We are all in this together … or not

Whenever you hear that phrase, “We’re all in this together,” be very, very cautious. That is what scammers will say to convince you to do stupid things with your money (like buying pumped stocks) and what both hucksters and even non-fraudulent trading gurus will say to try to get their hands on your money.

The simple truth of the matter is that everyone has different goals and priorities. The most important thing you can do is to make sure you are aware of how the priorities of those you deal with and listen to differ from your own. A stock promoter’s goal is simply to get you to buy stock — damn you and your kid’s college fund.  A trading guru who sells his services with an alert service or trading chatroom benefits the longer you subscribe. His financial interest is best served by selling something that you will continue to want or need for years and years. The guru’s monetary motivation will — ceteris paribus of course — cause him to charge as much as he can for as little as he can. He will sell you hard to get you to pay him more money.

Even saying that all traders care about is profits is wrong. Especially in the penny stock world there are many of us who are motivated by other things besides profits (of course we are all motivated to a large extent by profits). I remember getting a bunch of flak from commenters on this blog when I accused a certain pumper of violating securities laws (six months later the SEC sued him). People attacked me for potentially destroying profitable trading opportunities. But I along with most other bloggers don’t just do this for money.

At the end of the day, each of us is motivated by different things, some of which are obvious, some of which are not. Money is the most obvious, but most of have emotional motivations — we genuinely want to help those we come across. Some of us have other motives that drive us, more powerful motives. When the time comes, my motivations will be made clear. In the meantime, let us embrace the motto “All for one, one for all, and every man for himself!”

 

Disclaimer: No positions in any stocks mentioned. This blog has a terms of use that is incorporated by reference into this post; you can find all my disclaimers and disclosures there as well..

8 thoughts on “We are all in this together … or not”

  1. I find myself guilty of typically searching for one answer to problems, one purpose for activities, and singular “reasons” or “ultimates” for most things in life. Although grouping people and motivations helps to keep things mentally organized, the truth is that most things do not fit neatly into place.

    On a related note: http://vimeo.com/29496177

    Lest we forget all those people diligently spending years of their life to earn the savings they invest in one pennystock after a five-minute commercial.

    Humans are not rational and often have no idea what they want. Traders, gurus, or promoters want either a million dollars, a haircut, ice cream, a new spouse, or… who knows, depends on the day.

    1. Ice cream is one of my top motivators. Unless I really screw up or Europe blows up, killing the equity markets, it will be hard for me to end the year with a net worth of under $1m. Unlike some stock promoters, I don’t need mountains of cocaine or a Ferrari.

  2. One of the things I’ve always enjoyed when reading your blogs, or even your comments, is the honesty and conviction that bleeds out through your words. That will go a long way towards building your pay site I think.

    When I tell people that personal satisfaction drives me the most, they tell me I’m lying or I’m crazy. I have always worried more about doing something right, or being good at something than the money I made while doing it. For some reason everything always worked out during the process.

    I always wanted to learn how to trade properly, I never really cared if I made money. The satisfaction of understanding something and how it works has always meant more to me than anything else, even money.

    On another note, I built my first custom computer; I have a video card that can handle 4 monitors and a ton of hard drive space along with several other good features. My other rig was having problems and now I’m rebuilding it for Tyler to game on.

    1. Nice! I upgraded my computer back in early December to deal with screencasting to Livestream (which is very cpu-intensive). Best part of the upgrade was an SSD for my main drive — makes boot-up and program launching super-quick.

  3. Nice. I also went with a SSD, actually two of them; one 2TB and one 120GB. I stored Win7 on the smaller srive and will use the larger one for daily operations. I also went with the i7 Quad Core CPU, hopefully I won’t need to upgrade anytime soon.

    I’m no expert, done a ton of reading before i ordered everything, but I can say it was a good experience building and setting everything up.

    1. That seems like overkill! Even running all my normal programs my core i7-2600 runs at under 10% usage.

      It is so easy to build a computer nowadays. And mostly fun (except getting tiny connectors to fit together and dealing with cord management).

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