big time traders

When I looked it up in wiki shibboleth was something people could use to see if you belonged to their in group. Maybe it would be something like you’d meet a guy on a train who claimed to be from Chicago, but you would be suspicious so you’d talk about how it never gets too cold at Wrigley Field and if he agreed you would know he wasn’t from Chicago. In wartime it was used by soldiers to detect infiltrators, for instance they’d ask who won the world series last year. That didn’t fit what I was thinking about at all.

But then I looked outside wiki and I found that it could be the mores of a group that would tend to be outdated and a little arcane and that is what I meant.

But petard is spelled petard, and what it was was this little bomb about the size of a quart of milk and you would run up to the enemies gates and set it off (it had an often unreliable fuse) and run like hell, but because of that unreliable fuse it might go off before you got out of your range and you would be hoisted into the air. Not quite the way we think of the word hoisted now, and probably why you and I thought it must be a spear-like thing from which the victim dangled. Another interesting fact I found out on wiki was that petard means fart in French.

Well see, even with your dashing way with words I was scarce able to keep my eyes open during your explanation of options. I’ve heard all this before, after all it all originated right down LaSalle Street a few blocks from where I lived. Did you know that way back when after a farmer harvested his crops he couldn’t just sell it to some fancy pants guy? He had to haul it around from city to city across those muddy roads they had way back then until he found somebody who would pay him something the farmer thought acceptable.

So commodities is a definite step up from that, and despite what I said earlier, I don’t think that it actually lines the pockets of the traders. Well it lines the pockets of certain traders, but others lose their pants. I believe at the end of the day if you add up all the winners and losers it all comes out to a big fat zero, a zero sum game.

So why do they do it? Well why do people play roulette, or much worse video poker? But it’s more like real poker where you can actually win money, whereas video poker the longer you play the surer you are to lose. With poker you can make money off the other guys who don’t play as well as you do, also you can cheat. I think this is what goes on in commodities trading. These guys know the ways of the market, and every now and then the big guys get together and pull off some scam on the poor suckers.

The funny thing is that over the longer run you can use things like knowledge of what the weather is going to be like or if cheerios is going to use some wheat in their mixture and you can have a handle on the way wheat is likely to go. But the shorter the run less predictable the price is, like over the long run you can bet on temps getting higher, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a bad winter every now and then, and even in that bad winter you might get a warm day now and then.

Well there is this whole thing about randomness, is their a pattern to it, mathematics says sort of in certain cases, but not really. Well this is not purely random, there are factors like those long term things and probably if the commodity went up the day before it is more likely to go down the next day, and probably daily weather has some effect, and the fate of the local sports team, and even if these guys can get a .0001 edge they will make a fortune so they conjure these elaborate computer programs, but then so do their opponents. And surely, well we know they do because some to do end up in the slammer, they get together in the club and set down their cigars and hatch out some plan. I think Beagles should be glad that in the old days you had to do loathsome things like wear a suit and live in a big city to get into the game so he never got into it otherwise greater Beaglesonia might be the size of one of those Yukon deeds you used to get from

Quaker Oats.