Options for the Average Joe

Have you read Nathaniel Popper's piece in the Times about brokerage houses making options trading easier for people like me?  The average joe?  Click here.

A significant subset of everything you need to know about what is wrong with the world is enclosed therein, but the gist of the thing is that brokerages like E*Trade and Schwab and Ameritrade are opening new avenues to play the options game.  And their customers are, predictably, getting crushed.

The ironies abound, but the closing couple of paragraphs take the cake.  In them, a former Ameritrade executive bemoaned the fact that the company was having to engage in expensive marketing campaigns to generate new clients.  Why?  Because the existing Ameritrade clients who started trading options were losing all their money and closing their accounts.

A current Ameritrade executive denies that this is true.

I'd type more, but I'm massively short on Beam Inc (only because I drink Jack Daniels and I figure there must be more people like me out there) and I'm getting nervous.  I'll leave you with this ...

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