Did Mark Cuban Predict the Market...

It's been a year of vindication for Mark Cuban. The owner of the Dallas Mavericks quieted a lot of the critics who said he was a loudmouth who didn't know how to run a basketball franchise. Now his team is the best in basketball.

But Cuban is also proving somewhat prophetic in a much more unsettling way. In the spring of last year, only three days after the harrowing May 6 "Flash Crash" that temporarily plunged the Dow Jones Industrial Average more than 1,000 points within minutes, he wrote a blog post that seems chilling today. He titled it, "What Business is Wall Street In?" And toward the end, he wrote in bold, "There will be another crash."

Granted, there are a lot of doomsayers out there. But Cuban is not that. He's a successful businessman -- he sold his Internet start-up in 1999 for $5.9 billion in Yahoo! stock -- and he says he's been involved in the stock market for the better part of a decade. But what makes his post stand out even more is that he named a specific reason for the predicted "crash" -- professional traders.

"The only people who know what business Wall Street is in are the traders," Cuban wrote on May 9, 2010. "They know what business Wall Street is in better than everyone else. To traders, whether day traders or high frequency or somewhere in between, Wall Street has nothing to do with creating capital for businesses, its original goal. Wall Street is a platform. It's a platform to be exploited by every technological and intellectual means possible."


http://www.thepostgame.com/blog/daily-take/201108/did-mark-cuban-predict-market-crash

Wall Street does not match investors with money to people who want to use that money to build economically beneficial entities. That used to be their job. Now they invent instruments that generate profits and commissions but divert money to non-investments thereby harming the overall economy.

Because these instruments are leveraged, their harm is multiplied.

If you want to invest for economic growth you have to by-pass Wall Street. The stock market as we know it has nearly outlived it's usefulness.

The swings of the past few days have shown this especially clearly. High Frequency Trading algorithms that use rates of change in prices have injected increased instability. This is trading. Not investing.

Wall Street is a parasite on society. It is the major reason for the decline of the middle class. Of course republican politicians protect them, because they pay well.

I think this is a very good question, has the stock market outlived it's usefulness?

Just no.