I still don't think Cuban knows what he's talking about. For starters, the financial market's function is not to "create capital". There are several other odd c

I still don't think Cuban knows what he's talking about. For starters, the financial market's function is not to "create capital". There are several other odd claims and unsupported arguments in that article. But in his defense, I don't think he even mentioned "exotic derivatives". Exotics are just derivatives that aren't "vanilla" (standard put or call options, etc). They don't have to be any more leveraged than a standard call option or a futures contract. >If you try to play Vegas' game, you'll probably get burned. But if you stand back, watch the game, and buy when their game creates a bargain price on good long-term stocks, you stand to get very solid returns. When a stock is dropping a lot (like it happened the other day with several stocks), you usually can't tell if it's really a "bargain". In hindsight it's easy to say that some stocks were a bargain a few days ago, but at that moment it would be risky to buy them. It could be that the companies were really in trouble. For instance, even as Lehman stock was dropping, some people were buying it. Another example: this year, Japan Airlines (JAL) went bankrupt. It had been in trouble for some time, but as usual for airline companies, the government was propping it and most people didn't believe it could go down.