Paul Tudor Jones Giveth And Taketh Away (Updated)

Posted by Bess Levin, Jul 28, 2009, 2:12pm

Picture 1824.pngAs a few of you have emailed: yes, Trader: The Documentary has been pulled from YouTube. Those who listened to us at the time and checked it out yesterday should not be too broken up about it, since you got a glimpse of a vintage PTJ, though, yes, it is upsetting to not be able to watch it every night before bed. Those who failed to do so-- you fucked up, big time. It's unlikely that this thing will make it back to the 'Tube any time soon, as Jones bought up all remaining copies in the mid-90s in an effort to keep it under wraps, and was probably instrumental in getting it yanked today. Nevertheless: we will attempt to get our hands on it, not matter the cost. Then: DB Movie Night.

Update: The original uploader speaks:

At first I had no idea how sought after this piece of material was. I had heard anecdotally about Ebay listing in the $1,000's but I chalked it up to urban legend. Then late Sunday night I was talking with a colleague about an obscure blogger/marketer who had for months talked about posting the Trader doc. I figured it was just a ploy to build a marketing site and thought it was kind of backwards to encourage this shadowy cottage industry/exchange of VHS tapes. Given the historical relevance, the position of both PTJ and Borish in the industry today and the fact that this aired at some point on public television - I thought posting the videos on YouTube would be educational for other traders and finance professionals. I embedded the videos on the Elite Trader message boards only after John's seeing John's site was having "technical difficulties" as the WordPress structure was exposed.

By Monday morning Dealbreaker, zerohedge and influential personalities on Twitter picked up the videos. My email Inbox exploded with messages and comment notifications from YouTube all day long. Some of the commentary, observations and quotes were priceless, I felt like I had given new credence to yuppie culture- often reserved for citations of "American Psycho" and Gordon Gekko. Monday was very distracting and hard to get work done, so I turned off the email notifications and put my head to work. This morning I was reading the Financial Times Alphaville section and saw my YouTube video embedded and knew things had really caught fire. I logged into YouTube to discover in less than 24 hours each video had been watched some than 30,000 times.

Clusterstock and the New York Times picked up the story and unfortunately cited the YouTube account name 'doctationsmarketing'. The trouble was I had uploaded prior videos of CNBC segments and conference interviews for a marketing presentation for a client, an electronic medical records company. After realizing this I knew I had to take down the videos or move them. Before I could even return from lunch I got the below notices from Youtube:

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My hope is that Mr. Jones understands I had no knowledge of copyright infringement and believe the video to be fair use given it had aired publicly years ago. The intention was for educational use only. The strategies, lifestyle and mannerisms of Mr. Jones and Mr. Borish portrayed in the film are not only entertaining but inspiring to both retail and institutional investors everywhere. I apologize to PTJ and Borish for any embarrassment I may have unintentionally caused.

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