When talking dunderheads on the Financial Nonsense Channel bemoan the closing of abysmally performing hedge funds due to abysmal performance, then decry staff reductions and pay cuts throughout the financial rackets, it can only mean one thing. Phones are down all over The Street. Again.
The Securities and Excuses Commission (SEC), or somebody, has finally knocked them out this go-around.
See, for your Presbyterian Mafia to rip customers off big time, your top refined wise guys have to pool some not-so-refined efforts. Ivy League goons aren’t smart enough to know what’s going up or down by themselves, let alone when. Somebody’s got to orchestrate your massive plunderings and pillagings, and let the rest of the pinstripe hoods in on this stuff, and that's where Alexander Graham Bell's invention comes in. Yackety, yack, shorts attack. When the heat’s on, however, lines get tapped and conversations monitored - even your third cousin’s tennis pro’s girlfriend's cellphone isn’t safe to use anymore, and Elite Dons are afraid to try pulling enough cronies together to gangbang prices with the weight of their combined egregious amorality.
Wall Street shutters its rackets for the duration. No phone calls, no trading. Your made man goes broke fast trying to pull any of this calamari off by his pathetic own self.
Oh, they’ll be back soon enough and probably with a vengeance, but enjoy the lull while it lasts. You may even be able to spot mega moves yourself now, and cash in on them, if racketeers are really being stymied by actual law enforcement efforts, as the latest idiot box news suggests.
Free market theory, the one where rational market participants determine rational market prices, the one that ignores the reality of widespread and perpetual rigging by irrational market insiders, the theory espoused by academic charlatans anointed intellectual giants at institutions of the rich and careless by telling the rich and careless what the rich and careless want to hear, may actually hold water for a time.
We never ever recommend any kind of trading strategy to subscribers who aren‘t wired into the right phone calls from the right Country Club Capo, and still don’t, but if you want to dabble a bit in short-term price swings today, go on and give it a shot, a tiny, tiny shot. We’re willing to take a page from the SEC’s own playbook, and look the other way for now.
These are, after all, heady times for our MacDougal Post community. The felonious are starting to go away. At least some of them anyway. Big ones too. To rot in jail for a long, long time. A really long, long, long, long time for a change.
Go ahead and celebrate a little, why don't you?
