You and I can't afford to publish a 500-page book just to astroturf a statement of endorsement and advertise it well beyond the reasonable costs to promote such a book to its reasonable audience. We can afford to get our endorsement out to a few people on an open forum here.
That's not about "banning books". It's about banning the political fraud of hiding behind the 1st Amendment to use money to dominate speech. It's about making democracy, not plutocracy, the political system we live under. Which was the point of the Revolutionary War.
More like highly-regarded medical scientist being made Surgeon General.
It's far better to have a procedurally unpracticed constitutional scholar for once than the sequence of long-time political hacks we got from the other side.
The VC sells the stocks onward to someone on a secondary market, thus receiving money he'll use to invest in another company.
That's an assumption. In any case, you aren't investing when you buy stocks from him. You're paying him off for his investment, and taking a gamble that there's still some growth value left in the company, or that there is someone around the corner you can sell the shares to whether the company is any good or not.
When he invests, he does so with full knowledge of the internal state of the company, including information that only he and the company principals are privy to. When you buy stock in the secondary market, you only have what is in the most recent prospectus. It is illegal for the company principals to give you information they aren't giving to your allies and competitors.
His money built the company. Yours only builds his wealth.
That isn't a rocket project. It's something to do with drilling and shooting money. Can't tell for sure. The pages of the press release were stuck together.
You're still confusing the secondary market with investing.
It's not investing in anything but brokerage commissions and the greater-fool theory.
Your money doesn't go into a company's pocket to build machines and hire personnel. It goes into another speculator's pocket. It's a false flow in the economy. It's gambling. No more or less than poker or craps.
This does have a financial benefit to the company.
That's a bit of a cart before the horse. The company is supposed to be of financial benefit to me, not the other way around. In fact, I think more CEOs should be boiled in oil to drive that point home.
Um, the point of dollar cost averaging is to admit you fucked up by getting in too soon and you're trying to make back your losses on new bets.
Look up "martingale" for why it's no better than just moving to the next gamble. Martingaling delays ruin, but that's true of any scheme that splits your bankroll into a large number of small bets.
The company isn't allowed to give you any info that makes you any more or less competitive than anyone else. So your new bets aren't any better than your old ones, since they're made purely on the basis of price movement, because really, that's the only true information you have. The idea that it's better at $8 today than it was at $10 yesterday ignores the fact that it wasn't any good at $10 yesterday so it's probably not any good at $8 today.
And "it works for me" is post hoc ergo propter hoc logic. Don't fall for it.
The DJIA is a very small, randomly selected subset of the overall market. Whatever your algorithm is doing, it's violating causality, or has a bias that happens to match the local bias in the markets. You're on a streak at the craps table. That's all.
Wall Street hedged its gaming of the bucket-shop system by planting its cronies in the White House. That's why they got pure cash profit from the public when it came time to dismantle the ponzi scheme. The grifters got paid, everyone else got scammed, not just the people the grifters suckered into the setup. It was the finance-company equivalent of an insurance scam: create a fake accident and claim you're in too much pain to do your job; and don't give a damn whose lives you wreck in the process.
The purpose of the market has been what it's always been. To give entrepreneurs a chance to raise funding for new ventures in a well-defined manner, in exchange for partial ownership of those ventures.
That doesn't require a secondary market (non-company persons trading company stock). Just a primary market (giving money to companies).
The purpose of the secondary market is to pay off those with the connections and resources to act in the primary market.
What I want to know is, with all the computers and internets it should be trivial to construct a global primary market. Where is it? Who's keeping us from it? And why? (And I'm staring at the NYSE and NASDAQ as I say this.)
Any trade where your purpose is to make money out of money seems pretty pointless to me.
If you're actually lending that money to a company to improve its productivity (i.e., investing) then you're putting money to work instead of keeping it in your pocket, and that has a multiplicative effect on the economy. If you can charge interest and make money from your money then that's a good thing.
But the stock market isn't that. It's people trading the same gambling checks around and around in a circle, with the brokers shaving off a few pennies each time they change hands. They make decisions for a random gamut of reasons, but ostensibly on speculation the checks will be worth something some day. But that will only happen if someone with real money decides it would be better if he owned the company outright and buys up the checks. But he's doing that because he knows he can make a ton of real money improving the productivity, product market, or profit margins of the company, and he's paying you a tiny fraction of it. And he probably knows the price is depressed because of the mismanagement and you're desperate for a way out.
So you got screwed getting in, and screwed getting out before it got good. But you were told you were "investing in America" or some top-to-bottom lie like that, and you feel lucky you got a 30% premium, and you probably don't notice that he sold the company two years later for 4 times what he bought it for.
the winning strategy is not a secret: dollar cost averaging and low-load index funds
That strategy gives a moderate return over a certain medium-long term outlook. Provided something large doesn't get involved, like you get in during a marketwide bubble or are forced to cash out in the middle of a marketwide downturn, or both.
Until the fund manager decides to screw you and a fund you picked for its nice upward drift starts trending down and stays that way for several quarters, wiping out years of "gains".
for every position there is a counter position betting on the opposite result
You didn't read what I wrote.
The real investor, the one who bought a share in a company and gave the actual company his money, has his profit built in. He's not betting on the opposite result. He knows his result is locked in, because you are buying his shares at his price.
After that, yes, it's one dumb rat playing tug-of-war with another dumb rat, neither knowing if the thing they're tugging at is edible until they've swallowed it and tried to digest it, things they have no words for.
I didn't mention: the stock market also gives the true investor an opportunity to depress the amount he invests in a company relative to its potential value in the stock market. So he can rip off both ends.
This is astonishingly lucrative. That is why you will never be allowed into that club. Anything that has real ROI is reserved for people who actually compete at it. By the time the shares reach the secondary market (the exchanges) there is no profit margin to be had in known conditions, and any trading is speculation on imagined future events.
By entering the stock market, you are entering a casino, with rules on the conduct of the game but no rules on the setting of odds, and no information on the actual odds.
Speculation is just as rampant in the real estate market as in the stock market, but that doesn't make owning a home a gamble.
Two things about that: 1. at least you have a house, even if you overpaid for it. try getting a bank loan on a pile of stock shares. bankers know how the stock market works, and will not even give you a loan against the "par" value. 2. it was rampant speculation that led to the 2006-2007 bubble in real estate. a third of all sales were "investment" sales; i.e., to people who never planned to occupy or rent or significantly improve on the property. hundreds of thousands of people who honestly were intending to live in their new homes found out that the houses they bought were indeed caught up in a massive gamble, and they are making mortgage payments on a house that's worth as little as half what they paid for it. it's the biggest gamble they ever took, and many of them didn't even know it.
Slashdot Mirror
Dubya didn't win the election. Karl Rove did. Why anyone looks at the gibbering dry-drunk and thinks he was in charge of anything is a mystery.
Got the city to build a new stadium
So he had practice ripping off the public to line his pockets.
You and I can't afford to publish a 500-page book just to astroturf a statement of endorsement and advertise it well beyond the reasonable costs to promote such a book to its reasonable audience. We can afford to get our endorsement out to a few people on an open forum here.
That's not about "banning books". It's about banning the political fraud of hiding behind the 1st Amendment to use money to dominate speech. It's about making democracy, not plutocracy, the political system we live under. Which was the point of the Revolutionary War.
You mean it doesn't help that that half has figured the other half out?
Depends on whether you're trying to help the country or yourself.
Didn't realize those were requirements.
Because the previous guy came without a functioning brain.
More like highly-regarded medical scientist being made Surgeon General.
It's far better to have a procedurally unpracticed constitutional scholar for once than the sequence of long-time political hacks we got from the other side.
Seriously. This story is way off-topic and it's showing up here almost 24 hours after the fact.
Slashdot's article-selection system has been getting more and more stupid as time goes on.
We need a little constitutional reform.
If they implemented that web server on it, it must have left the curtains open this morning.
Oops again. Now the whole site's doing it. Troubleshooting is fun!
Oops. Spoke too soon. That was the link to TFA. The link to the video is still borked in IE. YMMV.
I got that from Firefox.
Works fine from IE.
Apply "FTW" as you see fit.
The VC sells the stocks onward to someone on a secondary market, thus receiving money he'll use to invest in another company.
That's an assumption. In any case, you aren't investing when you buy stocks from him. You're paying him off for his investment, and taking a gamble that there's still some growth value left in the company, or that there is someone around the corner you can sell the shares to whether the company is any good or not.
When he invests, he does so with full knowledge of the internal state of the company, including information that only he and the company principals are privy to. When you buy stock in the secondary market, you only have what is in the most recent prospectus. It is illegal for the company principals to give you information they aren't giving to your allies and competitors.
His money built the company. Yours only builds his wealth.
exceptin' the vacuum part...
That isn't a rocket project. It's something to do with drilling and shooting money. Can't tell for sure. The pages of the press release were stuck together.
If he wants to die in a harsh, hostile environment, why doesn't he spend a few $billion retiring to Compton or Afghanistan?
You're still confusing the secondary market with investing.
It's not investing in anything but brokerage commissions and the greater-fool theory.
Your money doesn't go into a company's pocket to build machines and hire personnel. It goes into another speculator's pocket. It's a false flow in the economy. It's gambling. No more or less than poker or craps.
This does have a financial benefit to the company.
That's a bit of a cart before the horse. The company is supposed to be of financial benefit to me, not the other way around. In fact, I think more CEOs should be boiled in oil to drive that point home.
Um, the point of dollar cost averaging is to admit you fucked up by getting in too soon and you're trying to make back your losses on new bets.
Look up "martingale" for why it's no better than just moving to the next gamble. Martingaling delays ruin, but that's true of any scheme that splits your bankroll into a large number of small bets.
The company isn't allowed to give you any info that makes you any more or less competitive than anyone else. So your new bets aren't any better than your old ones, since they're made purely on the basis of price movement, because really, that's the only true information you have. The idea that it's better at $8 today than it was at $10 yesterday ignores the fact that it wasn't any good at $10 yesterday so it's probably not any good at $8 today.
And "it works for me" is post hoc ergo propter hoc logic. Don't fall for it.
Apocryphal.
The DJIA is a very small, randomly selected subset of the overall market. Whatever your algorithm is doing, it's violating causality, or has a bias that happens to match the local bias in the markets. You're on a streak at the craps table. That's all.
Wall Street hedged its gaming of the bucket-shop system by planting its cronies in the White House. That's why they got pure cash profit from the public when it came time to dismantle the ponzi scheme. The grifters got paid, everyone else got scammed, not just the people the grifters suckered into the setup. It was the finance-company equivalent of an insurance scam: create a fake accident and claim you're in too much pain to do your job; and don't give a damn whose lives you wreck in the process.
The purpose of the market has been what it's always been. To give entrepreneurs a chance to raise funding for new ventures in a well-defined manner, in exchange for partial ownership of those ventures.
That doesn't require a secondary market (non-company persons trading company stock). Just a primary market (giving money to companies).
The purpose of the secondary market is to pay off those with the connections and resources to act in the primary market.
What I want to know is, with all the computers and internets it should be trivial to construct a global primary market. Where is it? Who's keeping us from it? And why? (And I'm staring at the NYSE and NASDAQ as I say this.)
Any trade where your purpose is to make money out of money seems pretty pointless to me.
If you're actually lending that money to a company to improve its productivity (i.e., investing) then you're putting money to work instead of keeping it in your pocket, and that has a multiplicative effect on the economy. If you can charge interest and make money from your money then that's a good thing.
But the stock market isn't that. It's people trading the same gambling checks around and around in a circle, with the brokers shaving off a few pennies each time they change hands. They make decisions for a random gamut of reasons, but ostensibly on speculation the checks will be worth something some day. But that will only happen if someone with real money decides it would be better if he owned the company outright and buys up the checks. But he's doing that because he knows he can make a ton of real money improving the productivity, product market, or profit margins of the company, and he's paying you a tiny fraction of it. And he probably knows the price is depressed because of the mismanagement and you're desperate for a way out.
So you got screwed getting in, and screwed getting out before it got good. But you were told you were "investing in America" or some top-to-bottom lie like that, and you feel lucky you got a 30% premium, and you probably don't notice that he sold the company two years later for 4 times what he bought it for.
the winning strategy is not a secret: dollar cost averaging and low-load index funds
That strategy gives a moderate return over a certain medium-long term outlook. Provided something large doesn't get involved, like you get in during a marketwide bubble or are forced to cash out in the middle of a marketwide downturn, or both.
Until the fund manager decides to screw you and a fund you picked for its nice upward drift starts trending down and stays that way for several quarters, wiping out years of "gains".
Oops. You weren't responding to what I wrote; that's why you didn't read it.
for every position there is a counter position betting on the opposite result
You didn't read what I wrote.
The real investor, the one who bought a share in a company and gave the actual company his money, has his profit built in. He's not betting on the opposite result. He knows his result is locked in, because you are buying his shares at his price.
After that, yes, it's one dumb rat playing tug-of-war with another dumb rat, neither knowing if the thing they're tugging at is edible until they've swallowed it and tried to digest it, things they have no words for.
I didn't mention: the stock market also gives the true investor an opportunity to depress the amount he invests in a company relative to its potential value in the stock market. So he can rip off both ends.
This is astonishingly lucrative. That is why you will never be allowed into that club. Anything that has real ROI is reserved for people who actually compete at it. By the time the shares reach the secondary market (the exchanges) there is no profit margin to be had in known conditions, and any trading is speculation on imagined future events.
By entering the stock market, you are entering a casino, with rules on the conduct of the game but no rules on the setting of odds, and no information on the actual odds.
Speculation is just as rampant in the real estate market as in the stock market, but that doesn't make owning a home a gamble.
Two things about that: 1. at least you have a house, even if you overpaid for it. try getting a bank loan on a pile of stock shares. bankers know how the stock market works, and will not even give you a loan against the "par" value. 2. it was rampant speculation that led to the 2006-2007 bubble in real estate. a third of all sales were "investment" sales; i.e., to people who never planned to occupy or rent or significantly improve on the property. hundreds of thousands of people who honestly were intending to live in their new homes found out that the houses they bought were indeed caught up in a massive gamble, and they are making mortgage payments on a house that's worth as little as half what they paid for it. it's the biggest gamble they ever took, and many of them didn't even know it.