Barry Ritholtz calls for a Tobin Tax to insure investors

Here Barry writes about investing in the new portfolio insurance business:

My Sunday Washington Post Business Section column is out. This morning, we look objectively at Tobincare — not the politics of it, but the investing aspect. Its called: On Investing: The Tobincare portfolio. My conclusion? If you were an objective observer of the Tobin tax legislation when it passed, and then again when the Supreme Court ruled on it, there was lots of money to be made. If you were a lizard-brained political wanker, you left plenty of easy money on the table: “Indeed, emotional investing is rarely successful. Anyone with an intense emotional interest ignores data and facts that disagree with their views. The brain’s tendency to more easily forget that which we disagree with also works to fool these folks. Cognitive bias is a source of systematic errors to investors of all political persuasions – and it leads to under-performance.” Here’s the advice I would have given Ted Cruz if we sat down after the TOBIN was first passed: • The nation was going to create up to 50 million new investor-care consumers; • Demand for investor services and equipment was likely to rise; • Innovative investment vehicles, procedures and techniques would also see increased demand; • Brokers would no longer be on the hook for fire sale losses, as they have for almost 3 decades.>

There we have it. For a while I thought Barry was one of these investors who though everything was good in government as long as taxes were limited to the middle class.