Captain Obvious: Nobody Understands the Stock Market

I began dabbling in the stock market last year. Just small stuff, getting my feet wet, trying to figure it all out.  In all last year--since I never sold a stock that was down, and only sold four total--I managed to make $600+ profit.  This year, I've lost, lost, lost.  I haven't sold anything yet, so nothing's really gone per se, but just like our house, I'm sorta under water.

Through it all, I'd watch the Dow Jones Industrial Average go by on my on-screen ticker. On days where the market was up, I was down. On days when it went down, so did I. It usually goes like that. But some days, the market fluctuates wildly.  Up 158 points! Down 60! Up 50! Down 226!  The market can be up, up, up all day, and crash at the end, or vice-versa.  If you want to check on why this is all happening, you can go to CNBC.com, and there will be a handy headline: "Stocks wobbly on fears of Chinese imports." This while the market is climbing like a rocket. Then, when it suddenly tumbles three digits, you go back to CNBC, and the headline: "Stocks soar on consumer optimism!"  At the closing bell, the DJI manages to claw back to positive, and CNBC says: "Market plunges at close, investors panic!"  It's like that a lot.

After a while, I started to wonder, "don't those headlines seem an awful lot like guessing?"  Yes, yes they do.  After a little over a year of this, I've come to believe that investment analysts are no better than carnival soothsayers.  They never have to be right, and yet they get to keep their jobs. Nice work if you can get it.

Image from RawStory

[Excerpt]

MSNBC’s Ratigan: Stock market an ‘obviously corrupt’ fraud


On his afternoon show Tuesday, MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan explained why he believes the usual explanations given in the media for why the stock market went up or down on a given day are nonsense.


"Seventy percent of the volume [of trades on the stock market] is computers that are run by the banks playing ping pong with stocks for 10 seconds at at time," Ratigan said.


"The stock market at this point, which used to be a reflection of the future value of actual businesses in this country, has been turned by our government and our banks into little more than a paper shredding facility [about which] we can make up reasons why it goes up and down," Ratigan said. "But when the computers ... at the banks are controlling the action, most everything else is kind of silly. . ."

Read more at: Raw Story