Hit and Run No. CLXXXIII
As the subtext of Mark O.
Barton's Peach State short
squeeze quickly makes the
transition from "day-trading
massacre" to "real-life
Stepfather," you may find
yourself in need of a top-down
analysis. If so, tune in tomorrow
for our special team coverage of
the tragedy. In the meantime,
we'd sooner bring sound man
Mike on our next camping trip
than test the market's new
volatility. But an interview
with Tokyo Joe's Societe
Anonyme, the polyglot investment
guru whose advice for individual
investors has made him one of
the most sought-after bons
vivants in the world of finance,
helped dispel our fears. Joe
spoke with us from his vacation
spot in Milan:
Are you at all concerned for
your own safety?Not really. I think there
are other people who are
more worried than I am,
because I've always been
straightforward. There are
other people who probably
prefer not to be named, but
they should be more worried
than I am.Barton was doing
his trading at a trading room,
rather than from his home,
where he presumably wouldn't
have been able to find as many
victims. Do you think some of
the killing might have been
averted if he'd just been
trading from home with
RealTick software and
following your investing
principles?I thought about him
quite a lot, and I think
his problem wasn't really
trading. It was something
besides trading. And even
though he used that as an
excuse, I don't think his
actions proceeded from what he
went through as a trading
person.Well he had lost a lot
of money, apparently….How much did he lose? Did
they prove how much he lost?According to Newsweek,
he lost $87,500 in June. And
Momentum Securities refused
to reopen his account because
he had to cover $100,000 on
margin.So that just proves
the point that day trading's
not for everybody, doesn't it?Well that's my next question:
Do you think people who are
potentially dangerous should
be day trading?No, if you go to my Web site,
you'll see my post that 99
percent of new day traders lose
money their first month.
Besides, we're not really day
traders. If you look at our past
performance, we don't really go
for half points or quarter points
like these boiler rooms, where
they get a commission from the
trade. We go for a gain —
from two or three to maybe 50
points.Do you think there are
more people out there who
might be dangerous now that
the market's in trouble?I'm sure there are, but it's my
job to make sure people don't
get hurt. That's why I've been
telling them to go into cash
for over a week now. I'm
telling people to sell everything.
I make no money by having people
trade. I'm not a brokerage.What are you basing
your market advice on?Momentum, the market
sentiment, the charts. Common
sense, basically.When somebody goes crazy
like this…I have no interest in this guy,
and I have no empathy for
him. I don't see why you're
doing this interview with me
in the first place. You should
talk to people like active traders,
those scam people in the chat rooms,
market makers who buy zillions
of shares and then pump it up
in the chat rooms. Talk to
them.So would there be less
physical danger if people were
investing more responsibly?We're very responsible: That's
the point. The success of Tokyo
Joe's is because of that. That's
our advice — go into cash,
be defensive.You mentioned market
sentiment. Does something like
this have any impact on market
sentiment?Every August sucks. Experienced
people know that every August
sucks. All the market makers
go on holiday: They go to the
Hamptons. All of Europe shuts
down for one month. There's all
this window dressing coming up
end of the summer. You go cash,
especially after what happened
last year — Asia in July
and South America in October.
Rising oil prices, weakening
dollar, inflation worries …
you go cash! Why's it so hard?What should I do at the end of
August?We always look ahead. We're
going to make some buys
after Labor Day, but nothing's
really happening until late
September or October. But I
think we're calming down from
the madness we've had over the
last three years.Chairman Greenspan is
considering raising interest
rates again. Since that might
push some people over the edge,
should he take enraged day
traders into account before he
makes his decision?How much can Mr. Greenspan
make it more clear? He talks
about the irrational exuberance
index. You had the biotech hype
10 years ago; you have Internet
hype now. It's going to become
more evaluation based. People
are going to want to know where
the beef is.Would you see any way of
keeping crazy people from trading?Yeah. Day trading firms should be
more honest. They should have more
strict screening procedures, more
responsible asset management in
terms of making sure the people
are as risk tolerant as they
claim to be. Ninety percent are
not. Some people even use credit
cards; some people even borrow off
their mortgages. It should not
be gambling.Do you see a regulatory solution?
Should we pass NAFTA regulations
so that crazy people can't trade in
Mexico and Canada?There should be more regulation. I
think the SEC is already going
toward more regulation. And
the market makers don't want
to have their business taken
away. It should be more
systematic.Should dangerous traders
occasionally be allowed to
win, say, $100,000 in cattle
futures to calm them down?No, that's stupid. You're going
to have nuts in all sectors
of society. There were more
nuts in the post office, right?But there's a great deal of
volatility in the day-trading
environment….Only if you become a day
trader of the gambling kind.Do you know what the "O"
stands for in Mark O. Barton?What?
Orrin. Do you think the
media keep calling him
Mark O. Barton to give his
name a Latin flavor?I have no idea. All I know is
he was a nut case. He was not
a typical day trader.What are you doing in
Europe?Every year I take a month, month-and-a-half
vacation in Europe. Play golf, relax.Well enjoy your vacation.
Although Stanley Kubrick's Eyes
Wide Shut turned out to be a
painful, multihour-long dry
humping, it may well end up being the
most influential political film
since Wag the Dog. The fallout
from this one will likely be
less literally destructive than
the actual bombing of random
countries, but early indications
are that it isn't much prettier
to watch. Who can seriously
doubt that Hillary Clinton was
following CruiseKidman's lead in
fictively fucking her husband in
front of an audience during her
Talk magazine interview?
"It is love, isn't it?" asks
hard-hitting journalist Lucinda
Franks of the missus, who
replies,"Yes it is…. We have
love." Hillary's voyeuristic
chief of staff pipes in that she
has seen "physical passion" come
back into the lives of the First
Couple (roughly 5,000 hours of
Rivera Live, Hockenberry, and
Hannity & Colmes, along with two
boatloads of court documents and
a Barbara Walters interview with
'90s It Girl Monica Lewinsky,
suggest that physical passion
may never have left the
president's life). As with Eyes
Wide Shut — a movie that can
only be read as a failed,
multimillion-dollar attempt to
dispel rumors that Tom Cruise is
gay — the First Lady's sex
show is less than convincing (we
await Rudy Giuliani's testimony
that he, the true New
Yorker, bangs his on-again,
off-again second wife like
Reggie Jackson knocking homers
out of Yankee stadium). But we
are filled with millennial fear
and trembling that it marks the
beginning of a new age in
American politics, one in which
office-seekers, like movie
stars, feel a need to do
anything — even grind
through a Kubrickian "Me so
horny, love you long time"
routine — before we stuff
dollar bills in their G-strings.
No, it won't be pretty, but with
enough booze and self-delusion,
we may be able to kid ourselves
that it's the sort of très
sophisticated entertainment that
the French appreciate.
Family physicians have always
been wet blankets, but with the
American Academy of Pediatrics'
tough new rules on television
watching by the under-2 set, the
good docs might be going too
far. With its Orwellian ideas
about "development" and
"interaction with other people,"
the AAP is trying to put the
kibosh on one of the most
promising growth areas in
programming — TV for
toddlers. It's as if the
veterinarians had tried to shut
down TV for cats and dogs. But
just as Babyswim athletes and
French for Tots grads get the
full advantage of the tabula
rasa, we're confident that
babies who learn to change the
channel before they can change
diapers will have an
incalculable advantage over
their overprotected sluggard
peers. More ominously,
the AAP's plan to enlist
parents in limiting kids'
Internet usage does more than
just complicate educators'
love/hate relationship with the
information age. After all,
wouldn't prolonged exposure to
Chamber do more to wean Junior
from the tube than another
lecture from Mom and Dad?
Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of reason. This story originally appeared in Suck, and can be viewed in that format here.