fracking in new york green light?, page-25

True macropunter but.......if I were to walk into a casino, I can be fairly certain that there are rules in place to protect me from 'dirty tricks' and that the owners will be making damn sure that those trying 'dirty tricks' on them will be prosecuted.
I do not get that feeling in today's sharemarket. It is more like a free for all, where one set of rules is made for retail investors and another set for the brokers and big players.
Not only that, the brokers and big players are still not satisfied with even the double rules - now it seems, they want to go into their 'dark pools', away from the scrutiny of the ASX and ASIC.

Rjaadave, I totally agree with you - but that does not mean to say I like it, anymore than any other retail investor. Call me old fashioned (I am) but I was brought up to believe in the fundamentals of a stock and the (naive) belief in 'free market' economies, where the individual decisions of thousands to millions of investors acting alone, would result in the market 'discovering' the correct price for a stock at any point in time (or something along those lines).

The reality of the early 21st century seems to be that we retail investors are competing against super computer systems and software to match and that at every turn, there is someone (or groups of people) trying to manipulate the market in their favour. All this despite the warnings of the GFC, where apparently, 'smart alecs' straight out of business school were allowed to come up with new ways of investing (thinking: CDOs) and the knowledge and experience of wiser and older heads were ignored (thinking movies and documentaries here i.e. 'Inside Job' and 'Wall Street; money never sleeps').

The scary thing about reading the AFR recently and the articles on and interviews with the heads of the ASX and the ASIC, is that they are beginning to realise that both they, and the people operating these high frequency systems and other 'tricks of the new trading system' appear to have no real idea what is happening. Hence the (again) recent meltdown on Wall Street when the high frequency trading got out of control.
The other worry is that (as rjaadave alludes to) the heads of ASX and ASIC are never talking to any retail investors - but only to the brokers and others living in a different world to us when it comes to investing......and they are asking these people questions like:
"How should we be regulating you?"

Now to me, an analogy to that scenerio would be like the Police going to a major Bikie gang (re: crimes) and asking them the same question :
"How should we be regulating you?"

Commonsense says, in both groups, the answers will start something along the likes of:
"Mate, you have to get off our backs and leave us alone" etc,etc.etc.etc

Anyway, end of my rant for the night. We all know no one will be listening to us.
It's a jungle out there.

All the above is my personal opinion. DYOR.