81–90 of 105 posts
I was recently shopping for an UPS + couple 100Ah Batteries solution and failed to find an easy way to buy something not manufactured in China. Northvolt seems to not be present in retail at all. Are there any good places I should've checked out?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well sure, because they're an investment company. They manage people's money. A lot of people seem to talk about BlackRock as if they're investing their own money, which would be similar to pretending your bank owns all the money that you put in it. They have $10Tn under management, but they have a market cap of $100bn. So the vast majority of what they're doing is just brokering deals for their investors. The fact t…
$10 tn AUM is way too much. I don’t see what the price of their stock has to do with anything.
Why does that matter? Why is 10T too much? It's a big number but that money is ultimately under the control of the individual asset holders (so far as I understand it anyways).
I was recently shopping for an UPS + couple 100Ah Batteries solution and failed to find an easy way to buy something not manufactured in China. Northvolt seems to not be present in retail at all. Are there any good places I should've checked out?
[flagged]
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I was recently shopping for an UPS + couple 100Ah Batteries solution and failed to find an easy way to buy something not manufactured in China. Northvolt seems to not be present in retail at all. Are there any good places I should've checked out?
Another Swedish company that does battery tech: https://mattr.se/official-projects/
But not really consumer products either.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Having said that, Blackstone/rock has grown far too much. People need to stop sending their money to their index funds. Where else do you send it to? Vanguard, with 7.7T AUM? For reference, Blackrock's AUM is 9.4T.
My choice was to pick stocks. This is hard so I built a stock analysis platform for myself. But there are much better ways to get a diversified basket of solid stocks than blindly sending your money to the same 500 companies everyone else is sending their money to. There isn’t a simple formulaic answer to the question of how society should most optimally invest it’s excess capital.
So then investing in an index fund should be a fine choice for some, even many, correct?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is exactly what investors pay Fink and the BlackRock team to do. Most people don't have time to analyze and choose things to invest in, so they offload that responsibility to BlackRock in exchange for some fees. The system is working as intended.
To me, the bigger issue is whether BlackRock just gets paid a fee to manage the portfolio composition, or whether they can also exercise voting rights on shares in their ETF.
https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/about-us/investment-stew...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that it's a conflict of interest, but I'm not sure how the chair of the fed could keep their money without a conflict of interest somewhere, given that their role necessarily has interests in all US financial institutions. For the chair to not have a conflict of interest, they'd need to forfeit all their money, or keep it in cash under their mattress.
I'm of the opinion that anyone in government or regulatory agencies should be forbidden from conducting any business at all while in office. Put it all into a blind trust. It should be a crime to be a regulator while doing business with the entities one is regulating. As I said, just my opinion.
Following the Dallas/Boston Fed scandals a couple of years ago, the Fed does enforce this separation of interests, and Powell's money is now held in a blind trust. The trust is managed by Blackrock.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
$10 tn AUM is way too much. I don’t see what the price of their stock has to do with anything.
Agreed. Investing with one of the huge investment firms such as BlackRock, Vanguard or State Street feels like investing in the erosion of democracy and the monopolization of the means of production. The optimal strategy for them is to coerce all the companies that they invest in to only do business with each other in order to completely lock new competitors out of the market. This is very bad for consumers and socie…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well sure, because they're an investment company. They manage people's money. A lot of people seem to talk about BlackRock as if they're investing their own money, which would be similar to pretending your bank owns all the money that you put in it. They have $10Tn under management, but they have a market cap of $100bn. So the vast majority of what they're doing is just brokering deals for their investors. The fact t…
Agree on all points except the comparison with banks. The banks do technically own the money you put in it - and what you get in return is an IOU. So a bank is a very different sort of thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is exactly what investors pay Fink and the BlackRock team to do. Most people don't have time to analyze and choose things to invest in, so they offload that responsibility to BlackRock in exchange for some fees. The system is working as intended.
To me, the bigger issue is whether BlackRock just gets paid a fee to manage the portfolio composition, or whether they can also exercise voting rights on shares in their ETF.