I attended an Optionetics lecture yesterday, mainly to see how one top-tier marketer is selling the 'get-rich' theme to would-be traders in a very tough environment. Optionetics, founded by 'super trader George Fontanills,' maintains a high-profile in the seminars world, using infomercials, expo booths, print ads and direct mail to haul in thousands of prospects globally. The 90-minute sales pitch I sat through at the Westin Omni near Denver was conducted by a very intense fellow name Kurt, who, despite mentioning a graduate degree from Princeton, assumed the persona of the successful sweatsuit trader who had paid his dues in the school of hard knocks. The audience, by and large, looked pretty scruffy, and although some were well dressed and neat in appearance, at least half-a-dozen of the attendees looked like they could have arrived with shopping carts in tow, or astride BMX bikes. Now, I have no idea how many of the 60,000 students who supposedly have graduated from Optionetics have been making money trading puts and calls. However, I wax skeptical when I hear someone claim, as our lecturer did, that Optionetics can transform into succcessful traders even the Amway and NSA-filter burnouts who for all appearances comprised as much as half of last night's audience. And I become even more skeptical when the lecturer emphasizes how, using options, one can profit regardless of whether stocks are moving up, down or sideways. That's true in theory, of course. But as if to refute the point, the speaker homed in on a very atypical example that most of us wouldn't experience in three or four prayerful years of option trading. It involved Bristol Myers puts that were purchased for 0.75 after the stock ran up from $41 to $49 one day. As chance would have it, the stock collapsed the
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