You must log in or register to comment.
I just want to tip my hat to Elizabeth Lopatto’s writing in this piece. I miss following her on twitter and had forgotten how spicy and on-target she can be. Good stuff.
Weren’t they one of those blocking early GME?
It was not just robbingdahood… all of brokers using apox clearing did is my understanding among other brokers using other clearing brokers.
i think you could still buy on fidelity maybe?
They turned off the buy button when it was about to squeeze.
Even before that they have been accused of not buying stocks ordered by users, then buying at sell order and waiting for the price to raise to sell so they get a profit. It’s been questioned a long time.
Yes and no. Iirc, only high-rollers got to have their trades go through.
high rollers use robinhood?
Glad I stopped investing.
Don’t stop investing. Investing the right way is the right thing to do with money you don’t need in the near future to prevent it to rot in bank.
They must not be worried about pissing off Citadel anymore. I wider what that means.
Bruh, wtf you think stock trading is? Buying into funds is just hiring professional gamblers to work for you, "insider trading* is cheating and dark pools is just the high rollers table.
Stock prices at least have the possibility of being based on something substantial other than dice rolls. Derivatives, not so sure.
It’s damn near a roll of the dice of what is going to come out of a CEOs mouth during an earnings call…
“Possibility” but not an “actuality” since share prices are typically based on the feelings of major investors and not necessarily what’s actually happening within a company.
Having a diversified portfolio has a positive expected return. Gambling has a negative expected return. There’s a long history of stock investing resulting in positive average returns, and there’s a long history of slots resulting in negative average returns.
If you’re buying good companies (or buying an index) and holding long-term, you are expected to get positive returns, therefore it’s not gambling. Any investment can have a negative return, it’s the mathematical expectation that separates it from gambling.
People aren’t using Robinhood to invest in index funds via their 401k, they’re using it to “day trade” which is just gambling. Nobody is saying that investing = gambling, they’re saying that buying and selling shares or options in a single company in order to time the market = gambling.
Robinhood has IRAs, and you can totally buy diversified ETFs with it. When I used Robinhood for a few months, that’s basically what I did.
Options can be part of a legitimate strategy (e.g. my brother sells covered calls on dividend-yielding stocks, where the intent is to juice returns a little on a long position), but yes, most people who trade options are gambling.
My argument is that investing != gambling, and the difference is whether there’s a positive expected return. That’s a statistical question, not a “I am smarter than the next rube” question.
How long does an asset need a history of positive returns before it’s no longer “gambling”? Hypothetically, would 15 years be enough?
History is the wrong way to look at it. If I go to a roulette table and the last 10 balls have landed on red, that doesn’t change the odds that the next ball will end on red. Assuming the table and ball are fair, no amount of history will change the probability of the next ball landing on red, so there will always be a negative expected return for any bets placed on a roulette table.
Investment grade securities are different. Businesses are expected to return a profit to shareholders, otherwise they will eventually go bankrupt. So there is a built-in expectation of positive return, regardless of the pricing history of the security. Buy-and-hold investors should always expect a positive return on a diversified portfolio, because, on average, businesses are expected to return a profit. Valuations can certainly fluctuate in the short and medium term separate from profits (valuations include future expected returns), but since it’s not a zero-sum game, long-term returns are expected to be positive.
So no, 15-years is not enough, nor is any other arbitrary amount of time. Any expectation of future returns should be largely founded on the underlying fundamentals of whatever it is you’re buying, and then modified by past returns to adjust the probability of returns going forward.
Stock valuations are a poor proxy for actual value, they’re more a measure of market sentiment, which is why very short-term stock movements (esp. less than a year) are largely just gambling, because as A. Gary Shilling said:
Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent.
So if you’re trading good securities (i.e. companies with positive expected return) on a short-term basis, you’re likely gambling, because you’re betting on changes in market sentiment. But if you’re trading good securities on a long-term basis, the underlying fundamentals should outpace short-term deviations from expected returns. My general number here is 10-years, but many financial experts go as low as 5-years in terms of investment horizon. The historical returns matter a lot less the shorter or longer your time horizon, and IMO are largely only important on medium terms (say, 5-15 years) because at that point we’re looking at more systematic over or under valuations (and tools like the Shiller CAPE do a decent job of indicating that).
It’s possible for the stock market only to grow because it externalizes costs (environmental damage, health of workers, etc.), and if that’s the case, we need to see if society is actually proceeding in a positive direction as a whole (I generally believe this to be the case), but consider for a moment that the economic windfall experienced by many western nations was (and still is in many ways, think banana plantations) largely made possible by the subjugation of imperialized nations. In this case, was the economic windfall experienced by the imperial powers and their trade partners actually a good for society as a tide that rose all boats, or not?
If we fail to consider the biggest losers of the stock market, those that cannot even necessarily participate, it becomes much closer to gambling at the very least. I’m not here to have an argument about whether or not capitalism and the stock market and such things are actually good or bad for society as a whole, just that it’s easy to ignore the biggest losers of the system by virtue of the fact that they don’t necessarily even invest in the first place. In this case, the universe is the casino, and humanity are the gamblers, as compared to just the stock market being the casino and the investors the gamblers.
Not that your comment is wrong necessarily just that there’s more ways of thinking about it.
It’s possible for the stock market only to grow because it externalizes costs
Sure, and ideally governments step in to return those costs to companies. For example, I think we’ve done an absolutely terrible job of managing climate change, and we’ve largely allowed companies to push those costs onto the people at large. That said, just because they are pushing off costs onto society at large doesn’t mean they’re a net negative, it just complicates the math a bit.
I’m a huge fan of Pigouvian taxes, and in the case of carbon emissions, that means carbon taxes (not credits or caps, but direct taxes based on carbon emissions). Those taxes should ideally equal the negative externalities of those companies, so if a competitor can reverse those externalities for less than it would cost the company to eliminate them, everyone wins (i.e. we now have two profitable companies). This has a two-fold impact:
- encourages companies to produce fewer negative externalities
- allows delay of expensive changes, with a short-term plan to compensate impacted individuals (or correct the externality, voter’s choice)
If we can put such a system in place, it makes it a lot easier to assess which companies are actually net positives for society.
In gambling, the house always wins, by extracting value from the players. In stock trading, the players (capitalists) collectively always win, by extracting value from labor, technological growth, and natural resources. These are not the same picture.
Sure, you can take on as much risk as you like using derivatives, and emulate a gambler using the stock market as a source of randomness (volatility). But that’s not how most traders behave, and it’s not how most traders’ payoffs work.
In gambling, the house always wins, by extracting value from the players. In stock trading, the players (capitalists) collectively always win, by extracting value from labor, technological growth, and natural resources. These are not the same picture.
Excellent analogy. People who equate the stock market and gambling should go look up where the DJIA stood in October 1994. The slot machines in Vegas don’t magically start spitting out profit just because you’re patient, but stocks generally do over time.
It is gambling, because dark pools. That is the house. You’re not trading the actual stock. The financial institutions do that. You buy stock from them, and they in turn give you a fake number and invest it in all secrecy.
In essence, you’ll get your money, but they will handle the profits. So it is a rigged slot machine.
Please go look up the Dow as of October 1994.
Thank you.
No.
Please read my original post again. Did I say “was and always has been” or did I say “is”?
In gambling, the house always wins, by extracting value from the players. In stock trading, the players (capitalists) collectively always win, by extracting value from labor, technological growth, and natural resources. These are not the same picture.
Not all gambling requires a casino/house.
Even in a home poker game, it is not possible for all the players to go home having made a profit, whereas that is very possible in the stock market due to growth, labor, and natural resources.
(The coal miner who gets a wage and black lung is not a player in the stock market. Neither is the sun, which provides free energy to agribusiness.)
Yes, general investing is not zero sum, however many methods of advanced trading are. Options trading, which is prominent and easy to access on Robinhood, is much closer to gambling (and is treated that way by many users) and is zero sum.
Most active trading strategies require successfully arbitraging, or extracting inefficiencies out of the market, and you can’t do either of those things without someone else losing money.
Passive investment is investing in the companies that underlay the market, active trading is extracting value out of the market itself.
90% of users lost money while trading
the end result is very much the same
Damn, I’m up over 100% since I downloaded it seven years ago. Thank you, ETFs and tech companies I dig!
Nice story, bro.
I’m also up, more years, not Robinhood.
Then you glance over to Wallstreet Bets, they are the direct opposite on the curve.
Yet still almost everyone loses money on exchanges, for various reasons which I don’t want to spend time writing up.
But market has been irrational for many years, with no signals of slowing down.
I mean, I feel most people who lost money were doing “options trading”, basically full on gambling/speculation. If you had put that money in an s&p500 index fund, chances of losing money are slim.
Thats… what Robinhood doesn’t advertise, and (at least used to) always buys options by default.
So fuck Robinhood.
Where is the app that has only one button ‘Buy ESG’?
Same, looks like I’m not part of that 90% either, only 4 years account age here.
Heady!
isnt the market itself exactly that?
Long term market rate of return is positive (extremely positive of late), where as casino gambling is EV negative.
But options and futures exist as a short term hedge on equity investment. Combine that with the vig Robinhood takes on the front end in the form of higher contract prices, and you end up with an EV negative return - more consistent with high stakes gambling than equity investing.
The way I explain it is it’s like a casino, where the market makers play and also take the rake/odds.
Stock trading is like playing blackjack, it’s hard to win or lose money quickly. Options are like slot machines or roulette, you can win or lose very quickly. But at the end of the day the people who control the casino will come out ahead of you.
I class market trackers as investing rather than gambling.
Sure they can still go down (and by a lot), but it tends to be big events like COVID that do that, and it soon bounced back up again.
If you’re investing more than a few percent of your portfolio in any one company, you’re probably gambling though. And sure, nVidia look a safe bet today, but if Sam Altman comes out tomorrow and goes “sorry guys, this ain’t going anywhere” then you’ll lose over half your money before you can blink.
I wouldn’t invest on a timeframe of less than a few years either. It’s not for boosting your rent money. It’s just better than leaving your spare money in cash. If the concept of “spare money” is alien, then it’s probably not for you.
If you’re investing more than a few percent of your portfolio in any one company, you’re probably gambling though.
I read a forum post many years ago about people that put all their retirement money into some company that was going to be the sole supplier for some components for the iPhone. Apple didn’t end up going with them, and the company was relying entirely on that contract. The company went bankrupt, and the people that invested lost all their money.
In the end, why invest in a small number of companies when you can invest in practically all of them? Bogleheads three fund portfolio (total US stock + total world stock + bonds) is very simple yet will beat most actively-managed portfolios over the long run.
Bogleheads three fund portfolio (total US stock + total world stock + bonds) is very simple yet will beat most actively-managed portfolios over the long run.
This is right. But you don’t really need the ‘total world stock’. I reduced my allocation of that to 2% because it was dragging down my returns.
The point of including worldwide stock is to reduce risk in case the US has a recession, as not all other countries will be affected by that. The aim of the Bogleheads three-fund portfolio is to be reasonably balanced in terms of risk vs reward, which is why it includes bonds too. Past performance is not indicative of future performance, and in general it’s better to diversify (investing entirely in a single country isn’t really diversifying)
If you’re not risk-averse then 100% US stock is fine, just be prepared for larger drops than if it was more diversified.
The point of including worldwide stock is to reduce risk in case the US has a recession, as not all other countries will be affected by that.
This seems to be generally no longer true.
They’re almost there…
contract for difference is the operative term here.
Run by the types of people that used to run casinos…
Let’s be honest, most share trading is more like gambling than it is like investing.
Let’s be honest, our “free market” is a regular casino for the plebs that own about 10% of shares in their 401ks and Robinhood accounts, and an intentionally rigged casino for the oligarchs that own the rest, with marked insider information cards, and loaded market manipulation dice.
Gotta love when the bootlickers defend this economy, and market investment, as somehow inclusive, when 93% of stocks are owned by 10% of Americans.
(Saved Fortune article) https://archive.ph/DW0A8
deleted by creator
I guess it depends on your main goal. I started out as a gambler then lost a bunch of money and started actually investing. But at the end of the day every transaction you make can be called a gamble.
Semantics.
I work for a publicly traded company and I have some visibility into what’s happening with our products and business. Then I read the Y! Finance page about our stock and it’s all weird math trends analyses and absolutely zero about our company, its fundamentals, and the future of our business. Stock trading is just a bunch of assholes trying to sift the sea of numbers to divine a magic formula. The irony is that their own behavior drives the price changes, so they are feeding straight into the data they are trying to read and act on. What a circle jerk.
The market is wild sometimes. I work for a fairly large company. Sometimes in our earnings reports, we exceed EPS and revenue expectations (which is good of course), but don’t exceed them as much as some analysts think we’ll exceed them, so the stock goes down. The expectation is that we’ll always exceed the expectations lol
Yes, and good news about the company can drive the stock price down, if enough people decide that that’s probably a high point for the near future and a good time to sell and take profits.
Companies should not even be issuing future “earnings expectations”. They mean little and warp the market. Drives me crazy when I hear financial talk about "future p/e’. It’s just a fake number. The only real p/e ratio is the trailing p/e ratio.
Great. Now how about Citadel’s $65 Billion in securities sold but not purchased? Just kickin that can, eh?
Hard to see how the SEC and DTCC aren’t complicit.
Citadel commands something like 8-10% of daily market volume. They’re the textbook Too Big To Fail investor. SEC won’t touch them for that reason alone, although there are plenty of other ideological/conflict of interest reasons, too.
I don’t disagree, but it’s the whole REASON the SEC was created in 1934.
If anyone needed further proof of end-stage capitalism, it’s this goddamn insistence on regressive everything.
Anything deemed “Too Big To Fail” is also a national security risk. Nationalize the whole firm, send the executives off with whatever loot they already have, and ironclad legalese to prevent them from ever setting foot in a financial market again.
Let’s pause — I would like to reflect on this incredible phrase, about an asset class that democratizes access to events as they unfold. See, I thought we all had access to the events of the election because we all exist in reality and can find out about them. But apparently, if we can’t gamble on an event, it isn’t happening. This is a fascinating vision of metaphysics, and I would like to hear more about it. No one bet on my birth, for instance, and thus there is no asset class relating to my existence. So am I real?
