George said (December 21, 2018):

Nothing funny about this. This isn't even controversial. There is a very simple truth about casinos. The house always wins. Can you imagine Sheldon Adelson playing at the tables? Does anybody really think that for the price of a copy of the Wall Street Journal you can get a tip worth a fortune?

The people who get those tips are the insiders. They are the ones who know that the wars are going to start because they start them. They are the ones who know that a corporation is going to fail because they are jumping out with their golden parachutes. Bans on insider trading? What a joke. The world in general consists of two types of animals: predators and prey. If you aren't sure which one you are, you are prey.

JG said (December 20, 2018):

Money is not like a vegetable that you plant in a garden that produces a harvest over a period of time. Plain and simple, money is made when one party extracts money from another party in small numbers on a big scale or large numbers on a smaller scale.

When someone makes a big gain on Wall Sreet someone else has taken a big loss at the same time. Most of the money is made by the insiders who control the numbers. Once enough investors decide to liquidate their funds and get out the ponzi scheme then collapses. All the money you thought was there really wasn't, they were inflated digital numbers.

Most people think that when the market collapses everybody loses. Not true, there are big winners when that happens also. Big losers produce big winners. Once the small investor states making money the crash is not far away. The market is then ripe for the big heist. It's happened time and time again.

I learned a long time ago that no one is out to make somebody else rich and that includes your stock broker. If only the Madoff investors still remembered that old cliche.

Tony B said (December 20, 2018):

Stock markets are justified as ways to amass capital in order to finance some mutually beneficial-to-man endeavor.

In reality they are most often attempts by some to gain an easy, effortless life at the expense of the strong backs of others.

They should be outlawed. Life has always been better when capital has been as diversified as possible with local business taken care of by local businesses hiring people from local families.

There never has been a real need for the high priced, "big" items that can only be made with giant pools of capital. Even home ownership worked better when a home was bought gradually at the price of monthly rent, the renter owning that much more of the property and the seller owning that much less upon each monthly payment.

Economies today are driven by greed. For the average family that greed is largely the result of debt-at-usury dysfunctional exchange mediums wherein the "carrot" is forever just beyond reach of the working man's outstretched arms as manipulated by the criminal bankers and their criminal bogus loans.