“There are plenty such victims available. “Farmers and schoolteachers and plumbers are taking responsibility for their own investments,” says John Yost, whose San Francisco firm, Black Rocket, created the famous TV commercial for Discover Brokerage about the tow truck driver who bought his own private island from his stock-trading profits. “If you really care about your health, you have to be more involved in learning about medical care,” says Yost. “If you really care about your financial health, you have to be more involved in investing your own money.”

Harvey Houtkin, the CEO of All-Tech Direct, a pioneering daytrading firm, has long argued that the more people there are who actively trade for themselves, the more liquidity and competition the market has. He believes that the new, high-volume daytrading scene is producing so much volume that the traditional exchanges will soon be obsolete. “Why do you think the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq want to go public?” asks Houtkin. “To bail out on the public. You’ll be able to enter orders through an electronic mechanism, so what does the New York Stock Exchange do? ‘Hmm, well, there’s a lot of suckers out there; we’ll go public.'”

But while advocates of the Internet stock market see the growth of amateur electronic trading as a popular triumph, a stream of greedy and ill-informed newcomers shoring up the bottom layer of the pyramid is also helpful. Anthony laughs with scornful delight at the notion of a fair and massively popular stock market. He views the competition among brokerage firms, market makers, and the new electronic trading system merely as a staged showbiz feud, and he pictures the Nasdaq market as an evil partnership: The online brokerages lure new herds of sheep into the game and collect the admission fees while the market makers do the shearing. “Right now,” Anthony says, “people just get wild hairs up their ass, and all of a sudden a whole sector will move and there is no rhyme or reason to it. Take online banking. Net banks are at 20 or 30 bucks and then they shoot up to 200 because everybody is talking about how people will do more banking online, and over a four-month period they drop back down to 20 bucks. The more volatile the market, the more risk associated with it, and undoubtedly the more losers. You have the public versus the professional, and the public is going to lose in the end.”

Joey Anuff and Gary Wolf, Adventures of a Day Trader (excerpted in Wired magazine, 2000)   citing convicted fraudster-turned-FBI informant, Anthony Elgindy, on the rigged market.