Yes, the price they sell at. Which has little to do with the price they buy at. Paperback bestsellers and book club printings are nearly worthless, because of supply/demand in the used market.
And don't they have "Half Price Books" there? I though that chain was nationwide.
On wealth vs stuff: it's key, because you just can't consume that much more stuff than the next guy. If you have a very high income, you either blow it all on status symbols (making some jobs for others in the process) or you invest it. And money spent buying stock shares is not taking stuff away from anyone else - it's competition for a different kind of resource entirely.
What you don't seem to get here is that the average man's salary will always buy an average amount of stuff. How the dollar bills will shake out is anyone's guess, but once there are robotic factories making all shoes, all people are going to have shoes. The buying power of everyone's collective salary will always be close to the production of all the factories (robotic or otherwise) because it can't happen any other way, (unless you have some sort of Soviet system where all the production rots in rail cars because no one has any incentive to deliver the produced goods).
The CEO just can't wear so many shoes that the average man has a shoe shortage.
Plus the idea that "there will be no more demand for labor" is utter nonsense, disproven by all of history. Almost all manufacturing jobs have already gone, we're just looking at the tail end now.
Seriously, you do understand the difference between stuff and wealth, right? While the'te both measured in dollars, no one has less food because some other guy has a lot of stock shares.
Well, there are special cases for everything in life. If you want to grow mint it's all about funding land that won't be overrun by kudzu for as long as possible, which is pretty random. But there's no shortage of arable land, in general, nor shortage of food (i.e., calories and protein to keep us from starving).
No, bonds are odd that way. Contrarian investing can work well in stocks, but in bonds the experts are mostly right, most of the time, and fortunes are made or lost on a very thin edge of better predictions than the next guy. That's sort of the point of bonds: to not be as crazy as stocks. Now, there are all sorts of derivatives that I don't understand with full-on crazy, where contrarian investing might work well, but I'm not even sure there's a retail market for that stuff.
"In the entire history of investing, there has never been anything like X before."
This was said in earnest in every single past bubble. Bitcoin's future is entirely determined by fashion - as it becomes more fashionable, price will go up, if people drop it like last-years boy band, it can go to 0.
Borrowing shares is a thing because actual (naked) short selling of stocks is illegal. Is there some market where you can short bitcoin? It won't surprise me when bitcoin speculation markets spring up with none of the lessons learned and protections of real exchanges.
The fact that all the corporations that care about the NSA scandal are quite unhappy wit the NSA says: maybe there's less corporate control than you imagine. Of course, if your point was "we have two big-government, pro-corporate" parties, then I agree completely.
Well, you can make up whatever price you want to for the IRS, but my used book-club hardbacks are worth about 10 cents each. Other than books-by-the-yard, used bookstores have little interest. Have you tried actually selling these books, or are you going by made-up numbers (honest question)?
I don't know anyone who counts resale price of used books in their book buying decisions - it's mostly "bring in a box of old books for one new one, now what else do I buy while I'm here".
The world has a net surplus of food production as it is (and in America farming is very unfriendly to the nearby environment). Distribution is a different matter. Forests in America have been gradually reclaiming farmland for many decades now - you just don't need much land any more.
Ah, but that's inventory management at brick-and-mortar stores, which Amazon doesn't deal with (i.e., that's the reason the time of brick-and-mortar stores has largely passed). The per-book cost of a pallet of 1000 books delivered to Amazon has a different breakdown than the retail side.
I have the opposite take - without the need for all that paper, all the land used for tree farms would likely be used for something far less environmentally friendly.
Ebook pricing has gradually been coming down though. I think the early market (people who could afford tablets and readers when they were new expensive toys) just wasn't very price sensitive.
Ultimately, I think we'll see eBooks settle down to the same price as "real" books, before shipping. The per-unit cost of printing a book and shipping it in bulk to a distributer is a trivial portion of the price of a book. Most of the cost is in fixed costs (not per-book) that are the same regardless of media: copy-editing, royalties, marketing, and so on.
Newspaper fonts were optimized for totally different goals than making it pleasant to read hours worth of text. If the goal is to minimize fatigue when reading for hours, the result of that optimization is a good book font.
The one thing keeping the dollar from hyperinflating is the fact that oil transactions are done in USD
Why does this myth keep going? The currency futures markets are vastly larger than the oil markets. It doesn't matter in the least which currency you pick to price oil in, you can trivially buy it with any currency, and price futures relative to any currency, and it will barely be a blip in the currency futures markets.
Income on investment has been absurdly high for a while now
That's entirely false. The returns you can get on each $1 of investment have been falling for quite a while now. Bonds and other "income investments" are at historical lows, and until recently the stock market had been basically flat for 10 years (the expression "going violently sideways" comes to mind - lots of sound and fury signifying nothing).
But step back from that. Let's look at corporate earnings as a whole: total corporate earnings are less than 10% of total personal income. Total personal income in 2012 was $13.4T, while the total value of all US stocks is only about $19T, with a P/E of about 20, so total corporate earnings in the US are under $1T.
Seriously, it's quite normal that corporate profits are less than 10% of salaries.
And regardless of anything measured in dollars, the average man's salary buys an average amount of stuff. It can only happen that way. No matter how rich you are, you can't drink 100 times as much beer as the average man, nor eat 100 times as much food. Wealth may be highly concentrated, but stuff isn't.
Oh, technical analysis has performed very well through the history of the stock market, but any given system of prediction has a short lifespan because it will be gamed as a part of the next system. Why do you think investment banks collectively topped the NSA as the largest employer of math Phds for a few years there?
But the gaming the market and gaming the gamers and so on recursively just snowballed under the pressure of thousands of really bright guys until there was nothing left but "trolls trolling trolls".
However, other than a few big-name stocks where stock prices are still manipulated to game algorithmic trading engines, technical analysis is a great way to "predict" the past. That may sound silly, but a great danger of investing is getting emotionally committed to positions and not being able to see how wrong you are while there's still time to salvage something. Technical analysis is still pretty decent for helping you realize you've failed.
I don't know what "trickle down" even means, but life sucks for everyone in a recession, and is better for everyone in the boom times.
The average man's wage is always going to buy an average amount of stuff. When the economy as a whole stumbles, we make less stuff, and during the boom times we make more stuff. The total dollar value of that stuff is largely irrelevant.
Heh, the best investments I've made so far in life were in real-estate-related companies back in the darkest times. Half of my picks failed, the others gained 5-10x in just a few years. Sadly, my current bet on emerging markets is proving my lack of genius in investing. Oh well, can't win em all.
BTW, interest rates are already going up, but that means it's a terrible time for the bond market - as rates rise the price of existing bonds falls, and long-term bonds fall dramatically. I was late getting out myself, because the stupid QE-infinity is hiding how far along we are in interest rates jumping up. I pretty much suck at the bond side, but even the pros are having difficulty adjusting to the fact that treasuries can't be the benchmark any more, when they've been that since the gold shock. It's hard to change a mental model that has worked since before you were born!
No, in general you want to avoid the ones that did great for the past few years, as it's someone new's turn; otherwise investing would be easy!
But the S&P500 is up over 50% over the past 10 years (much of that just happened this year), so you should have to look far. Unless of curse you're looking for stocks that never go down - sorry, stocks don't work that way. The reason stocks have been the best investment for any 30 years period for 100+ years is precisely because for any 3 year period they can make you cry.
There's no production capacity problem. There's a demand problem
Nope, we're past that now. This is business-cycle-as-usual, and heavy industry is doing capacity build-out. Other goods and services will follow in the years to come (the usual business cycle is 10+ years).
When coming off the bad times, the first areas to improve are big-ticket consumer items, from cars to washing machines. Stuff people have been fixing (or just working around) instead of replacing for years, but finally the annoyance has exceeded fear of things getting worse. So right now there's demand for those items, and energy/raw materials are at the very bottom of the cycle, price-wise, so heavy industry is gearing up.
Right now energy companies and raw materials have demand ramping up and prices are starting to follow (up from 2009, but not really high yet), but in a while (not this Christmas) we'll see the next leg up, where demand comes for more "fun" consumer items and people finally start to admit to themselves the recession is over.
For sure the claim that "socialized medicine stopped working so well when those economies hit the skids" makes far more sense than "it's all Global Warming: Mother Gaia punishes us for the sins of carbon emission".
Slashdot Mirror
I think we'll see eBooks settle down to the same price as "real" books, before shipping
Yes, the price they sell at. Which has little to do with the price they buy at. Paperback bestsellers and book club printings are nearly worthless, because of supply/demand in the used market.
And don't they have "Half Price Books" there? I though that chain was nationwide.
On wealth vs stuff: it's key, because you just can't consume that much more stuff than the next guy. If you have a very high income, you either blow it all on status symbols (making some jobs for others in the process) or you invest it. And money spent buying stock shares is not taking stuff away from anyone else - it's competition for a different kind of resource entirely.
What you don't seem to get here is that the average man's salary will always buy an average amount of stuff. How the dollar bills will shake out is anyone's guess, but once there are robotic factories making all shoes, all people are going to have shoes. The buying power of everyone's collective salary will always be close to the production of all the factories (robotic or otherwise) because it can't happen any other way, (unless you have some sort of Soviet system where all the production rots in rail cars because no one has any incentive to deliver the produced goods).
The CEO just can't wear so many shoes that the average man has a shoe shortage.
Plus the idea that "there will be no more demand for labor" is utter nonsense, disproven by all of history. Almost all manufacturing jobs have already gone, we're just looking at the tail end now.
Seriously, you do understand the difference between stuff and wealth, right? While the'te both measured in dollars, no one has less food because some other guy has a lot of stock shares.
Well, there are special cases for everything in life. If you want to grow mint it's all about funding land that won't be overrun by kudzu for as long as possible, which is pretty random. But there's no shortage of arable land, in general, nor shortage of food (i.e., calories and protein to keep us from starving).
No, bonds are odd that way. Contrarian investing can work well in stocks, but in bonds the experts are mostly right, most of the time, and fortunes are made or lost on a very thin edge of better predictions than the next guy. That's sort of the point of bonds: to not be as crazy as stocks. Now, there are all sorts of derivatives that I don't understand with full-on crazy, where contrarian investing might work well, but I'm not even sure there's a retail market for that stuff.
"In the entire history of investing, there has never been anything like X before."
This was said in earnest in every single past bubble. Bitcoin's future is entirely determined by fashion - as it becomes more fashionable, price will go up, if people drop it like last-years boy band, it can go to 0.
Borrowing shares is a thing because actual (naked) short selling of stocks is illegal. Is there some market where you can short bitcoin? It won't surprise me when bitcoin speculation markets spring up with none of the lessons learned and protections of real exchanges.
You really think people are using bitcoin for that? Well, perhaps that's ramping up and pushing the value.
Are there any investment vehicles for Btc yet (like a Btc ETF)? Or is it all just keep it in a wallet still?
The fact that all the corporations that care about the NSA scandal are quite unhappy wit the NSA says: maybe there's less corporate control than you imagine. Of course, if your point was "we have two big-government, pro-corporate" parties, then I agree completely.
Well, you can make up whatever price you want to for the IRS, but my used book-club hardbacks are worth about 10 cents each. Other than books-by-the-yard, used bookstores have little interest. Have you tried actually selling these books, or are you going by made-up numbers (honest question)?
I don't know anyone who counts resale price of used books in their book buying decisions - it's mostly "bring in a box of old books for one new one, now what else do I buy while I'm here".
The world has a net surplus of food production as it is (and in America farming is very unfriendly to the nearby environment). Distribution is a different matter. Forests in America have been gradually reclaiming farmland for many decades now - you just don't need much land any more.
Ah, but that's inventory management at brick-and-mortar stores, which Amazon doesn't deal with (i.e., that's the reason the time of brick-and-mortar stores has largely passed). The per-book cost of a pallet of 1000 books delivered to Amazon has a different breakdown than the retail side.
I have the opposite take - without the need for all that paper, all the land used for tree farms would likely be used for something far less environmentally friendly.
Ebook pricing has gradually been coming down though. I think the early market (people who could afford tablets and readers when they were new expensive toys) just wasn't very price sensitive.
Ultimately, I think we'll see eBooks settle down to the same price as "real" books, before shipping. The per-unit cost of printing a book and shipping it in bulk to a distributer is a trivial portion of the price of a book. Most of the cost is in fixed costs (not per-book) that are the same regardless of media: copy-editing, royalties, marketing, and so on.
Newspaper fonts were optimized for totally different goals than making it pleasant to read hours worth of text. If the goal is to minimize fatigue when reading for hours, the result of that optimization is a good book font.
The one thing keeping the dollar from hyperinflating is the fact that oil transactions are done in USD
Why does this myth keep going? The currency futures markets are vastly larger than the oil markets. It doesn't matter in the least which currency you pick to price oil in, you can trivially buy it with any currency, and price futures relative to any currency, and it will barely be a blip in the currency futures markets.
Income on investment has been absurdly high for a while now
That's entirely false. The returns you can get on each $1 of investment have been falling for quite a while now. Bonds and other "income investments" are at historical lows, and until recently the stock market had been basically flat for 10 years (the expression "going violently sideways" comes to mind - lots of sound and fury signifying nothing).
But step back from that. Let's look at corporate earnings as a whole: total corporate earnings are less than 10% of total personal income. Total personal income in 2012 was $13.4T, while the total value of all US stocks is only about $19T, with a P/E of about 20, so total corporate earnings in the US are under $1T.
Seriously, it's quite normal that corporate profits are less than 10% of salaries.
And regardless of anything measured in dollars, the average man's salary buys an average amount of stuff. It can only happen that way. No matter how rich you are, you can't drink 100 times as much beer as the average man, nor eat 100 times as much food. Wealth may be highly concentrated, but stuff isn't.
Oh, technical analysis has performed very well through the history of the stock market, but any given system of prediction has a short lifespan because it will be gamed as a part of the next system. Why do you think investment banks collectively topped the NSA as the largest employer of math Phds for a few years there?
But the gaming the market and gaming the gamers and so on recursively just snowballed under the pressure of thousands of really bright guys until there was nothing left but "trolls trolling trolls".
However, other than a few big-name stocks where stock prices are still manipulated to game algorithmic trading engines, technical analysis is a great way to "predict" the past. That may sound silly, but a great danger of investing is getting emotionally committed to positions and not being able to see how wrong you are while there's still time to salvage something. Technical analysis is still pretty decent for helping you realize you've failed.
I don't know what "trickle down" even means, but life sucks for everyone in a recession, and is better for everyone in the boom times.
The average man's wage is always going to buy an average amount of stuff. When the economy as a whole stumbles, we make less stuff, and during the boom times we make more stuff. The total dollar value of that stuff is largely irrelevant.
Heh, the best investments I've made so far in life were in real-estate-related companies back in the darkest times. Half of my picks failed, the others gained 5-10x in just a few years. Sadly, my current bet on emerging markets is proving my lack of genius in investing. Oh well, can't win em all.
BTW, interest rates are already going up, but that means it's a terrible time for the bond market - as rates rise the price of existing bonds falls, and long-term bonds fall dramatically. I was late getting out myself, because the stupid QE-infinity is hiding how far along we are in interest rates jumping up. I pretty much suck at the bond side, but even the pros are having difficulty adjusting to the fact that treasuries can't be the benchmark any more, when they've been that since the gold shock. It's hard to change a mental model that has worked since before you were born!
No, in general you want to avoid the ones that did great for the past few years, as it's someone new's turn; otherwise investing would be easy!
But the S&P500 is up over 50% over the past 10 years (much of that just happened this year), so you should have to look far. Unless of curse you're looking for stocks that never go down - sorry, stocks don't work that way. The reason stocks have been the best investment for any 30 years period for 100+ years is precisely because for any 3 year period they can make you cry.
There's no production capacity problem. There's a demand problem
Nope, we're past that now. This is business-cycle-as-usual, and heavy industry is doing capacity build-out. Other goods and services will follow in the years to come (the usual business cycle is 10+ years).
When coming off the bad times, the first areas to improve are big-ticket consumer items, from cars to washing machines. Stuff people have been fixing (or just working around) instead of replacing for years, but finally the annoyance has exceeded fear of things getting worse. So right now there's demand for those items, and energy/raw materials are at the very bottom of the cycle, price-wise, so heavy industry is gearing up.
Right now energy companies and raw materials have demand ramping up and prices are starting to follow (up from 2009, but not really high yet), but in a while (not this Christmas) we'll see the next leg up, where demand comes for more "fun" consumer items and people finally start to admit to themselves the recession is over.
For sure the claim that "socialized medicine stopped working so well when those economies hit the skids" makes far more sense than "it's all Global Warming: Mother Gaia punishes us for the sins of carbon emission".
BTW, I'm 20% cooler than everyone upthread.