3 ms·

> At the same time, it feels infuriating that in order to afford medicine, clothes, food, shelter, and defense once you're past your working prime you must atta

by AlanSE 5y ago

> At the same time, it feels infuriating that in order to afford medicine, clothes, food, shelter, and defense once you're past your working prime you must attach your fortunes to companies that have very little to do with the actual services you require in retirement. This feels like the worst possible argument against public corporations. There's a whole sector of the stock market for health care, and you can easily buy funds that only invest in that. What other services to retirees need? You will be able to find listed companies providing all of those services. There are some technical imperfections in a basket of equities. If your intention is to exactly hedge living costs, then you would also seek to own bonds from those companies, much of the economy is not public, and so on. There are valid points to be found, I don't think these are what you're concerned about. In the big picture, owning the means of production is the only game that makes sense. What's the alternative? The best store of value is a collection of things that people are paying for, because that's central to the economic definition of value. Otherwise, everything is gold or bitcoin.

ff317 5y ago
Part of the problem is that most 401Ks have a very limited set of investment options. You get a short menu of choices arbitrated by a clueless HR person at your company and the self-interested financial company that manages the 401K plan: a bunch of standard mutual funds and index funds, some are semi-targeted (e.g. large-cap vs small-cap, whole-market, foreign-vs-domestic, target-date, tech?). If you're lucky, there might be a couple of different bond funds, and maybe a money market option to park cash temporarily. There's not often the flexibility of a regular investment fund (e.g. an etrade account) to go after other specific options or individual stocks and bonds, or especially any kinds of commodities, futures, options, etc. I get the rationale: it's set up that way so that it's a "safer" investing option, because they're afraid people will make bad choices and lose their 401K balances. But the flipside is you don't get much flexibility in making the wisest or most self-interested investment decisions. The 401K -managing firms love it though, as they get to sell a bunch of funds that are often in-house and have fees, and the real free-market-trading investors like it because the 401Ks put a bunch of very predictably-timed money into predictably-common choices, and they can rely on this to gain a little advantage/arbitrage.
- quacked 5y ago
  Related: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ That site gets tossed around like candy and I don't think every graph they throw up is perfectly explainable by their central point, but what the invention of the 401(k) and IRA, both of which were released to the public only after the gold standard had finally been abandoned, really did was to allow wealth managers to pump completely unimaginable quantities of money into abstractions of value that are not actually related with physical wealth that materializes for Americans in the form of skills, a strong manufacturing industry, and robust supply chains. Michael Burry (Big Short guy) notes that the amount of money stored in indexes and funds tracking the S&P 500 are many orders of magnitude larger than the money that actually moves around between the shares of the S&P 500 companies themselves.
- anamax 5y ago
  > Part of the problem is that most 401Ks have a very limited set of investment options. Once you're retired, you can roll your 401K into a self-directed IRA which you can invest with not many restrictions. For example, you can put all your money into hospital stocks.

by AlanSE 5y ago

ff317 5y ago

Part of the problem is that most 401Ks have a very limited set of investment options. You get a short menu of choices arbitrated by a clueless HR person at your company and the self-interested financial company that manages the 401K plan: a bunch of standard mutual funds and index funds, some are semi-targeted (e.g. large-cap vs small-cap, whole-market, foreign-vs-domestic, target-date, tech?). If you're lucky, there might be a couple of different bond funds, and maybe a money market option to park cash temporarily. There's not often the flexibility of a regular investment fund (e.g. an etrade account) to go after other specific options or individual stocks and bonds, or especially any kinds of commodities, futures, options, etc. I get the rationale: it's set up that way so that it's a "safer" investing option, because they're afraid people will make bad choices and lose their 401K balances. But the flipside is you don't get much flexibility in making the wisest or most self-interested investment decisions. The 401K -managing firms love it though, as they get to sell a bunch of funds that are often in-house and have fees, and the real free-market-trading investors like it because the 401Ks put a bunch of very predictably-timed money into predictably-common choices, and they can rely on this to gain a little advantage/arbitrage.

quacked 5y ago
Related: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ That site gets tossed around like candy and I don't think every graph they throw up is perfectly explainable by their central point, but what the invention of the 401(k) and IRA, both of which were released to the public only after the gold standard had finally been abandoned, really did was to allow wealth managers to pump completely unimaginable quantities of money into abstractions of value that are not actually related with physical wealth that materializes for Americans in the form of skills, a strong manufacturing industry, and robust supply chains. Michael Burry (Big Short guy) notes that the amount of money stored in indexes and funds tracking the S&P 500 are many orders of magnitude larger than the money that actually moves around between the shares of the S&P 500 companies themselves.
anamax 5y ago
> Part of the problem is that most 401Ks have a very limited set of investment options. Once you're retired, you can roll your 401K into a self-directed IRA which you can invest with not many restrictions. For example, you can put all your money into hospital stocks.