Comment by giancarlostoro
3 hours ago
> Surely this cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul to pay John to pay Tim must end.
I think a LOT of companies really never needed to be on the public market, and its a darn shame that so many go on the stock market, we have this obnoxious culture where you have to fire tons of people if you have a bad quarter just to show you're stopping the bleeding. Companies literally fire and hire x number of people every quarter to keep things going, its ridiculous and unhealthy. Private companies rarely work like this, I'm sure there's exceptions.
Every company I've worked at started off private, and those were their golden years, until some economic hurdle happened so they sold it off to a bigger fish who is on the stock market, who bought them to be more attractive to investors or what have you.
I wish there were an alternative to the stock market where you invest for the long haul, and you cannot take your money out in x number of years. I think this would make more sense. Maybe it doesn't fix the VC peeps want their money back nonsense, but if you could do it even for early stage companies, maybe it could help somewhat.
There is nothing that stops you from buying stock and holding it forever, Buffett does this.
There are very stable companies in the stock market, like Cocacola. But they are not glamurous and don't give headlines.
And there are enormous fish in the private market, e.g. Cargill.
Stock markets are great if you have a company that needs money to expand quickly, and don't mind to share ownership. Stay away from IPO-jackpot stuff, and it shouldn't be that awful.
So you're asking for some type of equity that's private?
Seriously though, I have seen some very large companies like Tibco and Dell go private for an extended period of time as a means of avoiding shareholder nonsense during restructuring.
> I wish there were an alternative to the stock market where you invest for the long haul, and you cannot take your money out in x number of years.
That exists already! People often complain as well when a company ends its golden years because of some economic hurdle and ends up being acquired by a bigger fish who is _not_ on the stock market.
It's less about the company leaving the stock market and more about "Private Equity" often being a legalized embezzlement scam designed to suck the company dry and then dump its withered husk in bankruptcy court.
When that happens the current shareholders usually make out very well.
> we have this obnoxious culture where you choose to fire tons of people if you have a bad quarter just to show you're stopping the bleeding
Fixed your error.
They choose to do so because they've lost money in a bad quarter, which might not be the case on the next quarter, its ridiculous. I would rather invest in a market where my investment is long term based, and you aren't just firing people to make numbers work. To these people its all about make the numbers work for investors, they don't care about anything else because of the way that market works. You can offramp your investment on a whim, which is ridiculous and volatile at times. Personally I would prefer more companies go private. Some companies probably wouldn't exist without the public market, like some social media companies, and maybe that's okay if they did not...
Let companies fail, but also lets make investing smarter.