Peter Lynch famously researched companies by watching to see where his family spent pocket money. I recall reading analyses of trading performance by members of Congress -- they generally did about the same as everyone else except in companies associated with their districts.
Anecdotally, it is easier to double small dollars than large dollars. Berkshire Hathaway's growth has eased for ~2 major reasons: 1) Prices have been high for the last decade+, frustrating the core algorithm of value-investing. 2) It is very difficult to put huge amounts of money to work.
The alternative to a world with asymmetric information (and probably impossible to implement at that) is one with zero privacy, where all information is open to everyone always. I don't think we want to live in that world.
Well, the people working for Billionaires should be able to figure that out right?
A hedge fund, investing team, whatever you want to call it, has a limited capacity. They need to beat market returns on pool of money so large that spending 2 months to find a 300% return on something with a max investment of $75k is absolutely an incorrect use of time.
Read about opportunity cost to understand why there are many things “worth it” to people without access to something better.
Just by investing in an index fund, retail investors are getting a pretty great investment, essentially freeloading off of all the hard work the active funds are doing.
The problem with the idea, and the eventual reason it didn't work, was that though it was largest VC fund ever, 100bn isn't actually that much in the scheme of things. There's so much money sloshing around the system looking for the place where it will be treated best. So, in essence, what Softbank ended up doing was bidding up the price of the entire industry, creating massive inflation. If Softbank gives a shi-tton of money , and another VC gives a shit-ton to a competitor, they've both just wasted a shit-ton of money.
I actually don't think Masa is the compete idiotic everyone makes him out to be. He has a very high tolerance for risk, but that doesn't make him irrational. The Vision Fund might not be doing that well, but Softbank's stock is looking pretty good at the moment.
Simply outlawing extreme ownership of capital, via high taxes is a way to avoid privacy issues.
Unfortunately, we don’t seem keen to enable people to live their lives. We seem keen on making people ogle these giant initiatives and enterprises.
I don’t believe that’s natural. Growing up “off the grid” until the 90s, I’m still aghast at how sycophantic people act towards Amazon or a Gates like rich person.
Then I started seeing how forced social interaction is for upper middle class especially.
I should point out my family wasn’t poor. On the contrary, my parents just wanted to raise us outside the mainstream.
Don’t get me wrong I, love the gaudy culture. What I’m talking out against is demands to organize it just so. To normalize to the point of absurdity human agency to propping up of finance markets and banal old men’s gambling fetish, lavishing praise and riches on men as “owners” of the things we build collectively at scale is absurd to me.
There’s too much evidence out there suggesting success like that is luck not skill, and continued success like that is due to corruption of human social goals, not a lifetime of extremely good luck.
Continuing to play that social ladder game is hilariously morbid motivation to me.
Why not just have these men take their genitals out and prove who can take more whacks to the sack. That’s really what all this stuff feels like to me.
Lookit Bezos dashing back in to save Amazon. The idea is the place is winning!! Oops reality gets in the way and they stumbled with logistics hard.
Thanks to lavishing Amazon with praise in the form of billions, they’ll power on through it no problem. Tens of thousands of employees spared!
Meanwhile, thanks to the tax system literally millions of people are fucked.
I think people misunderstand how great and powerful index funds are for retail investors. Moreover, I people massively overhype this alternative data thing. Using alternative data to generate alpha is mindbogglingly difficult. If you just buy from a 3rd party firm, most likely all the alpha has been sucked up. So you need to source it yourself, clean it, analyze it, etc etc. It's really fucking difficult, and very expensive.
Trust me, you're not missing out. Your index fund is probably beating the returns of many firms with billions of dollars in capital and dozens of research analysts.
Also, it's generally the case that there are more opportunities to turn $1 into $2 than to turn $1B into $2B.
I believe this is not true for multiple reasons.
First - regulatory capture. Once a sector of economy generates a handful of billionaires, legal / regulatory barriers go up which make it much harder for startups to compete.
Second - competitive barriers. Google can acquire all the search channels (eg. paying Apple and Mozilla billions of $$$ to be the default search engine on iOS / Firefox).
Third - price undercutting by subsidizing a subset of the incumbent's product portfolio by profits from other parts of the business. See: Amazon vs diapers.com.
So yes, the game is definitely rigged in favor of billionaires.