stock markets (29)

I once got a job (somewhere that will remain nameless) to take into account the extra staff they will be needing in a couple of months when "another place was closing down".... The interesting thing is that in the local paper was an "official" article asking people to come forward for a "consultation on whether the mentioned place should close down or not" and telling people their opinion would be taken into account and would make a difference....

Yes and who are they The banks ; the govenments; the power players--- lets list them --- I'll start with the new "Kid" on the block rehashing an old 'product" - religion ie :-

POWER PLAYERS
Osama bin Laden
--- guilty of using religion as a vehicle for the control of the masses
-- (I wonder if he bought gold/oil before 9/11) have to fund the soldiers somehow

Sorry, I don't buy this opinion....beware the urban legend, as well as the hidden truth. Where's the evidence? If goverments, banks and individuals controlled stock markets, we wouldn't have the catastrophic crashes that we've had, because everyone loses out. Consider 1929, where in two days the Dow Jones lost 23%...Stock markets have been the subject of such intense research by all sorts of institutions from Universities to research departments of banks worldwide, including daily, a gazillion fund managers. If there was credible evidence that the stock market was being controlled in a fundemantal way by individuals, why would this enormous amount of research go on?
Consider the following paragraph:

Mathematical theory of stock market crashes

The mathematical characterisation of stock market movements has been a subject of intense interest. The conventional assumption that stock markets behave according to a random Gaussian or normal distribution is incorrect. Large movements in prices (i.e. crashes) are much more common than would be predicted in a normal distribution. Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows that there is evidence that the frequency of stock market crashes follow an inverse cubic power law.. This and other studies suggest that stock market crashes are a sign of self-organized criticality in financial markets. In 1963, Benoît Mandelbrot proposed that instead of following a strict random walk, stock price variations executed a Lévy flight. A Lévy flight is a random walk which is occasionally disrupted by large movements. In 1995, Rosario Mantegna and Gene Stanley analyzed a million records of the S&P 500 market index, calculating the returns over a five year period. Their conclusion was that stock market returns are more volatile than a Gaussian distribution but less volatile than a Lévy flight.
Researchers continue to study this theory, particularly using computer simulation of crowd behaviour, and the applicability of models to reproduce crash-like phenomena.

So what are you suggestimg?...a replay of the Proletariat Uprising?..maybe Karl Marx will become a bestseller again...

It's not so strange, when each self appointed leader no matter how altruistic they may have been, thought their views are the only ones' that are good for the masses. What they don't seem to take on board is that without a commitment to upholding the needs of the people that put them in this position as stated by the people they easily move to position of dictator.
I'm not sure if Humankind even has the tools or has yet evolved sufficiently to see beyond self alone.

Even our so called Democratic governments are made up of disproportionate numbers from parties that use their numbers to drive laws in their favour. If all upper houses of parliaments were equal in numbers from the elected parties then true debate may have a chance and not swayed in the direction of the powerful alone.

how is this for maths investor sells 1million shares at 10gbp's then the share price drops because of his sale by 1 gbp per share so he buys back 1million shares at 9gbp result 1million profit less comms in less than 1day nice work if you have the money and balls to take the risks no

Ok...let's do the math. he sold for 10 a share. Then bought back at 9 a share, and sits on 1 mill profit. 1 mill profit, and 9 mill inshares = exactly what he had before.....not much for a whole day's work...:-)

I think they would use options or futures contracts-- more leverage for less money

but he has the 1million shares he started with +1ml gbp in bank and because he bought the price will rise maybe even higher than before

Well exactly.....he is banking on that the price will rise in the future....but so is every other investor. But at the end of his working day, he still has in total asset value not more than he started with. He has just realized some of his investment.