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Sir,
These guys do you an enormous favour! They supply pigs.
They feed you. You should send them a letter of a deep
appreciation!
(Nothing personal. Do not want to disappoint anyone.)
The truth is out there...
> -----Original Message-----
> From: hans esser [mailto:he96@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: February 27, 1998 11:05 AM
> To: omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Jake "the Snake" Bernstein and K. Roberts
>
>
> as seen on the FORBES webpage - FYI, rgds hans
>
> c 1998 Forbes Inc. Terms, Conditions and Notices
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> Commodity shark
>
> By William Green
>
> JAKE BERNSTEIN is not alone. Another prominent purveyor of hype is Ken
> Roberts, a college dropout and former life insurance salesman. Roberts
> convinces neophytes that they can become successful traders with a
> grubstake of only $1,000.
>
> In 1983 he self-published The World's Most Powerful Money Manual &
> Course, a mail-order book that intersperses tips on futures with
> platitudes about getting "everything you want (mentally, physically,
> and spiritually)." He claims to have sold more than 300,000 copies. At
> $195 each, that adds up to nearly $60 million.
>
> Roberts, who touts futures trading as "the world's one perfect
> business," charges $2,695 for his advanced trading seminar. He hawks
> trading charts, a course on options, a newsletter and his novel, The
> Rich Man's Secret.
>
> He also owns a piece of a California brokerage firm, Main Street
> Trading. It charges commissions so highù$95 a tradeùthey virtually
> assure that most small active traders will lose money.
>
> The hype has paid off for Roberts. It has brought him tens of millions
> of dollars and an Oregon mansion with a cigar room. But where are the
> customers' mansions? ûW.G.
>
> <Picture> By William Green
> <Picture> Management, Strategies, Trends
> <Picture> From March 09, 1998 Issue
>
> c 1998 Forbes Inc. Terms, Conditions and Notices
>
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
>
> There's one born every minute
>
> By William Green
>
> "I'M TEACHING YOU SOMETHING that I know works," says Jake Bernstein.
> "It's real simple." Bernstein, 51, is in a Washington, D.C. hotel
> meeting room mesmerizing an audience of aspiring futures traders.
>
> Want to make a killing trading futures? All you need to know, says
> Bernstein, is that many seasonal price patterns occur year after year.
> Buy live hog futures on Oct. 30 and sell on Nov. 27. That's a trade
> that would have made you money almost every year in recent decades, he
> claims. Bet on the S&P 500 March contract to rise from Jan. 12 through
> Jan. 18. For 15 years, he says, this trade was a winner 93% of the
> time.
>
> Does anyone believe his nonsense? Unfortunately, yes. Intoxicated by
> the promise of easy money, audience members line up to buy Bernstein's
> products, among them his books, with titles like The Seasonal Trader's
> Bible and The Best of Bernstein: A Treasure Chest of Jake Bernstein's
> Market Wisdom.
>
> His monthly newsletter costs $400 annually; his weekly newsletter
> costs $895 a year. He sells three other newsletters, plus video
> courses and a CD-ROM ($695) that lists 60,000 seasonal trades. He
> offers telephone hot lines and charges up to $2,500 per person for his
> two-day seminars.
>
> Yes, you can fool some of the people all of the time. Commodity
> Traders Consumer Report, a respected futures publication, tracks the
> trades Bernstein recommends in his $895 flagship newsletter. If you
> had acted on these weekly tips from 1988 through 1992, you would have
> lost money for five consecutive years (assuming typical transaction
> costs).
>
> Let's say you set up a $20,000 trading account in 1992 and executed
> the newsletter's recommended trades for that year. Your account would
> have been wiped out. In 1996 you would have lost 95% of a $20,000
> account. Bernstein's response: "There are always losing periods."
>
> He professes to be an expert on the psychology of trading. His
> qualifications? In registering with the Commodity Futures Trading
> Commission, the Montreal-raised Bernstein wrote that he held a
> master's degree in psychology from Chicago's Roosevelt University. In
> fact, he never completed his master's studies.
>
> In the 1980s Bernstein hooked up with an outfit called Robbins Trading
> and helped to manage futures accounts for investors. James Roemer, who
> comanaged money with Bernstein, says: "Jake is brilliant, but he can't
> manage money to save his life. . . . He'd get scared, buy at highs and
> sell at lows. . . . He kept losing money."
>
> Bernstein found an easier way to get rich. Instead of just trading
> futures he would trade on investor gullibility. In 1996 he starred in
> an infomercial that has aired on nearly 400 TV stations. It hypes a
> video course ($180) called Trade Your Way to Riches. In it a farmer
> named Harold Henkel tells viewers how well Bernstein's approach has
> worked for him. Henkel, however, now admits that he lost money trading
> in 1996 and 1997 while using Bernstein's products.
>
> On his Web site Bernstein offers to set up customers with his
> "personal" brokers at Fox Investments, a division of the Chicago
> brokerage firm Rosenthal Collins Group.
>
> Suppose you take Bernstein's recommendation and set up an account at
> Fox with $5,000-the minimum that Bernstein says you need to become a
> trader. Your commissions would be $60 to $80 per trade, about three
> times more than savvy retail customers pay. Bernstein's weekly
> newsletter offered 195 recommended trades last year. At that rate, a
> small trader's commissions alone might amount to more than double his
> or her original investment. Needless to say, Bernstein receives a
> slice of the brokerage's commissions. A Fox broker appeared in
> Bernstein's infomercial, touting his seasonal trading approach.
>
> Says Bernstein: "There's no arguing with history." Say we: Where are
> the regulators when you need them?
>
> <Picture> By William Green
> <Picture> Management, Strategies, Trends
> <Picture> From March 9, 1998 Issue
>
> c 1998 Forbes Inc. Terms, Conditions and Notices
>
> ~~~~~
> Did YOU eat your BEEF today ?
>
>
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