[competentone]

Things kind-of changed when the Fed stepped in to bail out Bear Stearns in March.

One needs to reevaluate one's entire investment strategy when such blatant "unevenness" is shown to exist in the markets.

We "ordinary citizens" have to suffer with our losses if we are wrong with our investment decisions, but those with enough "political pull" get bailed out by the government (at the taxpayer's expense) when they are wrong in their positions.

Why trade in the markets if the guys you are trading against get to push the taxpayer at gunpoint to the trading floor to bail out their losing positions?

I was leveraged heavy on the short side in February and March waiting for "the house of cards" to collapse -- just as it would have with news of a major bankruptcy in the financial sector (like Bear Stearns).

Instead of being rewarded for my (literally years of) work studying the economy/markets -- and rewarded for the risks I took positioning myself for a collapse -- I'm penalized with losses while the idiot traders who have never so much as looked at a company's SEC filings, are "bailed out" as the Federal Reserve steps in and pumps billions of dollars of taxpayers' money into the system to prop up companies which are literally bankrupt.

One trades in the markets with certain expectations that both sides will have to follow the same rules. When one side uses the barrel of a gun (that gun being aimed at the taxpayers) to support their losing positions, it is not a fair market.