The Wall Street Jungle

Lions, Tigers and Bears

If you could convince a professional that anyone could do his or her job, you may soon be out of favor among the elite. Certain professions such as tax accountants and attorneys, to name a few, rely on the complexity and confusion of their field for their livelihood.

It is no different on Wall Street. For over 200 years, reliable access to financial information has been restricted to an elite group of insiders, floor traders, large brokerage firms and professional money managers. In his fictionalized autobiography, the cycle of the market was described by the legendary Jesse Livermore to be one in which “…the insiders, who buy low and drive prices high, will then sell to the public at the market top, and when the prices decline, the cycle begins all over again.”

Not much has changed since Livermore’s comments 80 years ago---except for one significant event: The advent of the Internet. For the first time in its history, the financial markets can be accessed with the click of a mouse. What used to be the exclusive domain of the commission-driven broker, the floor trader and the wealthy insider is now in potential competition with anyone who owns a modem and an E*Trade account.

But as old habits are hard to break, so do aging monopolies have difficulty adjusting to their inevitable dissolve. At last, the professional trader, the money manager, the insider and the broker alike are each facing the fact that anyone with a PC and half a mind can do their job. What are they to do?

The last line of defense amongst the elite is enforced ignorance and the insistence on the complexity and “danger” of financial markets if you wing it without them. They will be quick to tell you horror stories of trading, and how it is equated to gambling and other social ills, and that the proper way to invest is to buy and hold indefinitely (on their recommendations, of course).

So what is it that Wall Street doesn’t want you to know? They don’t want you to know how to trade. More specifically, they don’t want you to find out that the truly big money is made by traders, not long-term investors. That is how it has been for time immemorial. They only tell you to buy (and hold), because it is in the professional’s best interest that you do so. It’s strange, because “investing,” taught in this fashion, is the most dangerous strategy of all: Make a bet, stick with it come hell or high water, and if it doesn’t go your way, you lose everything.

My intention of this book is to dispel age-old myths about the market, to show you that anyone with the will and reasonable intelligence can trade for profit, and that it can be done with minimal risk with relatively small stakes.

And, while the message contained herein is certainly not popular with the masters of Wall Street, it is very popular with regular people. All it takes is a modest commitment, a desire to make money on stocks, and above all, the willingness to learn new things. That’s what the material in this course is about, and you are cordially invited to take that first step of the journey in trading for income!

My Story: Riches to Rags

Almost every American, regardless of personal or professional stature, has been involved with the stock market in one way or another. Even if you have never bought or sold a single share of stock, the market could have a profound effect on your financial security more than you might realize.

For instance, most company-sponsored retirement funds are heavily vested in stocks, so if you own a 401K, an IRA or pension, you own stocks. If you work for a large corporation, chances are that the company’s stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange, in which case, the future with your employer could very well be affected by what happens on Wall Street.

But even if you don’t have a retirement fund or do not work for a publicly traded company, our very economy that we all depend on is very much affected by what happens to stocks. One way or another, the stock market will have an effect on your finances.

Stock trading has not always been an interest of mine, and in fact, I have no formal education in finance, nor have I ever been part of the Wall Street elite (much to my advantage, as you will see). By profession, I am a software engineer, and that is where my story begins.

In late 1999, my software development firm was acquired by a Silicon Valley company for $18,000,000, of which my ownership was worth over $5,000,000. After fifteen years of innovation, I felt that my hard work had finally paid off. This is what it was all about, to achieve a financial goal that most people can only dream of---independent wealth, and perhaps the wherewithal to never want for anything for myself or my family for the rest of my life. My dream had come true…or so I thought.

In this case, fate had its cruelty. The acquisition occurred as a 100% stock deal, meaning that the Silicon Valley company used its publicly traded stock as “currency” to acquire my firm, with shares priced at $150 each. So until I sold the stock, my $5,000,000 of wealth was all in company stock, or only on “paper”.

Needless to say, by the time I was able to sell a single share of stock, the price per share fell from $150 to $15 (a ten-to-one decline). I sold what I could (there were restrictions on what I was allowed to sell), and then watched the stock plummet to $5 in less than two months. I sold more shares, then watched the stock decay to $1. Basically, my $5,000,000 fortune had been completely wiped out.

But it did not stop there. In the interest of “corporate downsizing”, I was informed by the company that my services were no longer required. In other words, I was fired. So there I was, no stock, no company, no job, no income, and no longer any ownership of my intellectual property that I had developed for more than a decade. I was facing home foreclosure and bankruptcy. In short, I was ruined.

The only silver lining was that this experience was a wake up call, to put it as mildly as possible. Something was very wrong with the deal I made, or with the market, or maybe I was defrauded, or perhaps all of the above. I wanted answers.

I asked myself that if a giant fleet of professionals, including the entire stock market itself valued a stock at $150 per share, how could it possibly deflate to $1 in a matter of months? Nothing significantly changed with the company, there was no particular news or series of events that should have caused such deflation. Could it be that the $150 was that out of line? Could the stock analysts have been that wrong?

Over time, I discovered the answer to this question. Yes, the analysts can be that wrong, and furthermore, they are wrong an alarming number of times.

This is when the whole bottom dropped out of my understanding of financial markets. Like so many others, I assumed that people who analyzed stocks for a living, who made recommendations to the rest of us, and who managed large pension and retirement funds knew what they were doing. But to my horror, many of them are not only incompetent, but some of them engage in borderline criminality, or outright fraud (we have already witnessed the many Wall Street scandals that have surfaced in the media).

Hence, this “riches to rags” twist of fate is what led to my calling, it is what motivated me to discover the truth about stocks and how the Wall Street game is played. I was determined to get my money back no matter how long it took, and regardless of how many hoops I had to jump through. I simply wanted to learn the truth.

I am neither a financial advisor, or do I hobnob in any Wall Street circles. You will never see me on media shows that talk about investments, but why should you? Nearly everyone who appears on such shows are the same pied pipers who led millions of innocent investors to portfolio ruin.

All that I have is my common sense, my dignity, and my desire to reclaim what was lost. From a practical sense, I have my analytical abilities, acquired from years of software development training. It is this ability that has enabled me to sort through an otherwise confusing matrix of data to develop stock trading systems that really work, and that work for the common investor.

Stock Market Basics