ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ .And go easy on that ENTER key. I feel like I'm reading the Daily Mirror.
We can fix the trader problem by fixing capital gains. Anything held under a month should be taxed at 50%, under a year, 25%.Rent-seeking by the government is still rent-seeking.
I'd love to explore this a bit more. Isn't this a definitive growth strategy? As a thought experiment what would happen?
I really don't understand the hate here. You guys talk like plans like this guy's to make money from the recession were causing our economic problems. People like this guy that buy stocks when the prices are low are part of what helps to end a recession.The stock market has fuck-all to do with the economy, except that it occasionally correlates with it.
posted by straight at 5:07 PM on September 26 [+] [!]
I'm no economist, but waiting until a stock bottoms out isn't really helping. Investing in a company when its stock is undervalued or needs a shot when it otherwise looks promising, and then retaining that stock in one's portfolio long term might more be considered "help".Neither helps the company. When you buy a stock, you aren't giving a company money. You are just buying an investment someone else made long ago.
posted by Horselover Phattie at 5:48 PM on September 26 [+] [!]
The guy who wrote [on Forbes] mistakenly wrote that I’m a Wall Street trader. I’m not an institutional trader. I wouldn’t dream of ever doing that. I trade my own money, my own account...His story is that he's a day trader who has always traded with his own money, online from his home. He's never worked for a bank or an instititution. So, there's nothing out there that could really confirm or deny whether he's a "real" trader, or a fake trader, or just a random guy dabbling in the market with smallish sums.
...I started trading for real in 2006...
I trade mostly the Dow futures, also a bit of forex, and I trade stocks, the most liquid stocks in the market.
The ideologues of the left who profess to see it as a parasitic activity, phagocytozing the real economy, are ignorant of the reality of the facts. Since the beginning of the 1980s, financial transactions have yielded more money, overall, than capital invested in the production of goods, whether material or non-material; the purchase and sale of fictive capital on the stock markets and exchanges yields more than the productive development of real capital.Aaargh. This is kind of a true statement supported by false reasoning.
My point of departure was actually the fact that the microelectronic revolution allows production of growing quantities of commodities with decreasing volume of work, in such a way that sooner or later the system will have to run up against its internal limits [2].Computers!
Right. Because we're in a recession/crash. Now is a good time to buy. When the market crashes it will be a better time to buy. 10 years from now is a good time to sell. What you fail to mention is that if you had bought BAC in '96 at 6.57 and sold it prior to the current crash in '07 at 52 or '06 at 45 or even '03 at 32 you would have made a substantial amount of money.Now is not a good time to buy Bank of America. Do you know anything about Bank of America?
Basically you can't pick an arbitrary time and say that you're absolutely going to make money by buying and holding for ten years, and more importantly you can't know that any given time is a significantly better time to buy than any other time.You make money over any 10 year period. Except, you know, the last 10 year period.
So... everybody agrees that this is legit, not a yesmenesque subversion or something? I hesitate taking at face value anyone whose name anagrams to "rationalise ass", despite the fact that the name has appeared in an unrelated news story a year ago. And that he has a youtube account from '09 and a twitter account from '10...The stuff he's saying is not at all uncommon to hear from people involved in trading. They all seem to be kind of nuts. If you're not working for a major investment bank or something there's no reason to put a gloss on it.
Neither helps the company. When you buy a stock, you aren't giving a company money. You are just buying an investment someone else made long ago.Not true, you increase the share price, which makes it easier for the company to raise money by issuing new shares. I pointed this out once in a thread where someone was trying to claim that people who owned BP stock weren't "responsible" for the oil spill because they weren't 'helping' the company, when in fact they were.
Anyone here who says they can time the market is defacto declaring that they are smarter than all the MIT quants and all the computer sims running in all the big investment houses.Only if you assume that the MIT quants and computer sims running in all the big investment houses can't time the market. But why would you make that assumption? In fact, big investment companies absolutely do try to time the market doing things like high-frequency trading and statistical arbitrage. I'm talking about millisecond timing though.
I’ve never liked the notion of talking about economic “science” — it’s much too raw and imperfect a discipline to be paired casually with things like chemistry or biology, and in general when someone talks about economics as a science I immediately suspect that I’m hearing someone who doesn’t know that models are only models. Still, when I was younger I firmly believed that economics was a field that progressed over time, that every generation knew more than the generation before.posted by delmoi at 10:45 PM on September 27, 2011 [1 favorite]
The question now is whether that’s still true. In 1971 it was clear that economists knew a lot that they hadn’t known in 1931. Is that clear when we compare 2011 with 1971? I think you can actually make the case that in important ways the profession knew more in 1971 than it does now.
I’ve written a lot about the Dark Age of macroeconomics, of the way economists are recapitulating 80-year-old fallacies in the belief that they’re profound insights, because they’re ignorant of the hard-won insights of the past.
What I’d add to that is that at this point it seems to me that many economists aren’t even trying to get at the truth. When I look at a lot of what prominent economists have been writing in response to the ongoing economic crisis, I see no sign of intellectual discomfort, no sense that a disaster their models made no allowance for is troubling them; I see only blithe invention of stories to rationalize the disaster in a way that supports their side of the partisan divide. And no, it’s not symmetric: liberal economists by and large do seem to be genuinely wrestling with what has happened, but conservative economists don’t
And all this makes me wonder what kind of an enterprise I’ve devoted my life to. -- Paul Krugman
I disagree with Krugman on that. Until relatively recently, biology was as inexact as economics is.Biology gradually accumulated knowledge over time. But there is a huge difference in that, basically since the beginning of modern science you've been able to do controlled experiments in biology. You may not know the underlying why of something but you know exactly what will happen because you can isolate it and test it. That doesn't happen in economics. People look at data and infer models, but they don't really have any way to test them.
You also have to keep in mind that economics is suffering a problem of most of its supposed brain trust working towards the ends of the Chamber of Commerce rather than actually attempting to move the field forward.Well, right but that's what makes it 'not a science'. It's probably possible to do economics in a scientific way but if people calling themselves economists aren't doing it then what do you have?
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2. ????
3. Survive
posted by bwerdmuller at 12:08 PM on September 26, 2011