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Accredited investor effectively means you can invest directly into a company as an angel investor. To legally do this you need a certain level of assets or inco

Accredited investor effectively means you can invest directly into a company as an angel investor. To legally do this you need a certain level of assets or income. As a result it locks a lot of people out of the high risk/high reward investment market. Kickstarter et all try and get around this, but early donations in Kickstarters like the Oculus DK1 don't get paid when the company gets bought by Facebook for a billion dollars. Accredited investors can invest $1000 and then get money back out of the deal if/when the company is bought

Danieru 7y ago
> Accredited investors can invest $1000 and then get money back out of the deal if/when the company is bought Scale is off though, any startup worth investing in will want investment lots 10x to 1000x larger than that. Any investment willing to accept $1000 would be a large red flag. Thus the accredited system IMHO is super reasonable. Anyone with enough capital that investments of 10kUSD to 100kUSD into high risk investments makes sense must have significant other capital. Meanwhile it saves the regular Joe from getting scammed out of his $1000 emergency fund.
- jachee 7y ago
  Sounds a lot like a system for controlling Regular Joe.
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
    A US government trying to prevent "Regular Joe" from becoming rich would have an infinite number of better ways to do so. Not running lotteries, for example. Or regulating the health care market to bring doctors' and lawyers' salaries down to European levels. Or taxing income in the 6-digit range at the rates of comparable countries. Or taxing investment returns at levels comparable to incomes. But there really isn't even a theory of why "regular Joe" striking it rich is in any way threatening to the status quo, is there?
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    I think it's more a system to protect Regular Joes from having small amounts of money stolen from them by shysters hawking get rich quick investment schemes. Many of those are now federal crimes, making the risk-reward unappealing. The assumption is accredited investors are more capable of doing their own diligence and better able to weather the loss of a $50K angel investment than Regular Joe.
kennywinker 7y ago
The point of locking people out, is to avoid scam artists stealing retirees life saving by convincing them to “invest” in some fake company. It seems reasonable to put a barrier given the high risk of scammery, tho one based on being rich rather than informed seems like a bit of a miss.

Danieru 7y ago

> Accredited investors can invest $1000 and then get money back out of the deal if/when the company is bought Scale is off though, any startup worth investing in will want investment lots 10x to 1000x larger than that. Any investment willing to accept $1000 would be a large red flag. Thus the accredited system IMHO is super reasonable. Anyone with enough capital that investments of 10kUSD to 100kUSD into high risk investments makes sense must have significant other capital. Meanwhile it saves the regular Joe from getting scammed out of his $1000 emergency fund.

jachee 7y ago
Sounds a lot like a system for controlling Regular Joe.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  A US government trying to prevent "Regular Joe" from becoming rich would have an infinite number of better ways to do so. Not running lotteries, for example. Or regulating the health care market to bring doctors' and lawyers' salaries down to European levels. Or taxing income in the 6-digit range at the rates of comparable countries. Or taxing investment returns at levels comparable to incomes. But there really isn't even a theory of why "regular Joe" striking it rich is in any way threatening to the status quo, is there?
- sokoloff 7y ago
  I think it's more a system to protect Regular Joes from having small amounts of money stolen from them by shysters hawking get rich quick investment schemes. Many of those are now federal crimes, making the risk-reward unappealing. The assumption is accredited investors are more capable of doing their own diligence and better able to weather the loss of a $50K angel investment than Regular Joe.

kennywinker 7y ago

The point of locking people out, is to avoid scam artists stealing retirees life saving by convincing them to “invest” in some fake company. It seems reasonable to put a barrier given the high risk of scammery, tho one based on being rich rather than informed seems like a bit of a miss.