accurately? Or was my reporting a version of the ancient Buddhist parable about blind men describing an elephant? “An elephant is like a spear,” said the blind man who felt the elephant’s tusk. “An elephant is like a snake,” said the blind man who felt the elephant’s trunk. “An elephant is like a tree,” said the blind man who felt the elephant’s leg. “An elephant is like a wall,” said the blind man who felt the elephant’s hide. “An elephant is like . . . OMG!” said the blind man who felt the elephant’s ____. (A joke I stole from my old friend cartoonist Sam Gross.) Let us take these times and places place-by-place and time-by-time. WALL STREET (NOVEMBER 1997) I visited the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, as in the Keats poem, “Like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He stared at the Pacific . . . Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” Meaning—in terms of portfolio life spans—it was that long ago. Plus Balboa, not Cortez, was the first European to lay eyes on the Pacific, and the NYSE is located in Manhattan not Darien, Connecticut. In other words, I had no idea what I was talking about back then. And I have less now. Any pajama-clad day trader clicking a keyboard in his mom’s basement and still holding onto Studebaker stock in hope of a short squeeze can tell you about the dramatic modifications in the way shares are bought and sold. I cannot. I consulted C. Scott Garliss who spent twenty years trading for top investment banks before becoming the editor of Stansberry NewsWire and Stansberry NewsWire Premium. Scott knows everything about stock markets. He’s like the stock market opposite of Cortez looking for the Pacific from a Connecticut suburb. I asked Scott, “What’s the difference between how trading was done then and how it’s done now?” Scott sent me a long and detailed memo. I interviewed him, taking long and detailed notes. The result was . . . long and detailed. I wished I had asked him, “What’s the same?” Thankfully Scott told me that too. The traders’ motive is as it always was: to make money. And no matter how a share of stock changes hands somebody makes money when it does so. This is true if the market is soaring in the manner of that eagle that Cortez had eyes like. And it’s true if the market is plunging the way Cortez would have if he’d leaned out too far gawking from that peak. The benefit that the economy derives from the traders’ activity is also as it always was: liquidity. The traders don’t mean to benefit the economy, they mean
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