also conservatives: trading stocks is a valid profession
@icedquinn I think the argument is that successful stock traders posses some kind of oracle that allows them to plan for the future and keep markets liquid. Most people are sure that's impossible but we wouldn't want to stop an oracle if it ever appeared. :p
>They do nothing useful
The economic justification is that they're providing unsecured debt to finance improvements to businesses.
Also I think a slight majority of the trading (in the US anyway) is retail people like me who have a day job and just like getting drunk while clicking on all the buttons in the brokerage app.
@icedquinn I've never looked closely at IPOs but I was under the impression that people who got shares during an IPO had involved themselves in some way with the formation of the company which is more or less the same thing.
the only thing that helps a company via stonks is when the company actively splits and sells stonks to the market.
all other stonk activity is parasitic.
@icedquinn If you didn't have a market for them they wouldn't be worth anything (and because of the market you get speculation and financial instruments.)
@icedquinn It's just another form of credit. Without financial instruments everyone would have to deal with the inability to predict the future themselves and wouldn't be able to handle moderate surprises.
It's a lot like the insurance thing.
@icedquinn We survived hundreds of years without understanding the *theory* of the complex contracts everyone made, but we've had things like credit, options, futures, and insurance for a long time.
what didn't happen were credit default swaps and the entire planet collapsing because corn futures went down 0.1% which caused a cascade of other instruments to explode.
@icedquinn The US isn't the first place where people in power robbed everyone else by changing the rules and it's also not the first place where something changing on paper made everything more expensive.
@icedquinn @swiley They’re good as positioning their trading abilities as value and convincing people to let them invest their money (even though an indexed fun that just follows an algorithmic investment model is almost always just as effective and cheaper).
But making up value is how we sell so many things. It does take work/effort, even if it is to generate a career via bullshit.
@djsumdog @icedquinn It really makes more sense if you look at it as just another credit market.
pro-stonk people have tried arguing me on this and think they are cute like, "well what about investors?"
and i usually say that if someone is buying in to a project for the outcome then it's somewhat productive (they are buying in to the bakery because they want the community to have bread) then this is based.
if they are buying in to the bakery just to turn money in to more money then its usury which is a sin and also cringe. but it has the accidental effect the neighborhood gets bread.
financial instruments are people who don't care at all about the bread and really aren't even concerned about accidentally breading the neighborhood it's just numbers games to them and they move stonks around. useless people. you could airlock them all and nobody would notice (other than their instruments would stop crashing economies.)