My enemy is myself

Contrary to the popular thinking, it is more of institutions eating institutions in today's financial market.

 

There are winning hedge funds like Citadel, who is also a market maker or specialist for many securities.  There are also losing hedge funds and MMs as well. For every Citadel, there is also a “long-term capital investment”.

 

Overall, I still think US market is one of the most competitive and "efficient" financial markets in the world. A competitive, effective and efficient market is  a market well-balanced with bears and bulls (institutions and individuals alike), with both of them equally competent, information and otherwise. Obviously, institutions have an edge over individual investors in general.

I believe that Fed/Treasury PPT does exist and come out helping bulls once a while like in 911 situation, and sometimes bails out some in-trouble financial institutions as in case of LTCM , but that's not norm. Most of time and otherwise, the market  is a well balanced and competitive one. I would think that, without institutions losing and winning among themselves, all individual investors would have been wiped out already.

Needless to say, there are some kind of helping each other between WS and Fed. But WS is of both bears and bulls.

As individual investors, our enemy on our road to success, is not institutional investors. The enemy is very often ourselves.