Comment by sokoloff
10 hours ago
It shifts the gains away from the marginal investor in Microsoft who was only willing to pay a penny less for those shares (probably an eighth of a dollar when this anecdote happened). Instead of them getting the 100 cars, the buyer who was willing to hit the ask earlier gets them.
That profit comes from owning a piece of a productive company, productive companies often spring from early-stage losses that require investment money from somewhere, seed stage money comes from the high likelihood that later stage money will come in if the venture appears successful.
Your comment does not address the (imho reasonable) criticism that the described system incentivizes gambling as the key to wealth, rather than labor.
There are many problems with a gambling based economy, not least among them that over a long enough time line, all the money ends in very few hands.
> a long enough time line, all the money ends in very few hands.
You're assuming the economy is zero sum, which it obviously is not.
> You're assuming the economy is zero sum, which it obviously is not.
That assumption does not follow from my statement.
What I do assume is that the easiest way to make money is to have money, which means that the rich and get richer and the poor get poorer. We've already seen that the rise of billionaires correlatives with an increase in wealth inequality and poverty.
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I don’t view long-term investing in productive companies as anything close to gambling.
Which is fine, except that one can't know in advance which companies will continue to be productive..that's why it's gambling.
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