551–560 of 898 posts
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Inequality is huge, just because you can buy 0.0000001% of IBM doesn't make that fair/democratic.
If you buy stocks, you'll have the same proportionate gains/losses as everyone else who buys the same stocks. Sounds fair to me.
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No, because traders don’t price the market as a whole, they price individual stocks. Some stocks will never recover, and some of that recovery will be companies that don’t exist yet. While these things might offset to create a market recovery, there’s no way to price in the expected cash flow for a company that doesn’t exist.
Traders can certainly spread their bets across many companies representing a business sector, and routinely do so. This "a few firms might go bankrupt so this explains why entire sectors experience massive volatility that isn't justified by long-term revenue expectations" claim seems like someone trying to rationalize irrational human behavior.
The price of Delta, United, American etc. gets discounted because the risk of each individual stock being bankrupted is high. But they don’t go to 0, because there’s also a chance each of the airlines might somehow survive to next year and go back to profitability.
If all the airlines go bankrupt, someone will step in and create new companies in the sector by buying up the bankrupt companies’ physical assets, but the existing shareholders will lose everything despite the sector itself being viable in the long term.
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Why are stocks inaccessible to so many Americans? There are fractional shares, and you do not have to be an accredited investor.
37% of Americans struggle with hunger [1] and 57% of Americans have less than $1000 in savings. [2] Would you be buying stocks if you didn't have enough to eat? [1] https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/facts [2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/58-americans-less-1-000-09000... EDIT: Apologies, first should be 37 million Americans (NOT 37%)
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Do you think a typical middle class American would rather be living in the world as it was 40 years ago though? Or today's world, full of technology and infrastructure that was funded by the rich?
Is this even a question? 40 years ago housing, healthcare and education were vastly more accessible than they are today. Middle class jobs paid wages that could produce a middle class standard of living. The only thing you'd miss out on would be a bunch of hollow digital toys. Would I trade my iphone to be able to own a house and have my children go to college? Of course! Who wouldn't!? In 1985, in-state tuition and…
Diplomas were more accessible. Education has never been cheaper.
This isn't an attack on your point, since what people really want are the diplomas (and the comfy middle-class jobs they led to), I'm just pointing out that everything that runs on information transfer[1] is incomparably cheaper in 2020 than in 1980. The college tuition problem isn't an economics of information transfer problem, it's an economics of status transfer problem.
[1] All of which you dismiss as "hollow digital toys" somewhat unfairly I feel, but I don't actually know enough to have an informed opinion on 1980 vs 2020, so I won't get into it.
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Corporate bonds are... interesting... now. I've been looking at airline bonds that mature in the next 6 to 18 months. Quite a few of them have yields-to-maturity north of 7%. I figure airline bonds aren't super risky (at least for the majors in the US), since the US gov't will prop them up until the end of time. Some of these aren't rated investment-grade anymore, but I don't particularly trust the ratings to be all…
I suspect many airlines will go bust before this is done. Not all of them. A few are going to come back strong. You could diversify, buy JETS (airline ETF.)
My bet is there will be a large number of hard hit industries (e.g. airlines, cruise lines, hotels, car rental companies) which will see widespread ch 11 and bankruptcies. Makes sense if then they can reemerge after eliminating a good chunk of debt and also roll back labour agreements. Likely a bunch of consolidation/merges on their way as a result too.
Should see the ball start rolling after the mid-year results come out early July.
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"Self made" is an over-simplification of a complicated process... one which you impressively admit you've achieved. Which, 100% - that is amazing, and you should be proud of your accomplishments. My definition of "self made" is not important, my point is that everyone's definition is going to be different. Here's the thing - I have no idea who you are, what your history is, and I can't make a single comment on the va…
Thank you... but I never said if I thought I was actually self made! What if I tell you that my parents did pay for my education? And they gave me a car when I was 16? Or they were fortunate enough to be able buy a computer when I was in elementary school, which definitely contributed to my interests today, many decades later? Am I still self made? Or did that give me too much of a "head start" so I'm not? Was it so…
I'd personally say, me too in so many ways... I had my struggles with an early death in the immediate family but it did provide the money to support me into my early start!
Here's the thing - struggle or not I absolutely have been around poverty and have actually done a bit in advocacy in the area. I don't say this for a gold star - just to qualify what I'm about to say.
Being poor is hard. Like really hard. It's expensive in sooo many ways and I freakin' wish more of us had empathy for those people that are struggling in that situation. I see WAY too many folks on HN that are comfortable in highly-paid positions like myself that don't acknowledge these things and even sound angry in regards to how people are "suppose to be"... lemme tell ya... as someone with struggles - man sometimes it's really really hard. Even with some of the insane privileges that I've been afforded.
All-in-all ... I wish more people admitted "man I had a lot of help" regardless if it's a computer in elementary school, or investments in education, etc. I know this has a negative "SJW" spin to it these days, but man... I have been privileged. holy crap I've been privileged. Doesn't diminish my accomplishments, but we need to come to terms that as a society everyone should have as equal of a playing field as possible..!
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Guillotines might have worked well in the past, but with modern weapons and technology, you can use a much smaller portion of the population to suppress a much larger portion of the population. You can pay 10% of the population well enough that they support the top 0.01%, and the top 10% can pay the next 20% to 30% well enough or provide a sufficient probability to move up (or illusion) that they are incentivized to…
This approach works well particularly well if the masses are decapitate by identifying anyone with high intelligence and “inviting” them into the 10% via education. Angry masses without a leader are not going to do anything.
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All governments are Mafias to some extent. That's what it means to have police. The difference is that we expect the government to leverage its Mafia-like power in a manner that best suits its citizens.
That seems like an unfair comparison. The govt has courts that can overturn it. Before trump we didn't have the whim on the executive.
Obama ordered drone strikes on Americans. Reagan ran Iran-Contra. Kennedy tried to invade Cuba. FDR tried to grow the Supreme Court to 13.
A better approach would be for the federal government as a whole - yes, all three branches - to reign in their power so that there's less power to abuse. The odds of that are zero.
An increasingly large % of the economy is concentrated in a handful of highly profitable, efficient tech companies and multinationals such as Walmart, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Stimulus $ is pure bottom line growth for these huge companies as smaller businesses close. Also, huge growth in business to business commerce, bypassing consumer spending altogether. Facebook and Google selling ad space to othe…
Yes, all this, plus most of those out of work today are doing fine because of the stimulus and additional $2400 a month in unemployment from the federal govt. I know family members who are making more at home now than they do when they are working.
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Thanks for the response! I guess my issue is that there's no actual value in owning non-dividend shares for any amount of time. So I can sell the stock to someone else, but what are they paying me for? The opportunity for the value to increase more? Why is someone interested in paying me more than I paid? I feel like there's never any real money that's made back by owning those shares. What's the goal? Removed from t…
Stock gives you a legal claim to a portion of the assets of a company, which as you point out, manifests itself quite clearly during a liquidation event like a dividend payment or an acquisition by some other entity. But tt shouldn't bother you that plans for such a liquidation event might not be clear when you buy the stock. What matters to you (and future investors that might buy your shares from you) is that if su…
So really when you get down do it, you're paying for the prospect that the company will eventually be able to do something that will return money/value to you, but you don't know what. And so when you're buying shares, you're analyzing the risk between them going broke, and the value that they could potentially pay out someday. Same as private equity, but with a less clear path to actually extracting value from the company.
Then if the company was really screwed up, the shareholders could technically vote on a way to turn the company's assets into cash, which they would get a portion of. Or do anything else with, since the shareholders get to vote on the outcomes of those things.