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I think you can still buy some stock with the intention of collecting the dividends or hoping for the stock's value to grow over time. There are simple calcula

I think you can still buy some stock with the intention of collecting the dividends or hoping for the stock's value to grow over time. There are simple calculations like Price/Earnings ratio that are usually published with every stock, that can help to see if it is a "gambling stock". You will of course hear all sorts of opinions about the stock market, including hardcore socialists who believe it is the root of all evil and so on. So take everything with a grain of salt.

rjbwork 6y ago
From a socialist (especially labor theory of value) perspective, you're buying and selling people's future labor. Socialists tend to think that the workers should get all of their labor. Obviously "root of all evil" is somewhat hyperbolic, but based on even passing knowledge of socialism, it is easy to see why a socialist might consider it to be an evil game. Per your previous sentences though, a common refrain on /r/WSB is "Sir, this is a casino".
- criticaljudge 6y ago
  It doesn't make much sense, as owning a stock does not give you any entitlement to the future labor of employees. Also employees can buy stock themselves, which arguably is superior to forcing them to be stakeholders in the company they work for, as it is voluntary. But the labor theory of value also doesn't make sense to begin with (if you disagree, I'd like you to pay me 10000$ to dig a hole in front of your front door, which would be hard work and therefore definitely worth 10000$), it's probably moot to discuss. I don't think /r/WSB is representative of the stock market as a whole. The stock market is just people trading. Some do stupid trades, some do smart trades. To cherry pick some stupid trades and claim it is all a casino is crazy, imo. Personally, I am a freedom guy - I think people's freedoms should be maximized. The alternative to "letting the people trade" is to regulate what people invest in. In my country, it gets harder and harder to invest in anything but the government pension, as every other asset class is being destroyed with taxes and risk of socialist pawning. There are also rules. It is just another tentacle of the "nanny state", preventing people from making potentially harmful decisions. But it limits freedom. Especially people on Hacker News (formerly Startup News) should understand. Should people be allowed to do Startups? It's a very risky undertaking which might lose you money.
  - rjbwork 6y ago
    I don't really want to get into it here, but your first example is pretty disingenuous. AFAIK the assertion is not that "all labor creates value" but that "all value derives from labor". There is a difference in those assertions and you should at least be willing to steelman the position of someone you disagree with.
    - criticaljudge 6y ago
      Which one do you mean? It is true that owning stock does not entitle you to labor of a company of employees. Paying wages does. And the "value theory of labor" states that the value of labor is determined by how hard the work is. So why should I not be paid for digging a hole in front of your door? If you say you didn't want that hole to begin with, we are veering into "people should only pay for what they want", and I think the "value theory of labor" already gets in trouble. You have to admit that how much people want something, or how useful it is to them, should factor into how much they should have to pay somebody else. So the theory that only labor should determine the price is debunked. "All value derives from labor" is not even true (what about trading rare items, for example - or lets take a house. Is a house by the lake the same value as a house on a garbage dump, because they both take the same amount of labor to build?), and it seems a very vague statement. How do you derive the value of something from that statement?
      - rjbwork 6y ago
        Like I said I really don't want to get into this here, but I really would suggest reading more into this stuff, as you do seem to me to have a number of misconceptions about LTV.
        criticaljudge 6y ago
        Any pointers? I was under the impression that nobody besides socialists takes LTV serious anymore. And I gave some reasons why it doesn't make sense. I haven't heard any counterpoints that make me think investing more time into it would be worthwhile. Edit: from Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value ) it seems quite a mess, perhaps a bit like planning economy where they add yet another equation to account for yet another problem, but they can never really capture it all. But at the end of the day, what is it useful for, other than making "worker demands"? Can you use it to compute anything useful? I highly doubt it. In another way it might just be saying "energy determines the price of everything", in archaic terms when energy was mostly "labor". It seems much more practical and sensible to simply go with market prices.
fakedang 6y ago
P/E has become a rubbish metric now, because there's so much money in the market thanks to QE. Most of the money in stocks now is money that would have gone into commodity trading and bonds, etc. The former's prices have stabilized or declined, leading to really poor opportunities, while zero interest rates and neg rates battered the market of the latter. Hence all that money has entered the stock market, which is why past P/E behavior, or any metric's past behavior really, cannot be correlated to future behavior.
- criticaljudge 6y ago
  Granted it was then perhaps a bad example, as it doesn't take into account the value of the companies possessions. I just wanted to give an example to say that you can check things about a company beyond the stock price, which may be inflated by gambling. If a stock is "gambled" to the moon, it assume would have a very high P/E. I'm not actually an expert on those indicators, haven't looked into them much.
- jandrewrogers 6y ago
  It isn't so much that P/E is rubbish but that its utility as a proxy metric assumes approximately flat revenue growth. This assumption is no longer true for a significant percentage of the largest companies, many of which are demonstrating large non-zero revenue growth rates, both positive and negative. If you are looking at companies with high revenue growth, there are other metrics used to determine if they are "cheap" or "expensive". Amazon is a great example of a company that is "expensive" by value metrics like P/E but actually pretty cheap by metrics with more applicability to revenue growth companies. The problem is that many investors apply metrics, like P/E or book value, blindly without understanding the assumptions that must be true for the metric to be a meaningful measure of value. It is even more complicated inasmuch as some companies fall into an ambiguous gray area when it comes to appropriate valuation metrics (I'd argue Apple is one such company). Like with any analysis, there is some work to make sure the statistical model actually captures what you intend to measure.
  - criticaljudge 6y ago
    But I think the opposite case still kind of holds, that with P/E you can at least see if a company is most likely not overvalued. And that was the issue in question ("everything is just gambling").

rjbwork 6y ago

From a socialist (especially labor theory of value) perspective, you're buying and selling people's future labor. Socialists tend to think that the workers should get all of their labor. Obviously "root of all evil" is somewhat hyperbolic, but based on even passing knowledge of socialism, it is easy to see why a socialist might consider it to be an evil game. Per your previous sentences though, a common refrain on /r/WSB is "Sir, this is a casino".

criticaljudge 6y ago
It doesn't make much sense, as owning a stock does not give you any entitlement to the future labor of employees. Also employees can buy stock themselves, which arguably is superior to forcing them to be stakeholders in the company they work for, as it is voluntary. But the labor theory of value also doesn't make sense to begin with (if you disagree, I'd like you to pay me 10000$ to dig a hole in front of your front door, which would be hard work and therefore definitely worth 10000$), it's probably moot to discuss. I don't think /r/WSB is representative of the stock market as a whole. The stock market is just people trading. Some do stupid trades, some do smart trades. To cherry pick some stupid trades and claim it is all a casino is crazy, imo. Personally, I am a freedom guy - I think people's freedoms should be maximized. The alternative to "letting the people trade" is to regulate what people invest in. In my country, it gets harder and harder to invest in anything but the government pension, as every other asset class is being destroyed with taxes and risk of socialist pawning. There are also rules. It is just another tentacle of the "nanny state", preventing people from making potentially harmful decisions. But it limits freedom. Especially people on Hacker News (formerly Startup News) should understand. Should people be allowed to do Startups? It's a very risky undertaking which might lose you money.
- rjbwork 6y ago
  I don't really want to get into it here, but your first example is pretty disingenuous. AFAIK the assertion is not that "all labor creates value" but that "all value derives from labor". There is a difference in those assertions and you should at least be willing to steelman the position of someone you disagree with.
  - criticaljudge 6y ago
    Which one do you mean? It is true that owning stock does not entitle you to labor of a company of employees. Paying wages does. And the "value theory of labor" states that the value of labor is determined by how hard the work is. So why should I not be paid for digging a hole in front of your door? If you say you didn't want that hole to begin with, we are veering into "people should only pay for what they want", and I think the "value theory of labor" already gets in trouble. You have to admit that how much people want something, or how useful it is to them, should factor into how much they should have to pay somebody else. So the theory that only labor should determine the price is debunked. "All value derives from labor" is not even true (what about trading rare items, for example - or lets take a house. Is a house by the lake the same value as a house on a garbage dump, because they both take the same amount of labor to build?), and it seems a very vague statement. How do you derive the value of something from that statement?
    - rjbwork 6y ago
      Like I said I really don't want to get into this here, but I really would suggest reading more into this stuff, as you do seem to me to have a number of misconceptions about LTV.
      - criticaljudge 6y ago
        Any pointers? I was under the impression that nobody besides socialists takes LTV serious anymore. And I gave some reasons why it doesn't make sense. I haven't heard any counterpoints that make me think investing more time into it would be worthwhile. Edit: from Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value ) it seems quite a mess, perhaps a bit like planning economy where they add yet another equation to account for yet another problem, but they can never really capture it all. But at the end of the day, what is it useful for, other than making "worker demands"? Can you use it to compute anything useful? I highly doubt it. In another way it might just be saying "energy determines the price of everything", in archaic terms when energy was mostly "labor". It seems much more practical and sensible to simply go with market prices.

fakedang 6y ago

P/E has become a rubbish metric now, because there's so much money in the market thanks to QE. Most of the money in stocks now is money that would have gone into commodity trading and bonds, etc. The former's prices have stabilized or declined, leading to really poor opportunities, while zero interest rates and neg rates battered the market of the latter. Hence all that money has entered the stock market, which is why past P/E behavior, or any metric's past behavior really, cannot be correlated to future behavior.

criticaljudge 6y ago
Granted it was then perhaps a bad example, as it doesn't take into account the value of the companies possessions. I just wanted to give an example to say that you can check things about a company beyond the stock price, which may be inflated by gambling. If a stock is "gambled" to the moon, it assume would have a very high P/E. I'm not actually an expert on those indicators, haven't looked into them much.
jandrewrogers 6y ago
It isn't so much that P/E is rubbish but that its utility as a proxy metric assumes approximately flat revenue growth. This assumption is no longer true for a significant percentage of the largest companies, many of which are demonstrating large non-zero revenue growth rates, both positive and negative. If you are looking at companies with high revenue growth, there are other metrics used to determine if they are "cheap" or "expensive". Amazon is a great example of a company that is "expensive" by value metrics like P/E but actually pretty cheap by metrics with more applicability to revenue growth companies. The problem is that many investors apply metrics, like P/E or book value, blindly without understanding the assumptions that must be true for the metric to be a meaningful measure of value. It is even more complicated inasmuch as some companies fall into an ambiguous gray area when it comes to appropriate valuation metrics (I'd argue Apple is one such company). Like with any analysis, there is some work to make sure the statistical model actually captures what you intend to measure.
- criticaljudge 6y ago
  But I think the opposite case still kind of holds, that with P/E you can at least see if a company is most likely not overvalued. And that was the issue in question ("everything is just gambling").