A.I.M. Users Bulletin Board

[Conrad]

Jonathan,

I am not all and never was,upset that you called me a mathematician. It was a compliment!. I have been called worse in my life and never got upset about it either.

What upsets me is that a lot of simple and honest people in this world get ripped off by rich vultures in pin-striped suits that use their silver tongue to make little old ladies invest their savings in fraudulent schemes. That makes me boil over with anger.

For a big portion of my life I grew up in Canada. A "sucker" is, as I learned it there, a person that falls for a phoney scheme that is presented by an apparently trustworthy person. In that sense the word in no way implies that suckers are "stupid". As for the word "idiotic" it referred to the essence of the Risk Pyramid. Not to the people who believe that this idiotic construction is to be taken seriously.

With this as background it means that investors that can produce good results consistently, like you, can effectively screen out the risks that they run when they venture to invest. That means that they(and you) skillfully avoid risk so that their investments will perform well.

The fact that you are able to do this proves that you understand that profits result from risk avoidance rather than from risk exposure that is preached by the idiotic Risk Pyramid. I urged you to smell the coffee because you appeared to have been sidetracked into holding an untenable belief.

In so far any reader may have felt as you did, this elucidation could serve to clear the air.

Conrad