Sunday Sentiment....Access To Markets Not Democratization

And why shouldn’t you have losers in the stock market?

There’s no divine right to profit, and besides, it’s the losses that you remember.

The pain of money lost provides motivation. The motivation to educate yourself on how the stock market and risk/reward works.

And thanks to technology, there is an infinite amount of free, high-quality information you can access on these subjects simply by using Google.

Despite the media’s focus on the most extreme examples and outlier cases, the vast majority of investors who participated in the GameStop saga may have fallen in the mud or bumped their heads on a plastic playhouse, but they didn’t get kicked in the head with an iron boot.

The ones who own up to being unprepared, and accept responsibility for their actions instead of looking for financial Boogeyman in the form of short-sellers, hedge funds, or brokers to blame their losses on, will learn from this experience and be better for it the next time they make a trade.

As a retail investor, you have many advantages over the professionals. Pros are judged on nonsensical bullshit like 30 day returns versus a benchmark, quarterly performance, upside and downside capture, rankings versus their peers, over- and underweights relative to the index and all kinds of other stuff that you don’t have to even think about. Nobody is asking you. Unless you post it, your holdings and performance aren’t under anyone else’s magnifying glass. Thank god for that. It’s an unwinnable game played by consultants, CIOs, marketers and a whole assortment of experts and ass****s. I know these people and outside of work they’re wonderful. In their roles, they are absolute goblins. Stay out of the Misty Mountains.

In contrast, all you have to worry about is your own financial situation, not what someone else thinks about it.

Of all the advantages retail investors can claim, firepower isn’t one of them. I’ve heard about the whole “banding together” thing. It sounds better in an online forum than it works in real life. People bail. They don’t know you or care about you. The incentives aren’t there. It’s Spanish Prisoner stuff straight out of Mamet – who’s going to break in the interrogation first? Who’s going to panic before you do?