The latest issue of Choice has an article about investment seminar programs, with the note that if the programs really worked that well, why would the companies waste time giving seminars? The overall implication of that rhetorical question is that they're basically snake-oil merchants, selling at a high premium basic information that can be had from a $40 book plus investment programs that don't really work.
However, hypothetically, there's a darker option.
The author of the computer software sold via these seminars knows that there's a reasonable number of people using it to invest their money and has a rough estimate of how many. A sufficiently unscrupulous operator could use that; essentially, they'd be deciding both sides of the trade. Done subtly enough, it would be nearly undetectable, certainly not by those who have already proven their suitability as "marks" by buying this kind of software at this kind of seminar.
With proprietary software, nobody else knows what's in the program — it could be anything. With an on-line subscription service that some of them seem to include, it would be much more flexible; but even without that it would be bad enough. For instance, on-line software can be individually fine-tuned based on customer feedback, rather than relying solely on the hard-coded "keep them coming back" balance of gains and losses, but a hard-coded balance works well enough for things like pokies — it'd work well enough here, too.
Like I said, a hypothetical.
⇦ Space colonization, GPS and mobiles | ⇨ Better than cordial |
