Market orders block your Wall Street Family from trading against you. Otherwise you’re telling the Crime Lords your price, and then they’ve got their hands in your pocket.
For example, a limit buy order at 20 gives these racketeers what poker players call an out. They can jump in with their own buy ticket at something like 20.10, taking a trading profit if the quote goes up from there while using your 20 to cover what has become, in effect, a firm stop loss order for them. Beyond that, your 20 is fertile ground for all kinds of criminal mischief. My favorite is the block trade, where large holders are talked into selling under the market, at 19, we’ll say, to fill all the retail limit orders the Crime Family sales force has generated around 20, the difference being that heralded “trading profit” we hear about so much. If the Family you deal with is anything like the one I grew up in, anytime your customer’s man calls up with a name and a price, it’s trading profit time. For them.
That’s what salesmen were called across my dinner table. Customer’s men. All of ours sat in a pit directly behind the consigliore's glass-walled office so he, in effect the head trader, could make sure they did what he told them to. There was nothing subtle about that criminal enterprise. If customers got nickled and dimed, our bean counters called it fees and commissions. Anytime the suckers were totally ripped off, the shylocks posted the windfall to our Trading Department books on a separate ticket.
The first time I heard that Washington was planning to stop future financial chaos by addressing organized crime risk management, I about fell on the floor laughing. We showed a trading profit every month the outfit was in business, even through the Great Depression, because those Dons never took a risk in their life. Their customers did. All Wall Street Mafioso ever do is dance around your orders.
Whenever investment success is attributed to market acumen by some moron in the media, all gangland rolls on the floor laughing. Take away their customer book and the fake play shares the Families counterfeit to crush public investment with short-sales, and the magnificent con called Wall Street is out of business.
With the software Street thugs use today, a mob consigliore has knowledge of every order placed, and uses that information to drive prices where they have to go to make trading profit happen by treating all trades as if they were coming from one sucker. This is how they have always tried to operate, only automation actually makes it possible these days. The racketeers don’t have to miss out on a penny any more.
After all, there are only two sources of money on Wall Street. Yours and theirs. They’re all wired in, operating a cabal, while you, on the other hand, are … well, I could say "not", but "screwed" is what it is really, and rather completely too. Completely screwed.
And now to the point. Investing over the last 55 years, I only used market orders. Effective May 6, 2010, however, the day the flash crash occurred, everything changed for me. I now only use limit orders, placing them at or inside bid or asked at whatever price I figure is most likely to get the trade done, which is all you‘re trying to do with market orders anyway.
The url below tells you why. It introduces us to the shareholder who got snookered in the infamous Proctor & Gamble flash crash trade. A true horror story if ever there was one, it shows an investor bullied out of the market by mob short-sellers, and what a system set up for the benefit of gangsters later did to him. It isn’t quite your worst nightmare, but clearly makes the list. And it all happened over a market order, so look for the market order rules, or lack thereof, whenever they come up in this sordid tale.
http://www.thestreet.com/story/10757383/1/how-pg-plunge-derailed-one-investor.html
