28 ms·

Scalpers are not the problem as they seem, they are like market makers for stock exchanges. They buy low and sell high, always. The factory could tell you that

Scalpers are not the problem as they seem, they are like market makers for stock exchanges. They buy low and sell high, always. The factory could tell you that they're currently out of stock for the next few months, but a scalper will never be out of stock, because their prices rises so high that only very few desperate companies would buy. The point is, it's better to have the option to buy something at a high price, than to have no option to buy at all.

Retric 5y ago
They can only do that by holding onto to supply which makes shortages worse. The same thing happens with ticket scalping at concerts, the difference is it’s more obvious that a sold out concert has empty seats vs supply sitting in a warehouse on the off chance it can be sold at 100x prices.
- abfan1127 5y ago
  this is false. the supply would be gone at those low prices. Now they can be had for those who want it badly enough.
  - adamc 5y ago
    "This is false" isn't much of an argument. If there is an argument, you should probably provide that instead...
  - basilgohar 5y ago
    Your statement is false. Demand would be met with an increase in supply, satisfying all needs for the product and without the "help" of scalpers who sidestep supply-and-demand by artificially creating scarcity to drive up demand for their own profit. This is no help to anyone but themselves. If there's a legitimate demand that will be used, then there's a good case for production to be increased to meet such demand, and all parties who need something would have their needs met. At no point to scalpers make this system more efficient – they just serve to extract a greater profit from consumers and businesses for their own benefit by the aforementioned artificial scarcity that they make. This is also known as cornering the market, a well-known and despised practice that has been frequently used by morally corrupt individuals who sought only to benefit themselves. Nowhere can nor should the argument be made that scalpers help anyone but themselves.
    - bricemo 5y ago
      Except increase in supply in chips takes 3-5 years
    - lmm 5y ago
      > Demand would be met with an increase in supply, satisfying all needs for the product and without the "help" of scalpers who sidestep supply-and-demand by artificially creating scarcity to drive up demand for their own profit. This is no help to anyone but themselves. There's no "artificial" demand. Think about it - the "scalper" isn't going to buy something that they can't sell on, they'd just lose money that way. (Maybe some of them make bad judgements - but they'll naturally go out of business in that case). > If there's a legitimate demand that will be used, then there's a good case for production to be increased to meet such demand, and all parties who need something would have their needs met. "Scalpers" improve the quality of that signal and make it easier to increase production with confidence. > This is also known as cornering the market, a well-known and despised practice Views on true corners are certainly mixed (there's an argument that it punishes dishonest market makers), but in any case it only applies to buying up the whole supply, which no individual "scalper" does or can.
      - nitrogen 5y ago
        Think about it - the "scalper" isn't going to buy something that they can't sell on, they'd just lose money that way. The only reason they can sell something on is because they created an artificial scarcity of the thing. If widget X has a well-matched supply and demand, and a scalper decides to buy 10% of widget X, then 10% of the demand is now unmet, some of the buyers go out of business, and the maker of widget X now has 90 something % of their previous market.
        lmm 5y ago
        > The only reason they can sell something on is because they created an artificial scarcity of the thing. If widget X has a well-matched supply and demand, and a scalper decides to buy 10% of widget X, then 10% of the demand is now unmet, some of the buyers go out of business, and the maker of widget X now has 90 something % of their previous market. If that happens, then the price drops, and the "scalper" loses money - demand has some elasticity, and a healthy market has some slack in it. Momentum-trading speculation works sometimes, but anyone who uses it as their sole strategy will go bankrupt sooner or later.
- skybrian 5y ago
  Empty seats mean someone screwed up but how can you tell that a group of empty seats is unused due to a scalper, versus some group of people who couldn’t make it? When speculators don’t screw up, one fewer part being sold now means one more part that can be bought later. Delaying sales of some parts makes the shortage worse earlier and better later. Keeping inventory is a service to people who didn’t plan ahead. Sometimes people do screw up, buying things that are never used, so they lose money due to the waste. But you can’t assume they’re all screwups.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Your right concerts make it hard to tell why seats are empty however unsold inventory is part of the basic business model of reserving a section of supply at higher prices not simply a mistake. Airline seats are a better comparison. Airlines keep raising prices as inventory gets sold and flights near. However, that approach means they generally fly with significant unused excess capacity. The reverse approach where prices got cheaper as the flight neared would result in increased occupancy though significantly less total revenue. The discrepancy shows up because buyers may be willing to pay radically different prices. A business traveler may be willing to book a last minute seat at 3x the price a holiday traveler who’s booking 6 months in advance. Hypothetically, making a 50/50 bet on a 3x sale is clearly a good idea but it means 50% of the time that seat sits unused.
    - skybrian 5y ago
      Fair enough, my explanation was simplified and yield management is complex. Planes are full so airlines seem to be be doing better at it, though. What raises the difficulty is that tickets expire - not a problem with selling electronic parts, though they do eventually become obsolete.
    - roenxi 5y ago
      That needs to be sourced from somewhere; the classic understanding of airlines is they usually overbook [0] and rely on people not turning up. In fact, the whole "lets not sell our inventory, we'll make higher profits!" idea here is suspect. The idea that having unsold inventory in the model is a good idea is just false; having inventory left over is always undesirable. If it was sold at the last minute then they would have more profits. The scalpers are incentivised to minimise leftover inventory to the point where it isn't going to be a big deal. [0] https://www.travelperk.com/blog/overbooking-airlines-quick-guide-business-travel-processes/ https://www.travelperk.com/blog/overbooking-airlines-quick-g...
PicassoCTs 5y ago
Scalpers hedge on the fragility of just-in-time - they milk the short-term thinkers for all they saved in the good times and are thus a healthy part of the market. Why do we praise people betting on actors being hurt by bad decisions like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry) but condemn the same behavior on the smaller scale of physical products?
- m4rtink 5y ago
  Would they not harm also reguar manufacturers who just want to make a stock of some part before starting a manufacturing run ?
- the__alchemist 5y ago
  Scalpers hurt anyone launching a hardware product who doesn't have the order quantity to buy direct-from-manufacturer.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    I don't get how it hurts anyone to have to pay market rate. If your product doesn't work at market prices, then that's your problem - not scalpers.
    - yxwvut 5y ago
      This kind of perspective where any intervention-free (often equated with 'free market') outcome is ipso facto a socially good outcome is so frustrating because it transcends policy discussions into morality/dogma. Are you opposed to efforts to curtail rent seeking more broadly?
      - lmm 5y ago
        Making honest prices illegal is the most destructive intervention you can do. "Scalpers" aren't rent-seeking, quite the opposite.
    - 5y ago
the__alchemist 5y ago
Negative. Like scalping everywhere, they're middlemen who contribute nothing to society, and make it more difficult for people who do.
- blevin 5y ago
  Some have argued that scalpers, like other risk arbitrageurs, accelerate market price discovery. If you buy the argument that markets are net positive for society by relaying information about economic trade offs, scalpers aren’t necessarily bad even if they are indeed annoying to market participants by lifting the ask. Of course there are extreme conditions where we also might decide that using money as the universal conveyance of value is a bad thing because it reveals how unequal outcomes in society have been… And the usual response is to shift to rationing rather than price to allocate scarce resources. But with rationing you get sidechannel markets and not necessarily efficient allocations.
  - Swenrekcah 5y ago
    This argument feels wrong to me. If there is a market for the chip, it will find a market price. If there isn’t there isn’t. If the market is in an equilibrium and the chip manufacturer makes some money on their chips, and the chip buyers make some money on their products, the a scalper coming in and sucking up all the profit isn’t doing anybody in the world any good except themselves.
    - skybrian 5y ago
      Equilibriums don’t just happen by themselves. When there isn’t an equilibrium, delaying sales by keeping inventory helps the people who didn’t plan ahead. The ant planned ahead for the winter, the grasshopper didn’t, and the scalper provides a service to the grasshopper, for a price.
    - medvezhenok 5y ago
      The scalpers don't suck up profit, since if there is a functioning market, you can't really scalp. Scalping exists when there is a discrepancy between a marked price and the market price of an item. If scalpers were not a thing, you would have shortages. With scalpers, you still have shortages, but you can acquire the good by paying a higher, market clearing price. That higher price either makes it so that rich people can get the thing (most don't like this), or that people who really need it can get it (i.e. lifesaving medication etc). So your view of scalpers might be influenced by the distribution of (1) and (2) going on.
10000truths 5y ago
It depends on what is causing the lack of supply. If the bottleneck lies in factors beyond the control of consumers, i.e. discontinued production, or shortage of raw material, then I see no inherent issue with scalping. But if it’s the scalpers themselves that cause an otherwise plentiful supply to become scarce, then they are the cause of the shortage, rather than the effect, and their behavior should be curbed. The problem is that the former situation can easily lead to the latter via a panic buying feedback loop, and it’s not entirely clear where the distinction should be drawn.
- pishpash 5y ago
  They could only do that by cornering the market, but if there are many competitive scalpers, then the price is right and that's just normal supply (at the source supplier, not the scalper) and demand.
  - esyir 5y ago
    Except that your markets are not perfect, your scalpers have overhead and now represent a middleman who wants their cut.
    - pishpash 5y ago
      If the buyers could participate in a bidding market directly at the supplier, there would be no need for this overhead. The overhead you speak of is the cost of running a liquid market for a particular good where none existed.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
The way I see it, this makes sense in a hypothetical world of perfect theoretical models (you may recognize this world as being the one inhabited by frictionless, perfectly spherical cows). In this world, scalpers cause the market to price in "stickiness" - the more critical an item is to the buyer, the more they'll be willing to pay - so the supply ultimately gets allocated to the most desperate of buyers, for the price of "your entire margin", or possibly "literally all you have", if the buyer's survival depends on it. Maybe this makes sense in that theoretical world - where there's no inertia, no friction, no capital investment, no jobs and livelihoods tied to the outcome. But in reality, scalping seems to be the purest form of parasitism. In a crisis, scalpers' activities may kill perfectly fine companies (or people) who would've otherwise limped through the rough times and survived, upsetting an industry long-term, and it forces everyone to waste their money. And even if you think that this kind of market culling is fine, I'm not seeing why all that money should go to the first asshole who managed to secure a large loan in time to buy off the entire stock of some good.
- dahart 5y ago
  This actually is the idea with truly “free market” thinking, no? The money wasted in a crisis, and the companies killed who would’ve otherwise limped through, is all assumed to be less waste and a better outcome than the alternative we get if we prevent scalpers and/or cap the prices. In this theoretical world, we waste more money when supply runs out too fast, and we get companies that are not as good at competing because they limped through. The big question economically is whether these assumptions are generally correct. We have evidence in both directions, enough that most people can comfortably stick to their opinions and learned assumptions and political tribes. But is there a way to demonstrate that the money wasted is greater with hoarding/scalping than without, and under what conditions?
  - awakeasleep 5y ago
    Actually the original ‘free’ in free markets meant free from economic rents
    - 5y ago
jimmydorry 5y ago
Except this is not really what market makers do. The amount of liquidity they can provide by buying high and selling low is quite limited, not to mention it locks up a lot of capital in market price speculation with the significant risk of 'getting it wrong'. Without going into motivation behind why ($$$), they will sell any share in demand at the prevailing market rate. As long as they later buy the same number of shares that they sold into the market, everything continues to work. By internalizing and batching orders, they can also exhert force on the price to ensure they don't lose on these 'market making shorts'. For your example to be equiavlent, scalpers would need to sell parts that they don't have, which falls apart as an analogy as such games would fall apart quite quickly during a supply crunch.
op00to 5y ago
You ignore that a scalper can easily slip counterfeits into the mix. An authorized reseller would be ruined if they did that.
mey 5y ago
They make supply chain validation problematic and introduce room for fraud. Not saying market making is bad, just in this case loosing supply chain validation may be worse.
newswasboring 5y ago
You are literally defending unnecessary middlemen. They add no value, all they do is create artificial scarcity. If they didn't exist someone would have made use of the chip. Instead they hoard it. I don't understand why you find this ok behavior
polskibus 5y ago
They are similar to a market maker but it's not the same. They are like predatory HFT, benefiting from fast information propagation. Most of the time the market would function well without them, with much less volatility in the price. In that sense, scalpers en masse are destabilizing the economy.
amelius 5y ago
> Scalpers are not the problem as they seem, they are like market makers for stock exchanges. They buy low and sell high, always. How do you feel about scalpers who do not act in scarcity but instead create the scarcity themselves. Like those who buy up land in popular cities?
bildung 5y ago
> The point is, it's better to have the option to buy something at a high price On a macro level this doesn't change anything (besides distribution in a limited way), as this doesn't increase production, or am I missing something?
raxxorrax 5y ago
Question is if that really provides benefits for the economy though. For scalpers and the stock market alike.

Retric 5y ago

They can only do that by holding onto to supply which makes shortages worse. The same thing happens with ticket scalping at concerts, the difference is it’s more obvious that a sold out concert has empty seats vs supply sitting in a warehouse on the off chance it can be sold at 100x prices.

abfan1127 5y ago
this is false. the supply would be gone at those low prices. Now they can be had for those who want it badly enough.
- adamc 5y ago
  "This is false" isn't much of an argument. If there is an argument, you should probably provide that instead...
- basilgohar 5y ago
  Your statement is false. Demand would be met with an increase in supply, satisfying all needs for the product and without the "help" of scalpers who sidestep supply-and-demand by artificially creating scarcity to drive up demand for their own profit. This is no help to anyone but themselves. If there's a legitimate demand that will be used, then there's a good case for production to be increased to meet such demand, and all parties who need something would have their needs met. At no point to scalpers make this system more efficient – they just serve to extract a greater profit from consumers and businesses for their own benefit by the aforementioned artificial scarcity that they make. This is also known as cornering the market, a well-known and despised practice that has been frequently used by morally corrupt individuals who sought only to benefit themselves. Nowhere can nor should the argument be made that scalpers help anyone but themselves.
  - bricemo 5y ago
    Except increase in supply in chips takes 3-5 years
  - lmm 5y ago
    > Demand would be met with an increase in supply, satisfying all needs for the product and without the "help" of scalpers who sidestep supply-and-demand by artificially creating scarcity to drive up demand for their own profit. This is no help to anyone but themselves. There's no "artificial" demand. Think about it - the "scalper" isn't going to buy something that they can't sell on, they'd just lose money that way. (Maybe some of them make bad judgements - but they'll naturally go out of business in that case). > If there's a legitimate demand that will be used, then there's a good case for production to be increased to meet such demand, and all parties who need something would have their needs met. "Scalpers" improve the quality of that signal and make it easier to increase production with confidence. > This is also known as cornering the market, a well-known and despised practice Views on true corners are certainly mixed (there's an argument that it punishes dishonest market makers), but in any case it only applies to buying up the whole supply, which no individual "scalper" does or can.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      Think about it - the "scalper" isn't going to buy something that they can't sell on, they'd just lose money that way. The only reason they can sell something on is because they created an artificial scarcity of the thing. If widget X has a well-matched supply and demand, and a scalper decides to buy 10% of widget X, then 10% of the demand is now unmet, some of the buyers go out of business, and the maker of widget X now has 90 something % of their previous market.
      - lmm 5y ago
        > The only reason they can sell something on is because they created an artificial scarcity of the thing. If widget X has a well-matched supply and demand, and a scalper decides to buy 10% of widget X, then 10% of the demand is now unmet, some of the buyers go out of business, and the maker of widget X now has 90 something % of their previous market. If that happens, then the price drops, and the "scalper" loses money - demand has some elasticity, and a healthy market has some slack in it. Momentum-trading speculation works sometimes, but anyone who uses it as their sole strategy will go bankrupt sooner or later.
skybrian 5y ago
Empty seats mean someone screwed up but how can you tell that a group of empty seats is unused due to a scalper, versus some group of people who couldn’t make it? When speculators don’t screw up, one fewer part being sold now means one more part that can be bought later. Delaying sales of some parts makes the shortage worse earlier and better later. Keeping inventory is a service to people who didn’t plan ahead. Sometimes people do screw up, buying things that are never used, so they lose money due to the waste. But you can’t assume they’re all screwups.
- Retric 5y ago
  Your right concerts make it hard to tell why seats are empty however unsold inventory is part of the basic business model of reserving a section of supply at higher prices not simply a mistake. Airline seats are a better comparison. Airlines keep raising prices as inventory gets sold and flights near. However, that approach means they generally fly with significant unused excess capacity. The reverse approach where prices got cheaper as the flight neared would result in increased occupancy though significantly less total revenue. The discrepancy shows up because buyers may be willing to pay radically different prices. A business traveler may be willing to book a last minute seat at 3x the price a holiday traveler who’s booking 6 months in advance. Hypothetically, making a 50/50 bet on a 3x sale is clearly a good idea but it means 50% of the time that seat sits unused.
  - skybrian 5y ago
    Fair enough, my explanation was simplified and yield management is complex. Planes are full so airlines seem to be be doing better at it, though. What raises the difficulty is that tickets expire - not a problem with selling electronic parts, though they do eventually become obsolete.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    That needs to be sourced from somewhere; the classic understanding of airlines is they usually overbook [0] and rely on people not turning up. In fact, the whole "lets not sell our inventory, we'll make higher profits!" idea here is suspect. The idea that having unsold inventory in the model is a good idea is just false; having inventory left over is always undesirable. If it was sold at the last minute then they would have more profits. The scalpers are incentivised to minimise leftover inventory to the point where it isn't going to be a big deal. [0] https://www.travelperk.com/blog/overbooking-airlines-quick-guide-business-travel-processes/ https://www.travelperk.com/blog/overbooking-airlines-quick-g...

PicassoCTs 5y ago

Scalpers hedge on the fragility of just-in-time - they milk the short-term thinkers for all they saved in the good times and are thus a healthy part of the market. Why do we praise people betting on actors being hurt by bad decisions like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry) but condemn the same behavior on the smaller scale of physical products?

m4rtink 5y ago
Would they not harm also reguar manufacturers who just want to make a stock of some part before starting a manufacturing run ?
the__alchemist 5y ago
Scalpers hurt anyone launching a hardware product who doesn't have the order quantity to buy direct-from-manufacturer.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  I don't get how it hurts anyone to have to pay market rate. If your product doesn't work at market prices, then that's your problem - not scalpers.
  - yxwvut 5y ago
    This kind of perspective where any intervention-free (often equated with 'free market') outcome is ipso facto a socially good outcome is so frustrating because it transcends policy discussions into morality/dogma. Are you opposed to efforts to curtail rent seeking more broadly?
    - lmm 5y ago
      Making honest prices illegal is the most destructive intervention you can do. "Scalpers" aren't rent-seeking, quite the opposite.
  - 5y ago

the__alchemist 5y ago

Negative. Like scalping everywhere, they're middlemen who contribute nothing to society, and make it more difficult for people who do.

blevin 5y ago
Some have argued that scalpers, like other risk arbitrageurs, accelerate market price discovery. If you buy the argument that markets are net positive for society by relaying information about economic trade offs, scalpers aren’t necessarily bad even if they are indeed annoying to market participants by lifting the ask. Of course there are extreme conditions where we also might decide that using money as the universal conveyance of value is a bad thing because it reveals how unequal outcomes in society have been… And the usual response is to shift to rationing rather than price to allocate scarce resources. But with rationing you get sidechannel markets and not necessarily efficient allocations.
- Swenrekcah 5y ago
  This argument feels wrong to me. If there is a market for the chip, it will find a market price. If there isn’t there isn’t. If the market is in an equilibrium and the chip manufacturer makes some money on their chips, and the chip buyers make some money on their products, the a scalper coming in and sucking up all the profit isn’t doing anybody in the world any good except themselves.
  - skybrian 5y ago
    Equilibriums don’t just happen by themselves. When there isn’t an equilibrium, delaying sales by keeping inventory helps the people who didn’t plan ahead. The ant planned ahead for the winter, the grasshopper didn’t, and the scalper provides a service to the grasshopper, for a price.
  - medvezhenok 5y ago
    The scalpers don't suck up profit, since if there is a functioning market, you can't really scalp. Scalping exists when there is a discrepancy between a marked price and the market price of an item. If scalpers were not a thing, you would have shortages. With scalpers, you still have shortages, but you can acquire the good by paying a higher, market clearing price. That higher price either makes it so that rich people can get the thing (most don't like this), or that people who really need it can get it (i.e. lifesaving medication etc). So your view of scalpers might be influenced by the distribution of (1) and (2) going on.

10000truths 5y ago

It depends on what is causing the lack of supply. If the bottleneck lies in factors beyond the control of consumers, i.e. discontinued production, or shortage of raw material, then I see no inherent issue with scalping. But if it’s the scalpers themselves that cause an otherwise plentiful supply to become scarce, then they are the cause of the shortage, rather than the effect, and their behavior should be curbed. The problem is that the former situation can easily lead to the latter via a panic buying feedback loop, and it’s not entirely clear where the distinction should be drawn.

pishpash 5y ago
They could only do that by cornering the market, but if there are many competitive scalpers, then the price is right and that's just normal supply (at the source supplier, not the scalper) and demand.
- esyir 5y ago
  Except that your markets are not perfect, your scalpers have overhead and now represent a middleman who wants their cut.
  - pishpash 5y ago
    If the buyers could participate in a bidding market directly at the supplier, there would be no need for this overhead. The overhead you speak of is the cost of running a liquid market for a particular good where none existed.

TeMPOraL 5y ago

The way I see it, this makes sense in a hypothetical world of perfect theoretical models (you may recognize this world as being the one inhabited by frictionless, perfectly spherical cows). In this world, scalpers cause the market to price in "stickiness" - the more critical an item is to the buyer, the more they'll be willing to pay - so the supply ultimately gets allocated to the most desperate of buyers, for the price of "your entire margin", or possibly "literally all you have", if the buyer's survival depends on it. Maybe this makes sense in that theoretical world - where there's no inertia, no friction, no capital investment, no jobs and livelihoods tied to the outcome. But in reality, scalping seems to be the purest form of parasitism. In a crisis, scalpers' activities may kill perfectly fine companies (or people) who would've otherwise limped through the rough times and survived, upsetting an industry long-term, and it forces everyone to waste their money. And even if you think that this kind of market culling is fine, I'm not seeing why all that money should go to the first asshole who managed to secure a large loan in time to buy off the entire stock of some good.

dahart 5y ago
This actually is the idea with truly “free market” thinking, no? The money wasted in a crisis, and the companies killed who would’ve otherwise limped through, is all assumed to be less waste and a better outcome than the alternative we get if we prevent scalpers and/or cap the prices. In this theoretical world, we waste more money when supply runs out too fast, and we get companies that are not as good at competing because they limped through. The big question economically is whether these assumptions are generally correct. We have evidence in both directions, enough that most people can comfortably stick to their opinions and learned assumptions and political tribes. But is there a way to demonstrate that the money wasted is greater with hoarding/scalping than without, and under what conditions?
- awakeasleep 5y ago
  Actually the original ‘free’ in free markets meant free from economic rents
  - 5y ago

jimmydorry 5y ago

Except this is not really what market makers do. The amount of liquidity they can provide by buying high and selling low is quite limited, not to mention it locks up a lot of capital in market price speculation with the significant risk of 'getting it wrong'. Without going into motivation behind why ($$$), they will sell any share in demand at the prevailing market rate. As long as they later buy the same number of shares that they sold into the market, everything continues to work. By internalizing and batching orders, they can also exhert force on the price to ensure they don't lose on these 'market making shorts'. For your example to be equiavlent, scalpers would need to sell parts that they don't have, which falls apart as an analogy as such games would fall apart quite quickly during a supply crunch.

op00to 5y ago

You ignore that a scalper can easily slip counterfeits into the mix. An authorized reseller would be ruined if they did that.

mey 5y ago

They make supply chain validation problematic and introduce room for fraud. Not saying market making is bad, just in this case loosing supply chain validation may be worse.

newswasboring 5y ago

You are literally defending unnecessary middlemen. They add no value, all they do is create artificial scarcity. If they didn't exist someone would have made use of the chip. Instead they hoard it. I don't understand why you find this ok behavior

polskibus 5y ago

They are similar to a market maker but it's not the same. They are like predatory HFT, benefiting from fast information propagation. Most of the time the market would function well without them, with much less volatility in the price. In that sense, scalpers en masse are destabilizing the economy.

amelius 5y ago

> Scalpers are not the problem as they seem, they are like market makers for stock exchanges. They buy low and sell high, always. How do you feel about scalpers who do not act in scarcity but instead create the scarcity themselves. Like those who buy up land in popular cities?

bildung 5y ago

> The point is, it's better to have the option to buy something at a high price On a macro level this doesn't change anything (besides distribution in a limited way), as this doesn't increase production, or am I missing something?

raxxorrax 5y ago

Question is if that really provides benefits for the economy though. For scalpers and the stock market alike.