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I am technically a war profiteer due to stock trading. I bought and then kept trickling some money into an oil index fund when news was everywhere about negativ

I am technically a war profiteer due to stock trading. I bought and then kept trickling some money into an oil index fund when news was everywhere about negative $/barrel, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine made me $500 when I sold out. (I don't actually feel like I did anything wrong, though. Just bought low and sold high, around oil macro events that anyone else could have seen)

spxneo 3y ago
A trade is a trade. I've come to accept this after hanging out with a hedge fund manager. I was trading my ego and I was gambling and I placed all these unrealistic expectations from the market. A trade is neither an expression of justice or injustice. It's just fucking numbers that we attach so much emotion and judgement on. Amoral != immoral.
- gigaflop 3y ago
  I ain't rich enough to take a real moral standing in investing. The only principled buys I make are for ETFs/indices that sound like good ideas, but are nonstandard. Copper, Lithium, Uranium for now. The Earth isn't making any more of the stuff, and they're base resources for other processes.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    > The Earth isn't making any more of the stuff We're nothing more than pond scum on the surface of the Earth. The Earth is full of stuff.
- dllthomas 3y ago
  A trade is an action you are taking in the world. Just numbers sometimes mean someone goes hungry or loses their house, other numbers mean someone gets bombed. I don't actually know that it makes sense to judge these particular actions (especially of small players) in the face of the incentives, but I think your dismissal is too cavalier to be effective. The fact that your impact on the world is mediated by numbers doesn't itself absolve you of anything.
tombert 3y ago
I mean, I own lots of ETFs, and I have bought-low-sold-high plenty of times. I've almost certainly benefited from war profiteering, either through oil fluctuations like you described, or publicly traded US defense contractors. I'm not going to sit there and try and correlate VTI's price to ensure it's some kind of inverse to Lockheed Martin's performance, and I doubt anyone else is either.
deleted 3y ago
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spxneo 3y ago

A trade is a trade. I've come to accept this after hanging out with a hedge fund manager. I was trading my ego and I was gambling and I placed all these unrealistic expectations from the market. A trade is neither an expression of justice or injustice. It's just fucking numbers that we attach so much emotion and judgement on. Amoral != immoral.

gigaflop 3y ago
I ain't rich enough to take a real moral standing in investing. The only principled buys I make are for ETFs/indices that sound like good ideas, but are nonstandard. Copper, Lithium, Uranium for now. The Earth isn't making any more of the stuff, and they're base resources for other processes.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > The Earth isn't making any more of the stuff We're nothing more than pond scum on the surface of the Earth. The Earth is full of stuff.
dllthomas 3y ago
A trade is an action you are taking in the world. Just numbers sometimes mean someone goes hungry or loses their house, other numbers mean someone gets bombed. I don't actually know that it makes sense to judge these particular actions (especially of small players) in the face of the incentives, but I think your dismissal is too cavalier to be effective. The fact that your impact on the world is mediated by numbers doesn't itself absolve you of anything.

tombert 3y ago

I mean, I own lots of ETFs, and I have bought-low-sold-high plenty of times. I've almost certainly benefited from war profiteering, either through oil fluctuations like you described, or publicly traded US defense contractors. I'm not going to sit there and try and correlate VTI's price to ensure it's some kind of inverse to Lockheed Martin's performance, and I doubt anyone else is either.

deleted 3y ago

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