Remarkable woman,and so smart.

April 21, 2015

In 1978 and 1979, Hillary Clinton managed to trade cattle futures so
successfully that she made over 10,000% on her initial investment of
$1000. This is remarkable on a number of levels. First off, she was
new to trading and had no formal trading. She is, if not the most
talented, one of the luckiest traders in the whole world. Let’s take a
look at how Hillary managed to so effortlessly make so much money in
under ten months.
In order to grasp the totality of the situation, let’s get a brief
(and admittedly shallow) understanding of the stock market. With the
stock market, you buy and sell small pieces of a company in an attempt
to make money. People buy stocks when they thing its price will rise,
and sell when they think its price will fall. Shorting is another
aspect to the stock market. When shorting, a trader essentially bets
that the stock is going to lower in price. This allows people to make
money on stocks losing value. To further increase potential monetary
gains, a trader can margin trade. Margin trading essentially equates
borrowing money from a broker to increase the amount of stock you can
purchase. This increases the risk however, because the ticking time
bomb of debt is now involved. As volatile and unpredictable as the
stock market is, the futures market is even wilder. In the futures
market, traders have less flexibility when to buy and sell.
When first starting out trading, people are often advised to trade on
paper without risking real money. This is to minimize any the
inevitable losses of a beginner trying to trade. The futures market is
an extremely fickle and dangerous beast, and very few experienced
people are able to make consistent monetary gains. So when the First
Lady of Arkansas, with many political connections, makes a boatload of
money, eyebrows tend to get raised. I’m sure that all her connections
didn’t have any factor in her success.
Just for kicks, let’s take a look at Hillary’s trading advisors at
that time. One of them was James Blair, a lawyer. Coincidentally, he
also provided outside council to Tyson Foods. Tyson Foods is a pretty
big company. I wonder what they sell. Oh look, chicken wings and
French fries. Nothing much to see here. Oh wait, they sell beef too?
Wow, what a coincidence that Hillary was trading cattle futures with
people who had connections to a cattle company! Who did James Blair
trade through? A guy named Robert Bone. Well, it turns out that Bone
was a Refco (more on that later) broker. He was also a former Tyson
executive. Another funny connection to potential insider information
in the very industry that Hillary was trading in.
So we know about Robert Bone and how he worked for Refco. Let’s learn
a bit about Refco to see what type of trading company it was. After
all, in an industry plagued by insider trading and fraud, it’s
important to see whose services Mrs. Clinton utilized. Refco, a fairly
typical trading firm seems to not be operating any more. It seems that
in late 2005, it was discovered that the CEO, Phillip R. Bennett, had
hidden over $400 million dollars in bad debt. Upon further
investigation, it turned out that Bennet had been funneling money
through an entity that was controlled by himself.
Sure, there’s been a few bad actors in Refco in the recent past.
Hasn’t every company had a scandal or two involving millions of
dollars? Let’s look back and see if there are any other problems that
pop up. It turns out that in 2001, Refco was ordered to pay over $40
million after one of its brokers cleared trades with fake order
tickets. Also, in early 2005, the company was implicated in a scam
known as naked short selling of a company’s stock. I guess Refco isn’t
exactly a squeaky clean company after all. Now that we’ve established
the trustworthiness of the brokerage firm that Hillary used, let’s get
back to the meat of the story. Just how amazing was the future first
lady’s trading?
The majority of people who try trading (stock or futures market) win
some but end up losing a lot more. Traders often either end up broke
or quit after realizing the futility of trying to time the market. New
traders are by far the majority of the financial losers, as they are
not used to the irrationality of the market. Hillary, against the
odds, managed to pull off an 80% profitable trade rate. She wasn’t a
grizzled veteran either. Hillary was either extremely lucky, skilled,
or had insider info. As we all know, the Clintons have a squeaky clean
track record so the third option is definitely not possible.
I’m sure Hillary is just a very talented and empowered womyn. After
all, the fact that the brokerage firm she used has been involved in
multiple scandals shouldn’t cause us to do a double take. The fact
that her trading advisors most likely had insider connections to the
market she was trading in shouldn’t raise concerns. Just because
economists at the Universities of North Florida and Auburn state that
the odds of Hillary’s trading success were at best 1 in 31 trillion,
we shouldn’t mistrust Hillary. Just for a better picture of the
previous statistic, an individual being struck by lightning is 41
MILLION times more likely to happen than Hillary pulling off the feat
that she did. I’m sure this is the case of an extremely skilled woman.
With an honest woman this gifted with handling money, it would be a
crime not to put her in charge of our economy. I’m not a sexist pig.
I’m voting to put this exceptional woman in control of the most
powerful country on earth.