Often times you will hear the stock market is rigged or bias and to some degree it is. It is also a wealth generator for patient money. However if you want to follow the get rich quick crowd, you have to rig it, to some degree. The easiest is to trade on inside information, however the problem for most of us is if you had insider information, how much could you borrow to buy the shares and how much would you make? If you are most people the answer is not all that much. If you were a billionaire, the numbers become much larger.

In an article by Luc Cohen, Jonathan Stempel and Jody Godoy of Reuters, British billionaire Joe Lewis whose most public investment is the Tottenham Hotspur soccer team, pleaded not guilty to what prosecutors called a brazen insider trading scheme.

The SEC prosecutors said in 2019, Mr. Lewis lent his pilots of his private jet, $500,000 to buy stock in Mirati Therapeutics before it released favorable results. The health care company stock went up 16.7% in one day. Both pilots repaid the loans and profited from the higher price of the stock. In normal times, when a health care company releases good results, the expectation if and when the product comes to market, it will sell well and the stock prices increases till people discover how long they have to wait till the product comes to market and then the stock decreases for a while. If Mr. Lewis wanted his pilots to be wealthier, he could have given them a raise.

Mr. Lewis, who is 86 founded an investment firm called Travistock Group and is the board of a number of companies which give him insider information.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, in the stock market are the people who want to get rich quick, most to the time they do not, there are also people who buy profitable stocks for the dividends and as economic cycles go through the stock market the price of the stock goes up and down, but over the long term the price tends to be higher because the stock is profitable. You can easily avoid those who want to get rich quick and their schemes with patience.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.