The stock market is no longer free and fair. It’s a rigged market where democratic capitalism has been redefined: Profits are private, losses are public. The excesses and extreme misuse of legislative power will soon bring the 21st-century Pecora moment.
You thought you could trade on the stock markets and make a fortune to retire early and live a luxurious life. No. You can’t win at gambling when your piddly bets are up against large dark money pools masquerading as foreign private banks and large institutional investors, as well as the sitting president of the United States. Your small bets and big dreams rarely succeed in the big ocean, where everything is controlled by very large money players. Uncle Ben told Peter Parker in the Spider-Man movie, “Great power comes with great responsibility.” But Trump is no follower of ethics, as we know.
You can study engineering, analyze businesses, pursue graduate studies in management and banking, and run any small shop, but you can’t make money in the stock market because you can’t fight the sharks.
The US President Donald Trump is the biggest market-moving trader. He conducted more than 3,700 stock trades in the first quarter of 2026, averaging over 60 transactions a day. These trades, each worth millions of dollars, were made with one eye on the ticker and the other on subscribers to his paid service on TruthSocial. News reports say he solicits subscribers to receive “advance” market-moving posts on TruthSocial. Any other person in the country advertising and engaging in such business would be prosecuted. But not Mr. Donald Trump, because he has obtained legal immunity from the DoJ for himself and his family. In such an asymmetrical market, you and ordinary Joe cannot dream of making money from the flickering prices.
The Securities & Exchange Board of India, the country’s markets regulator, found that retail investors lost Rs 91,685 crore in FY 2026 through Futures & Options trading, based on a study of major stock brokers. Over five years starting from FY 2022, their total losses reached Rs 3,84,856 crore, roughly US$ 40 billion. Moreover, in FY 2026, the Indian government collected Rs 27,695 crore in Securities Transaction Tax (STT) from F&O traders. Additional costs included stock exchange fees, brokerage charges, and interest expenses. More than 96% of retail traders end up losing money in the stock markets, clearly benefiting the few who profit in this asymmetrical system. These statistics only cover F&O trading and do not account for losses in the cash segment or the marked-to-market losses in mutual fund SIPs, which many believe are “sahi hai.”
A huge 80%+ of those gains are captured by proprietary trading firms and Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPIs), 99% of whom use algorithmic trading that ordinary traders cannot access. Retail traders need to recalibrate and stop being fodder for the stock market sharks.
Legendary stock trader of the last century, Jesse Livermore, said the stock market “is not a game for the stupid, the mentally lazy, the person of inferior emotional balance, or the get-rich-quick adventurer. They will die poor.” That was a different era. The present stock market is not for ordinary, intelligent, hard-working investors.
In the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash, the Pecora Investigation uncovered abusive practices by banks and their affiliates. As they do today, banks masked the identities of the real beneficial owners of billion-dollar stock market operations through layered entities in tax havens. They also engaged in a variety of conflicts-of-interest business practices to pay off bad bank loans and to run “pool operations.” His exposure of abusive practices in the financial industry galvanized broad public support for stricter regulations, which brought back the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and prohibited banks from trading in securities.
The Bill Clinton administration repealed the prohibitive legislation in 1999, allowing banks to own the highway and run operations as they had never imagined. Enron in 2001 and the sub-prime crisis in 2008 are not mere coincidences.
Ferdinand Pecora, the former New York prosecutor who busted the ‘banksters,’ wrote: “Had there been full disclosure of what was being done in furtherance of these schemes, they could not long have survived the fierce light of publicity and criticism. Legal chicanery and pitch darkness were the banker’s stoutest allies.”
Pecora revealed that National City (now Citibank) had hidden bad loans by packaging them into securities and selling them to unwitting investors. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had decried “the ruthless manipulation of professional gamblers and the corporate system.”
The US president makes one market-moving statement at night and the opposite the next day. His ‘Market-moving Truths’ service, at a subscription fee of $100,000 a month, gives early access to TruthSocial posts, which is totally outlandish and goes far beyond normal limits of unethical conduct, especially by the person wielding the highest administrative power on this planet. Such extremes only herald the beginning of the end of the casino markets and the Empires built on these foundations.
