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The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

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Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give a shareholder's perspective. Management, when left unchecked, frequently engages in in wasteful empire building and prestige projects. The most apparent manifestation of this is in mergers and acquisitions. Decades of evidence shows that the median merger destroys shareholder value for the acquiring company. Imposing strong controls on corporate management is one of the most important thing that shareholder…

Management left unchecked just does what they're incentivized to do. You can't pass on the blame as shareholders when shareholders create incentive packages that reward getting a bonus today for an acquisition instead of not really getting paid for sustainably growing the business over the next decade.

Management in many companies are just puppets installed for the purpose of keeping a person or group of persons in control. You'd be surprised at how many companies have management that has the decision making capabilities of a toddlers. And when I say toddler, I mean that in a literal sense. You can take an intelligent toddler and have them make day-to-day decisions that would be BETTER than middle-management.

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"go off the reservation" .. I suspect that my father many decades ago engaged in casual references like this, but I recall as a child that it was frowned upon by people who sought to reset and build positive relations between races in North America

Forgive me for straying OT: It seems like a fact-based analogy. 'A group have been restrained to "territory", but a member has broken that restraint'. There doesn't seem inherently to be a judgement as to the restraint or the rogue being right/wrong. I'd be interested in why you felt the usage was beyond the pale sufficiently that it needed to be reined in? The concept of territorial reservations doesn't appear to me…

Not the parent, but it's obvious what the origin of the phrase is, and while it may not be as icky as something like "open the kimono", it's definitely one that is trivially replaced with no loss in meaning, and therefore almost certainly should be:

"The issue with 'off the reservation' and similar phrases is that these things are said without any thought. They become a part of the common vernacular. Freely they move from mind to mind, mouth to mouth. Maybe the meaning of these sorts of phrases never should have been the issue. Maybe living lives without thinking about what we say and do is of greater concern."

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/06/29/326690947...

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#64

Genuine question, what good does the ability to buy and sell stock on the short term do for humanity ? Does it have any specific vertue appart from allowing one to make make money by betting correctly ? Why are not all sales required to be long term ?

It prevents capital being mis-allocated. It turns out that is one of the most important things to do in modern, capital intensive, economies. It also means people can invest for shorter periods and that means more capital is available for investment. This has a double bonus where it reduces the risk of investments again making more capital available...

I don't have the background to understand your answer, can you make it simpler with some examples ?

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#65
post #61

Just throwing this out there... Why not a simple rule to require all shares to be held for at least 24 hours before selling? It would certainly change the game in every way imaginable.

Hundreds of companies will lose revenue from commissions / fees of transactions.

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#67
post #43

Genuine question, what good does the ability to buy and sell stock on the short term do for humanity ? Does it have any specific vertue appart from allowing one to make make money by betting correctly ? Why are not all sales required to be long term ?

The fact that stocks can be bought and sold quickly has a use, namely that the price should signal how the market values this asset.

But what good does it do to have such a instant information on speculative value outside of the world of making money with it ?

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#68

Genuine question, what good does the ability to buy and sell stock on the short term do for humanity ? Does it have any specific vertue appart from allowing one to make make money by betting correctly ? Why are not all sales required to be long term ?

Not a strong conviction from me but I can see a case for liquidity when you can sell quickly.

I'm not talking about the times it take for selling as much as the absence of delay between buying and selling.

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give a shareholder's perspective. Management, when left unchecked, frequently engages in in wasteful empire building and prestige projects. The most apparent manifestation of this is in mergers and acquisitions. Decades of evidence shows that the median merger destroys shareholder value for the acquiring company. Imposing strong controls on corporate management is one of the most important thing that shareholder…

Management left unchecked just does what they're incentivized to do. You can't pass on the blame as shareholders when shareholders create incentive packages that reward getting a bonus today for an acquisition instead of not really getting paid for sustainably growing the business over the next decade.

People say that shareholders "own" a public company, but that ownership is much more limited than ownership in the normal sense. In reality shareholders have very little direct input on how the CEO gets paid. The best chance for shareholders to influence CEO incentives would be if an activist investor got involved and made it an issue, but that's fairly rare, and usually only happens in the most egregious cases.
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