Dear Friends,
It seems to me, the little guy is on the hook for everything, yet we are not even allowed to eat the bait. We work our entire lives to save a few dollars, and while we do, that money is stolen from us in a myriad of ways by a plethora of entities… then we are chastised if we complain, as greedy. By the biggest hogs on the planet. Many large investment firms, at this time, don’t allow customers to make their shares “unloanable.” If questioned, they blow smoke up our derrieres claiming it drives weak companies out of business. As if that is any benefit to the share holders of those companies, the customers or the employees. The only ones that benefit are the billionaire hedge funds. Parasites by every definition. I urge every reader to call their brokerage and verify if your stocks are loanable.
Hedge funds get to “borrow” your property, ie, your stocks in various firms, drive down the value by trash talking them, creating negative pressure simply by the volume of the short sale and the sales themselves drive down demand for them. All of which diminishes the value of your property. Imagine if you went to some billionaire hedge fund owner, took his Bentley and pounded it through a deep woods trail, utterly ruining the undercarriage, denting every fender and ripping off the rear bumper… then returned it where you found it? Do you suppose the police would be as cool with that, as the SEC is, with that same billionaire utterly ruining your retirement? That little inconvenience to the rich man would generate a violent legal backlash while ruining a little guy is legal and “just.”
Brokerages make money from screwing their customers, when they lend our stocks to hedge funds, front running our trades and selling our personal information. They make money on the front end, when you buy, they make money on the back end, when you sell, and they make money by fees, selling our trading info, charges… and loaning out your “Bentley” to rich people to hammer through the woods. Then we wonder why our stocks are always beat up while theirs hum like a swarm of bees. I have no problem with someone making an honest buck from me, if they provide a service, I do have a serious problem with theft, fraud and market manipulation, all of which those who are supposed to serve us… do to us. Nevertheless, screwing the customer, retiree and little guy… very progressive.
I recently discovered that we can make our stocks unloanable, in some circumstances. Some types of accounts, (cash accounts) are unloanable. There is also a way to get them to pay you for loaning out your shares. You get the brokerage to loan out the shares in your name and thus get the interest for it… instead of the brokerage. If you can pull that one off, you can “call back” your shares of heavily shorted stocks, driving up the price of your property. Good luck though. The whole thing is a game, where heads they win, tails we lose, making us tax donkeys, marks and investment fodder. Hedge funds bestow zero added value to our economy, brokerages are parasites and government regulators are their enablers. Since that is the case, we should engage in their shenanigans… until they are illegal.
They are stealing our hard earned money. While the boots on the ground investment banker is held to the highest standard, (and many of them are still so crooked they will have to be screwed into the ground when they die) the large brokerages, too big to fail banks and hedge funds, are held to no standard whatsoever. If caught in illegal activities, and they often are, their whipping boys the investors are fined, and the game goes on. No executive goes to jail for breaking the law, the guy who drove a bus for forty years going without meat on his sandwich most days to save that money… is fined instead. That is what passes as justice today. Now they are printing our savings into oblivion. It just goes to show, there is no filling up a hog, they are a black hole that warps even the Pareto distribution.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
