that for a living either. There are not many businesses as clean and ethical as trading, especially daytrading. We just make peoples lives a little more convenient without changing most anything else. There are not many more noble vocations I can think of. All that self-glorious bull aside, life on earth is just genes battling other genes within each individual, within each species, and on the whole planet. Whoever says there is anything else to it is either a liar or part of the well over 99% that never become aware enough to understand it.
*************************************************** All that self-glorious bull aside, life on earth is just genes battling other genes within each individual, within each species, and on the whole planet. Whoever says there is anything else to it is either a liar or part of the well over 99% that never become aware enough to understand it. *************************************************** It's true that we're a very competetive society. But that said I think a free and well-lubricated economy (primarily from traders of course!) can slowly raise the standard of living for everyone on the planet. The problem isn't the competition - the solution is the competition. It's when we get rid of the competition that you get hoarding, which is what oppresses the poor. Competition is a fantastic mechanism to transfer wealth from the wealthy to the rest of society. Lack of competition is what built the Rockefellers, Fidel Castro and that little 2 ton gorilla we call the Federal Government.
I had boyhood dreams of professional sports, as that was a passion through college. I had to come to reality and decide the best way to keep that competition/fire going. The Financial Markets keeps score with $$$$$$ not points or win/loss record. I am not 6'4 and 225 pounds, but the market does not care, nor does the otherside of my trades. Simply the best career one can attempt. The Best Game alive.
*************************************************** One of the reasons I am a day trader is that I don't have to drive a car every day, wasting resources that have taken tens of millions of years to develop and transforming the earth into a toxic waste dump. *************************************************** As much of a technology freak as I am, I agree with what you're saying. You made me think of an Indian co-worker describing how he could barely breathe when he went to Calcutta. He said the smog and pollution was 100X worse than any American city. We're doing some nasty things around the globe. (Here too of course - not picking on any country.) But I still think technology is helping much more than hurting.