>1. the retirement funds you should be putting your money in won't require brokerage fees. Ah, okay so there's another choice of waiting for retirement funds a

>1. the retirement funds you should be putting your money in won't require brokerage fees. Ah, okay so there's another choice of waiting for retirement funds and pensions to get looted by bank and insurance bailouts in the next financial crisis. > 2. don't leave your money with banks. This is kind of missing the point -- I'm saying that by the time the finance world is done "allocating resources", there's not enough left over for the working middle class to put in the bank in the first place. This reflects in statistics that more than half of Americans have less than $1000 in the bank at all. > 3a. your own ignorance is definitely a problem I was using ignorance in a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that exploitation of asymmetries in information ought to be considered inherently unjust in the same way that insider trading should be theoretically illegal, instead of, you know, the foundational philosophy of HFT. > 3b. VTI, SPY, VOO, etc is all the infrastructure you need. Leaving aside the fact that all ETFs have fees and expenses, one of the primary criticism of these offerings is that they enhance losses for naive owners. ETFs now consist of a sizeable chunk of U.S. invested assets, and every sharp market drawdown that happens runs the risk of inducing more selling. But in the same way that nobody looked at the garbage packaged inside CDOs before 2008, no naive investor is going to be able to watch the Net Asset Value of the underlying securities of their ETF investments, and so people will continue liquidating at prices that will lead to deep underperformance for smaller players. But let's just keep inflating the myth that ETFs are the savior of the middle class, because God forbid that institutional investors actually be required to have any skin in the game for themselves. Keep inflating it right up until the point where Bregman's bubble gets proven right and taxpayers get left holding the bag for the Great Recession 2.0.