Comment by BlindEyeHalo
3 months ago
Turns out that a company that is not publicly traded and run by people that only care about stock prices, can actually care about their customers.
3 months ago
Turns out that a company that is not publicly traded and run by people that only care about stock prices, can actually care about their customers.
There's all sorts of things you can do if you don't care about money.
The more interesting point is that if you aren't driven by investors to care about short term financial stuff (stock prices) then you can make long term decisions. Caring about your customers is a classic one for this - costs you money in the short term, but in the long term gets you a great customer base.
They care about money. They definitely care about money. They have achieved a steady cash flow that can sustain their business forever, unless something really bad happens.
What they don't care is the endless growth that MBA guys always try to achieve, and the quarterly profit driven decision making that ultimately destroys their customers loyalty, for short term profit.
A business can be very profitable without being exploitative. It's the people in Wall Street who can't seem to understand this. For them a hundred million dollars of profit is good if last year it was only fifty million dollars, and a dying business if last year it was also a hundred million dollars. It really makes no sense.
Just thinking out loud, but I wonder if Wall Street would be less awful about ruining companies if we were able to get a more meaningful dividend out of your average company? So perhaps the stock price itself stays relatively flat or boring, but the dividend paid out makes up for it. Or perhaps it would be the exact same issue and they’d be squeezing companies to maximize dividends.
I just know that I expect stock prices to go up because most “dividend stocks” give such a small amount of money per share.
2 replies →
People who are capable of saying "I have enough now" will self-select out of the activist investor class. Automatically, the people with the most power to influence publicly traded companies will be people who demand endless growth.
This sort of thing is why I think we need heavy taxes to limit wealth accumulation. Money is power, and the amount of power a person with ten+ figure wealth wields is too much for any one person to have, let alone one who was never elected.
This is sortof a function of buybacks vs dividends. Like, if the market rewards growth (in terms of share prices) then line must go up forever. If you are getting a steady stream of inflation adjusted cash (i.e. dividends), then you can afford to care less about number go up.
Or if you're the underdog and are looking for a competitive advantage in this market. (Just being cynical.)