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A comment on For the Love of Money. Parent comment

Re:For the Love of Money by ItendToDisagree on Sunday January 19, 2014 @03:17PM (#7085803)
As the above commenter stated. In the classical example (and a perfect world) derivatives can act as a sort of "insurance" or guidebook of risk. But we do not live in a perfect world. Greed is a real thing (and maybe one of the reasons Capitalism works so damn well), so it rarely works exactly that way. In the end it is often just a way to treat the little guy as a sucker while insulating the bigger fish. Or at least that is how history has shown it to play out so far.
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Re:For the Love of Money by WalterBright on Sunday January 19, 2014 @06:00PM (#7086455)
When I was young, I got into a poker game with some local hoods, and they cleaned me out. I knew enough about the odds to know they were cheating, but not enough to know how they were doing it.

I resolved not to play poker again until I understood the game much better.

Ditto for derivatives. If you don't understand the game, you should invest in something else.

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Re:For the Love of Money by judk on Sunday January 19, 2014 @09:59PM (#7087281)
My poker experience is actually closely analogous to the reality of AIG meltdown: when I lost, my buddies collected, but when I won, "we were just playing for fun, not real money".
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