{"id":183766,"date":"2012-11-28T20:35:00","date_gmt":"2012-11-29T01:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/11\/28\/holy-sh-we-are-running-out-of-gullible-idiots\/"},"modified":"2012-11-28T20:35:00","modified_gmt":"2012-11-29T01:35:00","slug":"holy-sh-we-are-running-out-of-gullible-idiots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/11\/28\/holy-sh-we-are-running-out-of-gullible-idiots\/","title":{"rendered":"Holy Sh%$, We Are Running out of Gullible Idiots"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i990.photobucket.com\/albums\/af27\/msaroff\/20121126_NYSE.png\" style=\"cursor: pointer; float: right; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px;\" width=\"350\" \/>I understand that all resources are finite, but I never thought that it would <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.reuters.com\/felix-salmon\/2012\/11\/27\/charts-of-the-day-equity-volume-edition\/\">apply to human gullibility and stupidity<\/a>, indicating a continuing fall in trading volume.<\/p>\n<p>His explanation is that we are finally running out of rubes willing to trust Wall Street:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">The uptrend bit is easy: volumes, at least until 2009, always went up over time, especially when they were helped along by things like decimalization and high-frequency trading. But what explains the downtrend? It\u2019s not the decreasing number of stocks: that might explain a bit of what\u2019s going on in the US, but it wouldn\u2019t explain the rest of the world.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Instead, I think that what we\u2019re seeing is the slow death of the stock-market investor \u2014 the kind of person who subscribes to Barron\u2019s, idolizes Warren Buffett, and thinks of stock-market investing as a do-it-yourself enterprise. During the dot-com bubble, lots of people thought they were really smart when it came to stock-market investing, and then after the dot-com bubble burst, the rise of discount brokerages helped encourage new people to step in to the market and try their luck.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Nowadays, however, the message is sinking in: it\u2019s a rigged game, you can\u2019t win, and you\u2019re better off with a passive strategy.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It is <b>very<\/b> hard for me to believe, but the idea that Wall Street is finally running out of hard-working, regular folks who are willing to be cheated is not an unreasonable thesis given this data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I understand that all resources are finite, but I never thought that it would apply to human gullibility and stupidity, indicating a continuing fall in trading volume. His explanation is that we are finally running out of rubes willing to trust Wall Street: The uptrend bit is easy: volumes, at least until 2009, always went &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1005,970,1004,1002,1245,992],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-corruption","category-finance","category-good-writing","category-honesty","category-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183766"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183766\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}