I get the point you were making, and to some degree you are correct. What you say is not entirely true though. Bond __investors__ make money as you suggest, but I think the article described this person as a bond __trader__, which is a very different thing. Traders often get a commision for the trade, whether the trade itself makes any money or not, even if they were the one who decided when to buy and sell, and what bonds to trade in. There are a lot of hedge funds that either lose money for their clients, or perform very poorly (many don't even beat the "index" funds which are basically "just buy one of everything"), yet these hedge funds themselves still do very well due to the fees they have hidden away in the fine print of the contracts you sign when you invest with them. This is actually a big part of why so many pension funds are in such bad shape. The underlying investments did alright, but the massive fees sucked out by the managers, traders, brokerage houses, and exchanges, eat up almost the entire profit on the trades leaving very little flowing back to the investor (in this case the pension fund). The funds list their "profits" in their prospectus which show how they make good trades and talk all about how much money you would make investing them, but when you actually dig through all the details, the fees are nearly as big as, or sometimes bigger than, the returns they quote up front. They sucker a lot of people this way, and even some (like pension fund managers) who should know better and either just don't catch the fees or don't care since it isn't their own money they are managing.

-AndrewBuck

Yeah, this is pretty laughable. I don't remember the exact figure but his battery factory (not built yet but planned) is estimated to be something like 25 to 50 percent of the current world output for these batteries; and it is expected that the battery factory will sell almost entirely, if not exclusively to his electric car operation. So this "genius" of a bond investor thinks to himself "gee, if there is such a big market for batteries he should just sell the batteries". Only problem with this line of thinking, if he quits making cars then the battery market dries up. With people like this running our economy it is little surpirse that we fell into an economic collapse, and are probably setting up the next one as we speak. Explain to me again why people like this deserve to be paid millions a year.

-AndrewBuck

You may not like it, but we live in a democracy, and the law is what the people say it is. We didn't know that this was in the law we passed, and now that we do, we are making our voice heard about it, the first step in the path to changing the law.

-AndrewBuck

Early indications are that it will be an Animal Farm sort of net neutrality, with some nets more neutral than others. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler promised recently that his agency “will not allow some companies to force Internet users into a slow lane so that others with special privileges can have superior service.” But the rule seems likely to allow ISPs to cut deals with content companies to ensure that their packets get delivered smoothly — as Netflix reluctantly agreed to with Comcast in February and Verizon last week. Which by definition means they’re in a faster lane than others, doesn’t it?

Keep the pressure up, we can still win this thing.