Bruh, wtf you think stock trading is? Buying into funds is just hiring professional gamblers to work for you, "insider trading* is cheating and dark pools is just the high rollers table.
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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In gambling, the house always wins, by extracting value from the players. In stock trading, the players (capitalists) collectively always win, by extracting value from labor, technological growth, and natural resources. These are not the same picture.
Sure, you can take on as much risk as you like using derivatives, and emulate a gambler using the stock market as a source of randomness (volatility). But that's not how most traders behave, and it's not how most traders' payoffs work.
In gambling, the house always wins, by extracting value from the players. In stock trading, the players (capitalists) collectively always win, by extracting value from labor, technological growth, and natural resources. These are not the same picture.
Excellent analogy. People who equate the stock market and gambling should go look up where the DJIA stood in October 1994. The slot machines in Vegas don't magically start spitting out profit just because you're patient, but stocks generally do over time.
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In gambling, the house always wins, by extracting value from the players. In stock trading, the players (capitalists) collectively always win, by extracting value from labor, technological growth, and natural resources. These are not the same picture.
Not all gambling requires a casino/house.
Even in a home poker game, it is not possible for all the players to go home having made a profit, whereas that is very possible in the stock market due to growth, labor, and natural resources.
(The coal miner who gets a wage and black lung is not a player in the stock market. Neither is the sun, which provides free energy to agribusiness.)
Yes, general investing is not zero sum, however many methods of advanced trading are. Options trading, which is prominent and easy to access on Robinhood, is much closer to gambling (and is treated that way by many users) and is zero sum.
Most active trading strategies require successfully arbitraging, or extracting inefficiencies out of the market, and you can't do either of those things without someone else losing money.
Passive investment is investing in the companies that underlay the market, active trading is extracting value out of the market itself.
90% of users lost money while trading
the end result is very much the same
Damn, I’m up over 100% since I downloaded it seven years ago. Thank you, ETFs and tech companies I dig!
Nice story, bro.
I'm also up, more years, not Robinhood.
Then you glance over to Wallstreet Bets, they are the direct opposite on the curve.
Yet still almost everyone loses money on exchanges, for various reasons which I don't want to spend time writing up.
But market has been irrational for many years, with no signals of slowing down.
I mean, I feel most people who lost money were doing "options trading", basically full on gambling/speculation. If you had put that money in an s&p500 index fund, chances of losing money are slim.
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Stock prices at least have the possibility of being based on something substantial other than dice rolls. Derivatives, not so sure.
"Possibility" but not an "actuality" since share prices are typically based on the feelings of major investors and not necessarily what's actually happening within a company.
Having a diversified portfolio has a positive expected return. Gambling has a negative expected return. There's a long history of stock investing resulting in positive average returns, and there's a long history of slots resulting in negative average returns.
If you're buying good companies (or buying an index) and holding long-term, you are expected to get positive returns, therefore it's not gambling. Any investment can have a negative return, it's the mathematical expectation that separates it from gambling.
It's possible for the stock market only to grow because it externalizes costs (environmental damage, health of workers, etc.), and if that's the case, we need to see if society is actually proceeding in a positive direction as a whole (I generally believe this to be the case), but consider for a moment that the economic windfall experienced by many western nations was (and still is in many ways, think banana plantations) largely made possible by the subjugation of imperialized nations. In this case, was the economic windfall experienced by the imperial powers and their trade partners actually a good for society as a tide that rose all boats, or not?
If we fail to consider the biggest losers of the stock market, those that cannot even necessarily participate, it becomes much closer to gambling at the very least. I'm not here to have an argument about whether or not capitalism and the stock market and such things are actually good or bad for society as a whole, just that it's easy to ignore the biggest losers of the system by virtue of the fact that they don't necessarily even invest in the first place. In this case, the universe is the casino, and humanity are the gamblers, as compared to just the stock market being the casino and the investors the gamblers.
Not that your comment is wrong necessarily just that there's more ways of thinking about it.
It’s possible for the stock market only to grow because it externalizes costs
Sure, and ideally governments step in to return those costs to companies. For example, I think we've done an absolutely terrible job of managing climate change, and we've largely allowed companies to push those costs onto the people at large. That said, just because they are pushing off costs onto society at large doesn't mean they're a net negative, it just complicates the math a bit.
I'm a huge fan of Pigouvian taxes, and in the case of carbon emissions, that means carbon taxes (not credits or caps, but direct taxes based on carbon emissions). Those taxes should ideally equal the negative externalities of those companies, so if a competitor can reverse those externalities for less than it would cost the company to eliminate them, everyone wins (i.e. we now have two profitable companies). This has a two-fold impact:
- encourages companies to produce fewer negative externalities
- allows delay of expensive changes, with a short-term plan to compensate impacted individuals (or correct the externality, voter's choice)
If we can put such a system in place, it makes it a lot easier to assess which companies are actually net positives for society.
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All these copium defend the market takes, you telling me Tesla, a failed venture living off government subsidies, is worth 16x more than the hundred year old Ford that actually makes a profit without fraud?
Tesla stock prices in the expectation that they'll have robotaxi services and general purpose robots in the near future. And also that they will be leaders in these fields, ahead of the competition.
How likely/unlikely that is to happen is debatable, but that's why some people are valuing the company so high right now.
It's also why he's hanging it all on Trump right now.
That's what he's after - the complete deregulation of self-driving safety standards in the US.
Hi-tech tulips.
What? The stock took a huge hit after that reveal. It's a cult of personality.
Yeah, because the market went from having the opinion of "I'm 80% sure that Tesla is going to do this robo taxi, automaton thing" to " I'm 65% sure that Tesla is going to do this robotaxi, automaton thing". Things are rarely all or nothing with the market.
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a failed venture
Bruh wut.
living off government subsidies
Are you referring to the consumer incentives to buy electric? Not only are these ending, but they’re some of the least hinky government subsidies of business in the economy, because they go direct to the consumer. Have you seen what our government does for corn farmers and big oil? Oh right, corn and oil: those other “failed ventures” LOL
Tesla, a failed venture living off government subsidies
It's not a failed venture precisely because it lives off government money. Show me a Fortune 500 company and I'll show you a large stream of public sector receipts.
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Weren't they one of those blocking early GME?
They turned off the buy button when it was about to squeeze.
Even before that they have been accused of not buying stocks ordered by users, then buying at sell order and waiting for the price to raise to sell so they get a profit. It's been questioned a long time.
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Let's be honest, most share trading is more like gambling than it is like investing.
I work for a publicly traded company and I have some visibility into what’s happening with our products and business. Then I read the Y! Finance page about our stock and it’s all weird math trends analyses and absolutely zero about our company, its fundamentals, and the future of our business. Stock trading is just a bunch of assholes trying to sift the sea of numbers to divine a magic formula. The irony is that their own behavior drives the price changes, so they are feeding straight into the data they are trying to read and act on. What a circle jerk.
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Let's be honest, our "free market" is a regular casino for the plebs that own about 10% of shares in their 401ks and Robinhood accounts, and an intentionally rigged casino for the oligarchs that own the rest, with marked insider information cards, and loaded market manipulation dice.
Gotta love when the bootlickers defend this economy, and market investment, as somehow inclusive, when 93% of stocks are owned by 10% of Americans.
(Saved Fortune article) https://archive.ph/DW0A8
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isnt the market itself exactly that?
Long term market rate of return is positive (extremely positive of late), where as casino gambling is EV negative.
But options and futures exist as a short term hedge on equity investment. Combine that with the vig Robinhood takes on the front end in the form of higher contract prices, and you end up with an EV negative return - more consistent with high stakes gambling than equity investing.
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I class market trackers as investing rather than gambling.
Sure they can still go down (and by a lot), but it tends to be big events like COVID that do that, and it soon bounced back up again.
If you're investing more than a few percent of your portfolio in any one company, you're probably gambling though. And sure, nVidia look a safe bet today, but if Sam Altman comes out tomorrow and goes "sorry guys, this ain't going anywhere" then you'll lose over half your money before you can blink.
I wouldn't invest on a timeframe of less than a few years either. It's not for boosting your rent money. It's just better than leaving your spare money in cash. If the concept of "spare money" is alien, then it's probably not for you.
If you're investing more than a few percent of your portfolio in any one company, you're probably gambling though.
I read a forum post many years ago about people that put all their retirement money into some company that was going to be the sole supplier for some components for the iPhone. Apple didn't end up going with them, and the company was relying entirely on that contract. The company went bankrupt, and the people that invested lost all their money.
In the end, why invest in a small number of companies when you can invest in practically all of them? Bogleheads three fund portfolio (total US stock + total world stock + bonds) is very simple yet will beat most actively-managed portfolios over the long run.
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They must not be worried about pissing off Citadel anymore. I wider what that means.
Great. Now how about Citadel's $65 Billion in securities sold but not purchased? Just kickin that can, eh?
Hard to see how the SEC and DTCC aren't complicit.
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They're almost there…
Let’s pause — I would like to reflect on this incredible phrase, about an asset class that democratizes access to events as they unfold. See, I thought we all had access to the events of the election because we all exist in reality and can find out about them. But apparently, if we can’t gamble on an event, it isn’t happening. This is a fascinating vision of metaphysics, and I would like to hear more about it. No one bet on my birth, for instance, and thus there is no asset class relating to my existence. So am I real?
I just want to tip my hat to Elizabeth Lopatto's writing in this piece. I miss following her on twitter and had forgotten how spicy and on-target she can be. Good stuff.
Run by the types of people that used to run casinos...
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