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The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

blog.ltse.com

531–540 of 561 posts

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope others see that our markets are designed. They are human artifacts. They are not natural laws to be accepted as-is. “Markets” are not the same thing as “the market”. Markets are human artifacts; the market is an emergent behavior. It’s governed by laws beyond our control as surely as the behavior of materials are governed by thermodynamics. If the behavior of your markets fails to match the reality of the ma…

> Markets are human artifacts; the market is an emergent behavior. If "the market" is a 2d array of 1 and 0 that emerges from a cellular automata, then "markets" are the rules for that automata. The human artifact defines the rules and incentives that cause the emergent behavior seen by aggregating all market participants. There is no Platonic ideal "markets" independent of the human structures where they operate any…

"Markets" (locations or brokers designated for trade) represent a very small fraction of all human economic activity. Conflating the rules of NYSE with the rules of the market is a mistake.

> There is no Platonic ideal "markets" independent of the human structures

You need to understand that there absolutely is a single "the market" and it's not platonic at all. It refers to the sum behavior of all human economic interaction, which is absolutely a physical reality.

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#532
post #526

This short-term-pervades-the-market is based on the idea that the current stockholders are able to trick future stockholders into buying stocks that have eaten their seed corn, before those future stockholders realize this. How can this process of continually tricking the next investor possibly work out quarter after quarter? Wouldn't the stock market have tanked long ago if this was, in fact, underlying the bulk of…

If short term investing wasn’t valuable why would real estate closest to the stock exchange be priced higher simply because it enables HFT to shave milliseconds of execution time?

I meant short term being the notion that companies are sacrificing long term growth for the next quarter's results.

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems problematic. The longer you hold your stock the more voting rights and hence value it accrues. But if you sell the shares all the accrued value is lost. So it surely leads to proxy voting, where former owners still are registered as owners of their former shares, but vote them for whoever they secretly sold the shares to.

I might be naive, but are you not going to get caught doing this? Because if you're secretly selling enough shares that your voting rights will have an actual impact, it seems like that'll be a fair amount of money you'd also need to transfer secretly, which is not that easy.

No, controls would be trivial to evade.

Let’s say I have a billion dollars worth of Tesla stock that I’ve owned for a decade, giving me twice as much votes as normal. You want to increase your voting power, and are willing to pay $1.5B for my shares to do so.

We sign a loan agreement. You loan me $1.5B at a high interest rate, secured by my shares and my agreement to vote them as per your instructions. If you demand repayment I can pay off the loan in full simply by surrendering my shares to you, and all interest is forgiven. If I want to repay the loan, I have to pay the full balance, all interest and a prepayment penalty in cash, no stock accepted.

You don’t want me to repay the loan so the shares can retain their ownership premium, and so I can’t without paying a massive penalty + interest. You can never require me to repay the $1.5B, I can simply surrender the shares, so I can spend it immediately any way I want.

So we can keep this “loan“ going for decades more, or until you want to sell these shares. Presumably you will sign a similar “loan” agreement with your buyer to maintain the voting power the share accumulated.

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#534
post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If short term investing wasn’t valuable why would real estate closest to the stock exchange be priced higher simply because it enables HFT to shave milliseconds of execution time?

I meant short term being the notion that companies are sacrificing long term growth for the next quarter's results.

I was tracking, I just don’t think the two points are completely uncoupled. If individual companies and by extension the market are long-term focused, there shouldn’t be that much incentive for trading now vs trading 1 sec from now.

Unless I suppose you think those who trade companies and those who run companies aren’t intertwined. I do v think there’s some evidence of short term bias. E.g., taking on debt to fund dividends to give the illusion everything is fine

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#535

Let me try to summarize everyone’s same question: - The idea of a stock exchange that allows companies and investors to focus on 5, 10, 25 year horizons sounds great! - However companies on normal stock exchanges now already try to do this, but it’s hard because of quarterly earnings, pressure for quarterly growth, etc - How is LTSE different? Seems like: Companies and investors “promise” to have a longer term focus…

just want to float an idea that occurred to me that might explain the disappointment/confusion from HN:

the LTSE in its current form is a Minimal Viable Product.

It is maximally compatible with existing exchanges in order to encourage trading, listing and adoption from day 1. Eric picked the governance angle to start with, but it's probably not the final vision. He believes it is high leverage; reasonable people might disagree.

but it is perfectly explainable to have v1 of the LTSE be a little disappointing, given that this is the same guy that coined the MVP.

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#536
post #529
post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are not enough upvotes for this comment.

Eric, I see you've commented hours after my question was posted, but neglected to answer? You openly admitted to infecting IMVU users' computers with malicious toolbars on purpose to make quick, easy money at Twiistup in a speech on startups, and now you are asking us to buy stocks on your exchange? You're not even mentioning that SEC REGSHO applies to ANY US stock exchange, so all the brokers have to do is let certa…

YASE - Yet Another Stock Exchange "This time I, Yes I, collect the listing fees! Yippee" - IMVU senior spyware deployer

I fixed the marketing for you Eric. It's less abstract now. Almost like your startup speech at Skirball. https://victorcaballero.com/twiistup-7-agenda/

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#537
post #465
post #449

The blog post doesn’t explain what, if anything, is different about how the market works. From the name, I expected that it would require holding an investment for a minimum period. But I see no evidence of that elsewhere on the site. I do see listing requirements that supposedly require companies to have a long term focus. But then elsewhere I see that all securities in the S&P 500 and the RUSSEL 2000 index will be…

IMO, the main difference between LTSE and a traditional stock exchange is the way votes are allocated to shareholders. Traditionally voting power is proportional to shares owned. However, on LTSE the amount of time a stock has been held is also considered. There is no minimum holding period, but there is an incentive to hold. A bit of a tangent: Since there is a premium in voting rights (GOOG vs GOOGL), I'm curious t…

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Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#538

Given current 50x multiples and high valuations for unprofitable tech companies I don't think there is much evidence that that current stock markets are unable to value long term ventures. As well the extent to which a company is expected to deliver quarterly results is more defined by their board and capital structure than anything in inherent to NYSE or the NASDAQ.

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Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be part of the system that built machines that auto traded on arbitrage opportunities due to millsec/nanosec differences in reported prices in different exchanges. Although probably not popular I would suggest that long term stocks needs to incorporate features that actively block certain trading patterns: limit price changes, limit buy/ sell frequency, & disallow shorting. I have been heavily involved in t…

I agree. I ran a DMA/Equity algo and internal prop desk's tech at 2 major banks and you are 100% right. Any delay (artificial or real) would be what we would target for artibitrage.

Best case scenario you make wider spreads and folks somewhere get paid more to market make with higher risks...

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#540
post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant short term being the notion that companies are sacrificing long term growth for the next quarter's results.

I was tracking, I just don’t think the two points are completely uncoupled. If individual companies and by extension the market are long-term focused, there shouldn’t be that much incentive for trading now vs trading 1 sec from now. Unless I suppose you think those who trade companies and those who run companies aren’t intertwined. I do v think there’s some evidence of short term bias. E.g., taking on debt to fund di…

1 second trades are more an arbitrage thing, not a short-term vs long-term thing. I don't believe quarterly results have any particular influence over high frequency trading, other than in the minutes after the earnings are announced.

Arbitrage is like pouring water into the bathtub. The water will slosh around, eventually finding its lowest energy level, until the next pouring event. Arbitrage is the pull of gravity mixed with friction.

> taking on debt to fund dividends to give the illusion everything is fine

I know that some companies do this. I find it strange they imagine they can fool investors doing this, because they aren't fooling anyone. See the CEO anecdote I posted upthread.

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