I am always amazed at how much info people give up and at the same time
blame other, (mainly GS), for their losses.

I am much mopre interested in getting better at trading

How can I achieve this? How can I trade more like an informed professional?
What can I do to get on the RIGHT side of the trade?

As for innovative financial products, we'll just have to agree to disagree. I do not believe that complex derivatives (CDSs, CDOs, etc.) have added any value to the broader market; Their entire existence thus far–again, this is common knowledge–has proven only to encourage risk while pretending to package prudence. They have destroyed far more than they created.

This may wander slightly afield, but I think these rough times have created a great opportunity to rethink what value is and how we should create it, especially because the financial industry has destroyed so much of it, taking the economy along for the ride, and paid little price. Absent a scapegoat bank or two, they have surrendered no value, and show no signs of planning to do so, despite having destroyed so much of it. I'm not sure we've taken advantage of the opportunity, and thus I firmly believe we'll have a fresh chance soon.

But to generalize grossly, I believe the union set of true innovators and investment bankers to be quite small. (You can substitute “thing”-making companies and investment banks into that statement if you like.) Having spent plenty of time working alongside both I may be anecdotally biased, but I would still rather live in a world full of the former and free of the latter.

And a fall-back to the term “greed” is not going to sway the argument, as I fear it could be inserted into the age old saying reserved for the fascists — “When they called the financial products innovators greedy, I remained solvent, and did nothing…”

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Our number one product–as of 2007 GDP, the last time we looked any good–was financial services. We manufacture shareholder value now. And the frontrunners see an opportunity to pick off even that. It's a downward spiral, having little to do with government in my book (though we've got some big debt problems coming), and everything to do with privileging greed over useful innovation. Financial products do not enhance capital, and frontrunning or HFT or what have you does not enrich liquidity.

Of course, it sure doesn't help when your Congress is inveighing against keeping manufacturing in this country by unilaterally making it more expensive to build “things” here, thanks to higher tax plans and now some poorly researched cap & trade scheme.

That said, the important thing — as it has been since the dawn of Man — is the ideas, or the IP if you will. Even at the start of the industrial revolution — when we first started making “things” — the idea of the cotton gin was thousands of more times important than the actual fabrication of one. That's all outsourceable.

As long as we maintain our status as the #1 idea generator, then you need not worry about Goldman creating better ideas about trading (although I share your view of bailouts), and other service-oriented businesses. Far more you should worry about our political system squashing innovation via group grabs of innovative industries and poorly planned tax policy.

Ask yourself, for example, who will have incentive to create value in the biotech field if the government becomes the only payor for such services?

Some, perhaps. But “Fewer” definitely.

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That usually necessitates being kicked out of the Village.

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