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> and I don’t think the answer to today’s many ills is to empower poor people to bankrupt themselves with margin accounts and derivatives. I love the double sp

> and I don’t think the answer to today’s many ills is to empower poor people to bankrupt themselves with margin accounts and derivatives. I love the double speak wrt margin accounts. They want to mix up naked margin accounts where your broker gives you a loan of money to trade with, with the types of margin accounts used by WSB peeps, where the margin is only to cover the 2 day settlement window or the time it takes a deposit to transfer, ie: covered margins. My counter point: I don’t think the answer to today’s many ills is to parentalise retail investors with a holier than thou attitude that is driving half of the spite from these investors. The soundbite is that they have to protect the poor whittle retail investor from scam stocks, but the effect is and will always be to lock off higher gain opportunities to institutional investors and away from poorer investors. Don't buy it.

zaptheimpaler 6y ago
YES. Not enough people understand this. Normies love to take a shit from on high on WSB, thinking they are a bunch of retards about to lose their money, but anyone who goes a little bit deeper than the surface can see its a very, very powerful resource to learn how to trade and how markets really work. Of course if you only see WSB as a stock pumping forum and throw your money into whatever ticker is mentioned, you are at the mercy of fortune. But the ones who do use WSB productively to learn can make enormous returns previously reserved only for hedge funds. The normies only see the news stories about the first kind of user who gambled and lost, clamor for even MORE regulation, and soon that pathetic 7% annual return on index funds will be even lower as you close off more and more opportunities. The VCs and sophisticated investors will gain even more from further asymmetric opportunities and the wealth inequality will widen. Ultimately protecting those who are at poor at investing from their own incompetence also means locking out those who are good at it and only cements inequality further. Every reduction in risk means a reduction in reward.

zaptheimpaler 6y ago

YES. Not enough people understand this. Normies love to take a shit from on high on WSB, thinking they are a bunch of retards about to lose their money, but anyone who goes a little bit deeper than the surface can see its a very, very powerful resource to learn how to trade and how markets really work. Of course if you only see WSB as a stock pumping forum and throw your money into whatever ticker is mentioned, you are at the mercy of fortune. But the ones who do use WSB productively to learn can make enormous returns previously reserved only for hedge funds. The normies only see the news stories about the first kind of user who gambled and lost, clamor for even MORE regulation, and soon that pathetic 7% annual return on index funds will be even lower as you close off more and more opportunities. The VCs and sophisticated investors will gain even more from further asymmetric opportunities and the wealth inequality will widen. Ultimately protecting those who are at poor at investing from their own incompetence also means locking out those who are good at it and only cements inequality further. Every reduction in risk means a reduction in reward.