Debunked: Alessio Rastani

Alessio Rastani is not hoaxer Andy Bichlbaum/Jacques Servin, but nor is he a Goldman Sachs trader spilling the beans.

Alessio Rastani appeared on a BBC news program, headlined as an "Independent Trader", and proceeded to say the end is coming, millions of people will lose everything, and that Goldman Sachs rules the world.

The conspiracy world ate this up, as a kind of "insider lets slip the truth about the powers that be"

The truth is rather simpler. The problem here is that the BBC set up Rastani as some kind of authority on the world financial system. But in reality he's not. He's an "independent trader", sometimes called a "day trader", which is someone who attempts to make a living by rapidly trading in financial markets with their own money. Trading as a full time job. He works from a bedroom in his girlfriends house.

[link to www.forbes.com]

I started trading for real in 2006. [...] I use actually TradeStation. [...] I work from home [...] I’m mostly a technical trader. I look at charts. I’m not a big, huge fan of funny analysis, you know, fundamentals.



Rastani's non-notability becomes more obviously when you look at his web site (which has only existed since February 2010)

[link to web.archive.org]



So there's no insider spilling the bean here. He's just a day trader who has had the good fortune to manage to survive for more that a few years, presumably by following a strategy that benefited from (or was at least someone insulated from) the recent financial turmoil. Hence he, like every other trader with short term success, thinks he's hit on the recipe for success, so he paints a simplistic picture for the future based on his rather limited experience - projecting what he thinks happened, onto what he thinks will happen.

In the process, he's got himself a lot of publicity, which will help a lot with his backup career - selling books and teaching about independent trading.