I used to think that the market “drove engagement” - keeping people with money interested in the dealings of the companies they invested their money in.
Lately, I feel like it’s just a giant Casino.
Comment on The Stock Market is Just Financial Fantasy Sports
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 hours ago
Former econometrician here:
Yes. Correct.
Ever since stock buybacks became the bog standard default, and P/E ratios are between ‘significantly elevated’ and ‘completely fucking delusional’…
Yep. None this shit makes any real sense.
Which is actually a huge problem.
Because… the economic ‘point’ of a stock market, in capitalism, is more or less to act as a kind of giant, collective brain, that figures out how to efficiently and rationally allocate capital and investments.
The ‘invisible hand’, and all that.
So when that brain spends a decade or two more or less in a euphoric psychotic break… well… it doesn’t exactly make sound financial choices.
Which translates into about two decades of nonsensical investment of a society’s resources.
Less ‘theoretically’: Its a giant gambling machine, and if you’re not rigging the game yourself, 99.9999% chance you’re the mark, you’re gonna lose.
And you won’t see it coming, not untill its too late for you to get out intact.
Economists have for a long time referred to state run lotteries as effectively an ‘idiot tax’, because anyone who can do fairly basic statistics also knows they’re very likely to lose money, thus, only idiots gamble.
The stock market as it is now more or less represents a more complex version of the same kind of thing… you’ve got the day traders, and they almost always get their clocks cleaned, they just develop a neurotic-obsessive personality based on ‘no, I’m the one guy that can outsmart the market’.
No, you can’t.
MangoCats@feddit.it 20 hours ago
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
Way, way back in the day, when the primary model of stocks and the stock market was…
I buy 1 share of Company X stock, for Y dollars, and once a year, it pays me Z dollars as a dividend…
Yes, with that paradigm, it made a lot more sense to say that this ‘drove engagement’… because a stock operated more like a miniature bond in/for a company.
But, now the whole model is ‘stock price must go up forever’, nest eggs are capital gains realized upon retirement, that you take loans out against to avoid paying cap gains tax…
…not dividends gradually paid into a growing retirement savings account, managed by a regional or local bank.
Which entirely blows up that way of thinking.
IronBird@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
that is exactly how the US markets are setup, you can compare the US markets to EU or practically any other besides Japan and they’re drastically less exciting.
the US’s is designed around “maximizing lquidity” via a mix of over and under regulation all meant to increase volatility.
uncouple9831@lemmy.zip 19 hours ago
You mean 500 p/e for an established company isn’t reasonable just because they scribbled AI on a piece of paper?
MarriedCavelady50@lemmy.ml 20 hours ago
Don’t index funds work better than individual stocks?
tempest@lemmy.ca 20 hours ago
They do, however a lot of people have known that for a while.
The large index funds have a lot of influence when it comes to voting.
As more and more people just invest in ETFs I do wonder if we are headed for some delightful market crash as a result.
I’m not even close to an expert though… Which is why I use index funds in the first place. Just wondering how I’m going to get screwed before it eventually happens.
pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 20 hours ago
Index funds are much better than individual stocks. But Index fund price to earnings ratios still reflect their individual component stocks.
When the P/E ratio is 40, a rough way to read that is “it will take 40 years of stability for this purchase to pay off”.
Many people don’t have 40 working years left to wait for a stock purchase today to pay off.
And the supply of “years of stability” isn’t looking amazing, right now, either.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
More or less this, yes.
Index funds are generally less risky than trying to pick individual stocks, balance your own portfolio, or god help you, be an active day trader.
But, as pinball wizard says… if the blend of stocks the index etf is based on… if all the components are also varying degrees of delusional…
Then everything could break, rather rapidly, if enough small delusions, or one big shared delusion… are revealed as such.
I’m not actually a financial advisor, but I am giving some advice:
Go make a chart of the DJIA, divided by the USD price of Gold.
… Gold is pretty signifcantly outperforming the stock market, in this 2nd Trump term.
As the Chinese say, we are currently living in ‘interesting’ times.
IronBird@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
it’s incredibly easy to beat the market when it a bull market (where do you think all these ratfucks put their illgotten gains…), i’m up 5000%+ ytd, not shorting anything just buying low selling high
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 hours ago
Yes, and then the trick is timing your exit or restructuring into countercyclicals … at the right time.
And timing is the part almost everyone fucks up.
Also, if you’re ‘buying low and selling high’, and you’re up 5000+ ytd?
Then you’re basically daytrading, which basically means this is a full on part time job for you, at least…
… and while did you say you’re not shortselling, you did not say you’re not using any leverage.
So uh yeah, best of luck, hope you can keep up the perfectly timed dance, and never miss a beat, nor miss an upcoming time signature change.
IronBird@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
not day trading, that’s the real beautiful part of actually knowing how all this works. just avoid the obviously overpriced shit, trade with the barest understanding of the actual value of the underlying and don’t short anything and it’s practically impossible to lose $ in a bull market.
i don’t day trade, more of swing/event trader i guess. point is in a bull market, especially a bubble…there’s shitloads of $ flying around, mostly via passive/algo traders. hunting that liquidity down for yourself really isnt all that hard to do once you understand they key differences between US markets and rest of world (especially EU, who like theirs predictable)
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 hours ago
… right.
At no point did you deny that you’re using leverage.
Which means that if your understanding of ‘how it all works’ is… wrong… in any significant way…
Well then your personal situation unwinds in a micro version of how the rest of the economy currently is.
Your strategy relies on never making a significant mistake.
Statistically, you will.
Oh right, also this:
A few million is nothing.
Maybe enough to confidently own a pretty nice home.
Assuming the starving mob doesn’t visit you.
In terms of fixing society?
That’s roughly on the scale of helping hundreds or thousands in your local community, on an ongoing basis.
Nothing, in the grand scheme of things.
… A couple million?
Jeff Bezos makes ~3 million dollars in a single hour.
An hour.
Try and square that, really try and think about that.
That house you wanna get, that non profit you wanna set up?
That you took huge risks for, for multiple years, some how lucky enough to never fuck up?
That’s an hour of Jeff sleeping.
He could see your house, or envision that non profit in a dream, and then on a whim, just buy 8 of them when he wakes up.
The solution to this, to trying to fix society is not trying to beat them at their own game.
The solution is breaking the rules of the game.
After all… that’s how they got to be where they are.
yesman@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
At what point do we start to consider that capitalist economies aren’t broken, but that they never worked in the first place?
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
Ideally around 150 years ago, but far, far too late is better than never.