Jonathan Swift's least-favourite profession
The only thing worse than stock-talk is lawyer-talk.
The 27+-year saga of 𝑀𝑎𝑠𝑠. 𝐵𝑎𝑟 𝑚𝑒𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟𝑠 vs. my family continues. (Note the use here of Unicode “math italic” characters in order to emphasize the evil kitten-eating reptilian overlords from outer space aspect of the attorneys of Massachusetts.)
In was back in 1996 that we found out that my aunt A₁’s inheritance from her aunt A₂ had been stolen by a lawyer. For 20 years after that she could never escape from him. Try as she might, hiring attorney after attorney to go fight with him, in the end he would always win because that’s just how the judicial process works. It seemed to me that her lawyers weren’t really working for her so much as for the Mass. Bar, trying to maximize the billable hours collected by all its members while never quite obtaining her freedom for her. A Mass. Bar member may charge a trust for his billable hours in defending himself against claims that he is mischarging that trust! For a normal person, donor-trust money can only be spent on charity - but a lawyer can spend it on their own ‘work’.
The wrongful-death lawsuit continues. The plaintiff attorney (who assures me that he is 𝓷𝓸𝓽 𝓶𝔂 𝓵𝓪𝔀𝔂𝓮𝓻 even though my sister and I are the named beneficiaries of his work) was happy to receive my compendium of emails between A₁ and Wifey, which he seems to think do actually prove (like I’ve been saying for 5½ years) that Wifey was A₁’s favourite relative and should have been appointed as her Personal Representative and should be the one to decide how her condo money gets split up, assuming that the ‘charity’ whose lawyers grabbed that money can ever be convinced to let go of it.
Ho hum. Playing the stock market is so much easier than dealing with lawyers. I won again! Another +1.5%. Took only three weeks, unlike this endless lawyer-saga. Although the lawyers would surely say that the saga would go faster if I would just hire one of their members - but A₁’s experience suggests otherwise.
On Apr 25 I said, regarding the price of IWM, that “This week I expect that we’ll be continuing downward…” But actually prices have stayed about the same ever since. My lovely trading algorithm, with its two arbitrary lines-in-the-sand drawn in blue, has sucked profit out of these directionless fluctuations in the stock market! If only there was any way to extract money from lawyers, such as the one who set up A₁’s perverse estate plan, which really didn’t combine well with the wrongfulness of her death. Um, if your client orders you to “break every law you can get away with,” could this perhaps be a sign that your client is daft? It’s illegal to notarize documents for crazy people, but laws don’t apply to lawyers.
On this chart there are four occasions (shown in orange) where price got within 0.1% of my LIMIT without triggering a trade. I used to attend a furry bowl-meet where the people would exclaim, “we was robbed!” whenever a bowling ball decided to ignore the laws of physics and go snaking between the pins without hitting anything - or maybe that was just the cartoon animation on the TV screen. But “ignoring the law” is certainly an observed behaviour among lawyers, such as the law against uttering death threats in a courtroom full of witnesses. And false documents cannot be interpreted as ‘jokes’ after being notarized, especially documents purporting to divert the proceeds from a real-estate sale, about which Massachusetts has a specific law on its books saying that lawyers in particular may not do that. But it seems the lawyer who did that is the one signing the budget-increases for this lawsuit, so I shouldn’t hate on her too much.