Beware the Jargoneer

Beware the Jargoneer.
O, Purveyor of Pseudo-Intellectual Market Insights, how you keep us enthralled!

He’ll frequently be wearing a beard, the uniform of the pretending and the pretentious.
You’ll find him often on the television screen, displaying a preternatural confidence in the circumloquatious bullshit he’s brought to class for Show and Tell today.

When asked for an investment idea, the Jargoneer will quickly mention a trade that no one else can replicate, track, research or watch.
The Jargoneer never simply buys a stock or an index or a bond in a straight-up way.  He is operating on a level quite above ours.  There are always conditions, and terms and qualifiers and sesquipedalian descriptors surrounding his trades that put even the most adventurous investors off the trail.

Because that’s just the point.

The game is about a feigned barrier of entry, an unswimmable moat of knowledge you’d sooner pay the Jargoneer to drop a drawbridge across than brave on your own.
The Ferryman doesn’t get his coin until you are convinced he’s your only way across.

This, above all else, is what you must know to survive as an investor: Opacity, Exclusivity and Complexity are the three main drivers of assets raised and fees charged on The Street.  The public pays up when they are convinced that they can’t do what you do but they need to be doing what you are doing.  The Jargoneer’s schtick is based almost entirely on this basic truth.

And when the world is too sheepish to ask questions or too busy to decipher the meaning of his words, his job is a very easy one.