Hope learned Monday evening. Wisdom packed in one sentence. Like this one: “the truth is always at the bottom of the well.” Statement by a Canadian journalist in the documentary La sect (Canvas) about the Order of the Sun Temple. In 1994, 53 adherents of the cult were found dead; 23 bodies in a burnt down farmhouse in Cheiry, 25 in three chalets in Salvan (just like Cheiry in Switzerland) and five dead in Canada. Was it a collective suicide, hoping to move to planet Sirius together? Or did the followers need a push, and had it been a killing spree?
Journalists and detectives devoted themselves for years to investigating this bizarre outburst of violence, but no one was willing to go all the way in to dredge up the truth. The cult, the researchers say, formed a parallel world that could not be grasped. In addition, the most prominent inhabitants of that world were dead. The sect members who escaped say afterwards that the only way they could go along with the madness of the cult leaders was to “close their eyes to the truth.” Because the truth, says one, stinks from his mouth.
Space travel
I won’t draw a parallel with the financial world, the parallel world that documentary maker Marije Meerman calls ‘Planet Finance’. Big finance is of course not a cult, but it is a sector that is difficult to get a grip on, and a sector that thrives in unrest, disaster, wars and natural disasters. Monday night was the first part (of six) PlanetFinance (VPRO). The series is not a crusade against bankers or big money, not a settlement with the one percent richest on earth, says Meerman at the end of this episode. It is a journey into space, a journey into how that world of money and numbers, profit or loss, fear and greed works. And we can come along.
Two former American stockbrokers guide us through the history of their world. How the stock exchange floor was still a real market thirty years ago, where people were obsessed with shouting, buying and selling at each other. One day a man climbed the World Trade Center with a rope and pickaxe, says one stock trader. Insane face. But what did the stockbrokers who watched from the sidewalk do? “Place bets.” Putting money on which floor he would crash down. The other stock trader thinks it’s a great joke. This, he says, is precisely the nature of the beast he himself once was. The exchange is now electronic and silent. No shouting, but beeps from data centers.
Meerman does not judge, the traders themselves do. A high-speed trader is embarrassed when she lets him tell her about his best trading day ever. 9/11. He never deals with the “why” or “how” of events, he says. “Why questions are a hobby.” He focuses on the ‘what’. “You see what happens and act accordingly.” The more things happen in the world, the more chaos and uncertainty arises, the more prices and exchange rates fluctuate, the more profit can be made for him. You don’t even have to be fast, as long as you’re the first.
Again so much wisdom packed in a few sentences. Yoshika Tagashira, data engineer at the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The market is a living being, she says. “Always moving. A reflection of the world and the thoughts of man.”
Anyone who knows the thoughts of the acting person is Denise Shull, former trader and neuropsychologist. She deals with traders who go into crisis when they haven’t made any money for a day. Trading and investing is a mentally grueling game, she says. There is zero certainty, the game is constantly changing and it never ends. “It’s the hardest game on earth.” Five more episodes to go to learn the rules of the game.
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