as the market is a group psychological process

The market is also about information. If you're not inside the inner loop, you won't get that information ahead of time.

Specifically it's about digested information. Without gossip, news, and good live analysis tools, you're already behind the professionals, and unlikely ever to catch up.

It was interesting looking at wchurchill's posts, because although we mostly disagreed with him politically, he was an excellent presenter of Wall St's common wisdom. His predictions also seemed to be more accurate than anyone else's on here.

In practical terms, it's only possible to make accurate predictions if you can enter the mindspace of the psychological process that drives the markets.

Since most of us assume that market processes are mostly insane, and clearly so, we're predictively disadvantaged in the short and medium term. Suspension of disbelief seems to be a useful skill which may be in short supply around here.

So even though we can see an approaching train wreck from far enough away to be able to say 'Wtf are these people doing?', it's very hard to turn that into an effective investment strategy.

My employer BNP Paribas markets warrants on various Brent futures, currently September 2007 to June 2008, many strikes/call/put. There are also gold, silver, housing indexes, indexes, stocks, etc...

It's curious because in the USA these products are not marketed at all, cultural thing?

Disclaimer: my wage comes in part from those warrants sales, and I personally own a few Brent warrants.