yes they are

I don’t know Beagles, you don’t think they are all crooks? Maybe you have lived too long in the noble north where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and so on, and have lost the old Bohunk fish eye.

When some stranger knocked on the door my mother would open it just a crack and give the guy the full fish eye and say, “You’re trying to sell me something aren’t you.” the implication being that whatever he was trying to sell her was a piece of junk, and ultimately he was out to cheat her. Of course he’d protest that nothing could be further from the truth and his sole purpose was to, to, oh inform her on the latest advancement in science (this was way back when an advancement in science didn’t necessarily have to do with a new app for your super duper phone).

And she knew better, but she would let the guy in anyway, just to confirm what she already knew, that the guy was there to cheat her, and when he finally revealed himself, he had better grab his hat on the way out because she was not going to bother opening it again and throwing it out after him.

She has taught me a lesson I have taken through life: always assume the other guy is out to cheat you, and it has served me well.

Actually my brother in law had a commodities account at one time, for the sake of the family I put a bit of my money into it. I got monthly reports, it went up, it went down. One day somebody fucked up on the decimal point on the report and I had made ten million dollars. Well I was a millionaire for a bit, so I guess that made it all worth it.

But maybe in the commodities market where everybody is dedicated to um, helping out the farmer and the urban wife baking her bread, oh and making an honest living by buying and selling stuff that they have only the slightest idea of what it is but that doesn’t matter because they will never see it anyway, why surely honesty is the order of the day.

That ten percent, my lad, is called a margin. It’s the way people used to buy stocks before 1929. What it means is that whenever the price drops too low to cover that other ninety percent, your money is gone justlikethat, like the morning dew, like the glory that was Rome.

Normally your mention of those angels who drop in every now and then to set things straight just because sent me to the wiki which informed me what it was all about which was:

In economics and finance, arbitrage (/ˈɑrbɨtrɑːʒ/) is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices. When used by academics, an arbitrage is a transaction that involves no negative cash flow at any probabilistic or temporal state and a positive cash flow in at least one state; in simple terms, it is the possibility of a risk-free profit after transaction costs. For instance, an arbitrage is present when there is the opportunity to instantaneously buy low and sell high.

Or to put it in Bohunk, “A bunch of crooks.”

The reason that a big scandal is generated whenever one of them is caught with his hand in the cookie jar is that they are pros and they can generally slip their fingers in and out and nobody the wiser. The scandal is that someone did it so badly as to get caught.