Please take special note of comments by "credittrader", he knows his stuff!
Wonderful, now I know more than I wanted to about how to leverage an "event" using long term vs. short term
gambling, I mean trading.
ZH comments are often more worth your time than the articles themselves, and once in a while you get a good zinger in the 3rd grade taunts, and the political spectrum runs the gambit.
A lot of the folks on ZH are full time, don't care how I make money, as long as I make it, traders. Maybe I am stupid, but I just can't bring myself to make money the way these people do-which is mostly by fleecing the less experienced and less attentive. Basically riding on the scams bigger and larger forces are setting up to the detriment of us all. The recent Greek bailout comes to mind - trying to sign up a future generation to pay the bartab of the previous one, and to foreigners, and they will try it here too. And these guys will salivate all over it. And then there is the Gold-bug/Day-Trader rivalry. Gold-bugs fear the collapse of the system over the next few years, and the traders see nothing but day, week, month long opportunities to make a buck, and don't care if the system goes or not - after all, they "got theirs." And really that is the mindset of our current political class- they know its going down- might as well pull as much for themselves out before it goes.
I knew the S&P would run from 6500 to some stupidly high level on QE, but I couldn't bring myself to speculate on it. I have the same problems with "short" positions.. I think its just wrong and immoral to bet against someones success - not to mention that it creates a moral hazard incentive to drive failures. I get that shorts serve a genuine purpose in allowing commodities producers to shift their risk to investors, but I can't figure out why anyone with a Stock would need that. I see how most of these
scams,
schemes, methods work, I just couldn't look myself in a mirror if I used them. Isn't that sad?