There was a longish article in the L. A. Times about forex trading and how many people basically lose their shirts. I know it hit the blogosphere and twitter pretty hard and the consensus was the article was pretty spot on.

I guess the thing about the article that I thought was, well, which financial product doesn’t have fraud and problems that are best left to the “experts”?

How about stocks?

You can’t tell me that a chart like this isn’t having stock manipulation going on?

The company that created that chart has many many different oddities on many different types of stocks. Let’s be honest, there’s no way that sort of stock trading is anything other than some sort of manipulation.

How about bonds?

I believe all you need to know about manipulation in bonds is QE2, and no I don’t mean the ship either.

Options? See above for stocks as really, it’s just delayed stock trading.

So, what’s a guy to do then? I think the safest course is to acknowledge there is all sorts of manipulation going on by many different folks for many different reasons. Understand that’s what’s going on and to proceed accordingly.

Always remember and understand caveat emptor and just make sure you’re not the sucker at the card game.