Jeff, I must have talked to 300 brokers / money managers in the last 30 years. Whatever they are, I don't know, they all wanted me to open an account, most are probably brokers.
Two in the last 3 days.
I have gotten on several lists of people that brokers should call because I need to move an account since the broker that had the account went out of business. At one time I was getting 4 calls a week.
I have only come across 3 brokers that I thought were any good. I found them, not that I was looking for anyone, just met them in the course of events.
I probably get the lower level of scamers, not the most sophisticated. It is like lately they follow some Mad Mag script, they all say the same sort of spiel, just change the names.
In the 80/90sI used to look at all the new lows in stocks, so I have also probably looked a way above average of junk companies.
It is useless to talk to these people that call on the phone. They all claim to have given me some big winner in the past, they expect I won't remember them calling.
On Friday one guy wanted me to send them 100,000, and when I didn't bite he lowered it to 5000, just to give him a try. Like money means nothing to me.
It seems every era has its ponzi, ours is Madoff. He will be the biggest for the next 100 years. Just the nature of things, people don't have money to throw around, everyone is now aware of the potential of a Madoff, and I don't recall hearing of Madoff before this. Perhaps I saw his name in some PR about something, but I see a lot of names that don't mean much to me.
