SA is Suadi Arabia
ZA is South Africa

UHG!

Good point; a stock like AAPL sort of behaves like a commodity in that regard. So the question is still about how long you will hold it and if you think the company will outperform the market + inflation. You also have the chance of beneficial corporate actions that may help your position. So do you think AAPL will beat physical gold? Oil? Basically its the difference of holding cash or . The something else being effected by the market.

Maybe right now in this global downturn AAPL stands to retain its value better than cash [think quantitative easing], and better than many of its peers - selling loads of iphones etc. So open a position and ride the trend. Nothing wrong with going with the flow when thats the thing that is happening.

People who jump into a long equity postion which pays no dividends are usually there because it looks like a good company in the "right" sector so you can expect to hold it and then dump it later.

If you are holding short term, then no, there is nothing else but betting on the bigger fool.

If you are holding long term, then you can make money on dividends and on the increase in value of a stock because a good company should appreciate in value faster than the average value of the market [e.g. S&P500 index] + inflation. Many of those companies [and a few exchange traded funds] which have this behavior also pay dividends. So looking at funds in a pension which ideally you want to try not to touch, investing long in dividend bearing vehicles can be a good strategy.

Note that the Long strategy is on the order of years where what these guys are doing is more like minutes and hours.

I agree with other posts here that point out these guys didn't do anything that any other trader isn't constantly doing; the one difference might possibly be if it can be proved these guys had insider knowledge of how this particular algo was behaving to take advantage of it, like if they had worked for Timber Hill at one point.

Wouldn't one or more of the Lagrange points be a good idea [I'm thinking L1]? mabye not the most interesting place, but as a platform for hopping further out it would be hard to beat. Not to mention that those are going to go to the first government to manage to sit a station on them.

no joke - if EVE is any example then asteroid mining is gonna be way important, if for no other reason than to give pirates something to lock.

surely the worst part of any of this is the prospect of only 'certified' software applications able to do I/O on one of these hardware based encryption discs - think region encoded DVDs. i bet RIAA and the rest of the IP hounds cant wait for this one to go mainstream.