When Will the Retail Investor Call It Quits? (Again)
Even after a fairly long vacation, I’m still cleaning up after my Aug. 2 column that looked at how the trading snafu involving Knight Capital had affected the psychology of investors.
Judging not only from the comments but from my inbox, half the readers seemed to love it, while half hated it.
“I am ashamed and saddened at what Wall Street has done, and continues to do, to this beautiful country,” emailed one. “They can’t keep stealing, as eventually they will have to steal from each other, as no one else will be [left in the market].”
The critics had strong feelings, too.
“Your silly article,” one investment adviser said in an email, “prompts me to think that you are probably on vacation and that your summer intern was recruited to fill in the space.” (Not so: I wrote it all by myself, for better or worse.)
The column, added the adviser, was “baloney” and “you should be ashamed of regurgitating such malarkey.”
In a letter to the editor asking that I be fired, another reader wrote: “How in the world can [Zweig] possibly think that this event – played out in seconds – could really impact the ‘small investor’ in any meaningful way?...MOREI guess the headline would be more accurate if it said "You Decide" (if you are a WSJ editor or a Dow Jones muckety-muck with a hatred of the scribes)
