Very well put together, Thomas ... concise and cogent, even if you named the wrong Patriarch.
My take is that trading of any sort is at core a speculative excersize ... one weighs current possession of trade item or capital against perceived future benefit to be gained by exchanging one for the other. If folks didn't figure advantage was to be had by taking action, not much action would be taken.
and my apologies for calling you "thock"
Okay, Someone tell me if I am wrong, but wasn't wild speculation in the market one of the major causes of the crash of '39? No rule about margin back then.
It was '29, and yes, unregulated speculation, particularly in conjunction with lax-to-non-existant liquidity requirements for margin accounts were the proximate cause of general economic collapse. Folks were betting not only with money they didn't have, but with money that didn't exist. That's a lot tougher to do today ... though in commodities futures trading, you can come pretty close to doing it, provided you can keep folks from calling you out before you get too deep. The Hunt brothers, a couple of billionaires, tried to corner the precious metals market back in the 'seventies. The sudden release of physical stocks of silver, primarily by Eastman Kodak, and of gold, primarily by The Federal Reserve, capped, then reversed the market runup, leaving the Hunts holding hundreds of millions in worthless contracts, as opposed to controlling the precious metals market, within a period of just a few days.
Another "oops" timber. Confused the year with my age.
