It helps us consider the question, "Why should we invest"? And then it answers said question: "Because TDAmeritrade will give you CONFIDENCE"!! My gawd! Are they selling brokerage services or incontinence products?
The only thing I know to be 100% true about the stock market is that it is a con game run by confidence men. All you need is confidence and you can be a Patsy too!
So meet TDAmeritrade's new face model, Patsy. Patsy kept her maiden name which is Tivly. Patsy Tivly and her husband "Vegas" Mark Tamarket have been married for 18 years now. They are both college educated and together they earn a nice living. Mark had been handing the family's investments since they were married but he got hosed in the 2007 - 2009 crash and swore off investing forever. He sold out before Bernanke started giving free money away to keep bankrupt financial institutions from going under. For the next few years, the couple looked on as others who had weathered the storm were made whole (and then some). 15 months ago, Patsy finally got enough confidence in the market recovery and so she assumed control of the family's finances from Mark and she began to "invest".
Well, Patsy is up 20% overall since then and feeling like she really understands this investing thing. She sticks to so called conservative equities who her investment advisors (all of whom are found on TV shows like CNBC, MSNBC, Cramer's Mad Money show, etc.) tell her are not only safe but also "responsible" investments. She especially admires Warren Buffett and his "common sense" approach to investing. After all, he's a billionaire for a reason, right?
It is important for Patsy to feel safe and responsible and to do that she must have confidence. Yes, Patsy is a good little economic liberal, full of the belief that the stock market is an over unity wealth machine for generating perpetual prosperity wherein responsible, educated people can put in a small amount of money over time and then, on demand, pull out massive wealth increases without having done any work to deserve it. She believes this makes sense because her money is working for her. After all, she has been told perhaps 10,000 times by Wall St. that this magic trick is not only possible but normal.
She does not believe this is gambling; she thinks she is now doing everything right and with great care so as not to make the same mistakes as Mark. Patsy is proud of her progress and, because the bets (err, investments) were doing so well, she doubled down after the big January sell off occurred. Boy did she get some real bargains in that deal! I mean, PE of 13-15 is pretty good and all, right? At least that's what Wall Street con men tell her.
Well I got bad news for Patsy: confidence is not your friend in a con game. It is your mortal enemy. Patsy's confidence in the system and those who run it for their own benefit is about to take her down harder than Mark got taken down. That little MILF head tilt and smile is going to turn into a twisted grimace accompanied by the blazing red Devil-eyes of a woman scorned one she gets taken to the cleaners. It will not be the loss of her retirement money that really pisses her off; it will be the feeling that she was lied to - the abuse of her confidence - that really sends her into the streets looking for payback.
Illuminated people know this is a Ponzi scheme and that the only gambling aspect of it is betting on when it will all collapse. The "if" part of it was already decided decades ago. Not everyone can win in a Ponzi. There are the players and there are the patsies. If you don't know who is getting screwed in a Vegas deal, it's you. The confidence men running this game know that it is a pump and dump scheme which is marketed to well educated people who, despite their intellect, remain completely clueless about how money and markets really work. These market participants think they are up on what is going on because they read Forbes and The Wall St Journal. They carefully avoid "unsanctioned reporters" operating under funny names on the web. After all, thinks Patsy, what do they know that the big establishments don't know?
And of course, Patsy is right about that. Big establishment types do know what is really going on. Patsy's fatal mistake will be that she doesn't realize that them knowing does not equate to them telling her! And even if she happens across a blog like this one that contains a picture that looks strikingly like her and a bio that matches hers almost to a tee, she can never allow herself to believe in any of that conspiracy theory stuff. "Those people need psychiatric help", she muses.
Well all I can say to Patsy should she happen across these pages is to get the Hell out of the markets before they collapse on top of her; collapse they must and so collapse they will. This is a function of math, logic and history. The wave count says the bull market is dead and so the odds are very high that Patsy is going to lose the rest of the money that Mark failed to lose. By the time this is over, politically correct liberals Mark and Patsy will be screaming bloody murder over advice they got from some CNBC interview of Buffett or others of his ilk. They will demand that the government "do something" about it because liberal pukes like Mark and Patsy never take responsibility for their own cock ups. Eventually, Mark and Patsy will demand that the same a$$holes who got us into this mess try to fix it, all the while making it worse and worse for the rest of us.
Now do yourself a favor. Go back up and look at that sickening economic liberal face that TDAmeritrade chose for their equivalent of the Obamacare Girl. Now read their bottom line a few times and really internalize how these con men operate. They don't say "TDAmeritrade, a financial rock" or if you are at the other end of the socionomic spectrum, "TDAmeritrade, safe to trade 'cause we never been played". Nope. Their thrust is that you should just have confidence for confidence sake. It strikes me as being very similar to the US dollar which also doesn't tell you what backs it or why it has any value. You should just have confidence in the system and everything will be all right because nothing can go wrong...
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