Monitor Monitoring and Monetization

Preventing
Prying Eyes from Profiting off of Your Stock Picks

By
Anthony Rhodes

 

One
of my favorite films is a movie called “Pi”. It’s the
fictitious account of a young man, who through his hard work and
intellect,
developed a method of successfully predicting the movements of the
stock market, and chronicles the unfortunate consequences which
resulted from his discovery. Throughout
the course of the movie, the protagonist
is
doggedly
pursued
by
groups
of surreptitious
individuals, including religious
zealots
and
unsavory
business people,
who are all
seeking to both monetize off of and exploit his
natural ability to solve complicated puzzles. While
the oft used cliche of the odd or misunderstood genius doesn’t
appeal to my liking, the film
cleverly atones for this shortcoming by being
replete
with many multi-layered themes. Its
central motif, however,
is the all-encompassing,
corrupting
nature of greed, which is represented by the inordinate and seemingly
unlimited lengths that nefarious individuals will go to, in order to
illegally profit or benefit from the talents of others.

The
technical
term
for
this form of theft is called “freeriding”,
and
it
involves using technology or other means to track and ultimately
steal someones’ stock picks, as they are being placed through their
online brokerage
platforms.
Within
today’s normalcy
of
constantly being connected, our “Internet of Things”
makes

this form
of larceny easy to implement, as we are consistently moving from
device to device, and supplying our passwords and personal data
between them. Obviously, you should scan your computers for malware,
and make sure that your wifi connections are ironclad. But it’s
equally important to change your brokerage passwords at regular
intervals. If a cyber thief gains access to your online password, he
or she can simply log onto your account, and wait patiently until
your trades are posted, and then transition to their brokerage
account and repeat those very same trades for their own personal
gain. 

Securing Your Securities

If
you are trading in an account today
without
using a VPN (Virtual Private Network), you are in
essence,
inviting
malcontents into your investing world.
These handy tools are inexpensive to use (many are less than $5.00 a
month), and can protect your purchases from increasingly prying eyes,
as you go about the business of investing online. It’s
also very important to make sure that
the
“sharing” tab on your computer is turned off during your
execution of trades. This
addendum should not be viewed as an afterthought, because some of the
more popular operating systems have this feature turned
on
by default. If
you refuse to enact this provision,
you
are essentially allowing
others’ to
not only purview
everything
that is occurring on your screen, but
to gain access to all of your unprotected investing
files, as well.

For
every individual
who
is responsible
for creating
something valuable,
there will always be others who would seek to profit off of them. And
the more
profound
such
a creation
turns
out to be,
the larger
those interested parties are likely to become. This
crude reality is an unfortunate byproduct
of the culture of capitalism; which, left to its own devices, would
evenly
reward both
inventor and thief alike, with no bias or
favor being given to
whichever
party actually
caused
the desired creation
to come into existence.
For
this reason, we must remain vigilant,
and protect our intellectual property in the best ways in which we
can. Because just as our
character in “Pi” discovered, whenever
the prospect of monetization is involved, nothing
is beyond
the pale for
those
truly
inflicted
with the avaricious
disease
that
is
greed.