The people here seem to be presenting extreme positions. On the one side, you can't beat the market unless you're a hedge fund or big player with special knowledge and equipment, so buy index funds or you're a naughty gambler. On the other side, we degenerate into self-creating automated trading software.

There's absolutely a middle ground here, folks. One can have a portfolio of conservative picks (index funds), self-selected individual picks, cash, bonds, so on and so forth.

This should hopefully be picked up by n-gate to make a mockery of us.

Joking aside, I'm curious what some of you who are actually paid to write front office software by Wall St. think of all of these threads.