Finance as Culture
luttig.substack.com
luttig.substack.com
He forgot one: the death of defined benefit retirement plans. Back when people knew that their pension + Social Security could allow them to retire with at least a decent lifestyle, nobody needed to care about the stock market. Only rich people needed to work with stock brokers.
Take all that away and force people to fund their own retirement with 401(k)'s and IRAs, and now people are interested in what the market is doing. This is typically to their detriment, since people want to sell when the market drops, rather than buy and hold. Continuing to buy and hold quality index funds is certainly the easiest way to generate wealth over a time period of 15-20+ years, but it's not very comfortable psychologically in the short term.
> Many “smart money” investors don’t rationalize investments by talking about the fundamentals of the business, or even conviction in its future. Instead, we’ve seen the emergence of chartism, which advocates for investing not based on where the business is today or where it’s headed, but its likeness to a “cup and handle” or “head and shoulders” pattern. This is the astrology of finance.
I've said this before, except I typically call technical analysis "numerology for smart people who should know better." Its only real saving grace is that it tends to capture momentum, which is one of the known and fairly reliable ways to generate alpha.
Now, cycles are fast, companies disappear. When they don’t, they have many rounds of layoffs (sometimes just to juice the stock) and employees have wised up — why slow and steady when there are no guarantees for loyalty?
So you have lottery culture. Because “long term loyalty culture” largely isn’t available.
The pension model essentially assumes either a far slower world or a protected relatively stagnant market. Even with "shift to government run pension" as a concept still has the same sorts of pressures no matter who the can is kicked down towards.
* Most investors' returns are below index returns.
* If everyone starts leveraging the index, that strategy becomes less effective.
* Leverage subjects you to even bigger drawdowns than just buying the index. Do you think the average investor, who can't even manage drawdowns from the index can handle drawdowns bigger than drawdowns on the index?
Besides, who said people don't make money? Also, notice how you switched from "active trading beats passive indexing" to "leverage the index." Are you saying you can't time the market? That you don't have the ability to make correct decisions about both when to get in and when to get out?
I used to work in finance. I’m sorry that you’ve been reading that index funds are the end all be all, but they’re really for people with no time or no brain cells.
If you were leveraged in March and held through the draw down, you are massively up.
NYC is full of prop shops with a few employees making 100% returns on a five million dollar portfolio. Just because you’ve never heard of those places doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Stop polluting the world with your middle class ideas of money management
If your Joe has enough saved to feel comfortable gambling with a few thousand bucks then sure, actively trading might be worthwhile.
But this is "tech", SV tech, the one built by people around the world who flock to SF for a few years, it is not technology in general. There is technology around the world, which operates in different cultures, not all of them morally equivalent.
I see finance-as-culture as more of the public’s realiszation of the reality of the social-economical machine.
As we approach the psychedelic renaissance[1], this public awareness is gonna help us to approach some sort of collective enlightenment is what I would love to believe.
[1]: ie with more legalisation & decriminalisation happening, and more research to understand these substances, the brain, and consciousness, as well as meditation, etc)
The behavior of the central bank is pretty telling. Low interest rates are pretty much inaccessible for the majority of people. It's basically free money into the hands of wealthy and large corporations. The exact opposite of what you need to stimulate an economy from the worker side first.
There are various reasons for a labor surplus in developed nations. Urbanization, globalization, lack of real estate and lack of employer provided training. The end result is young and old going to college trying to obtain self funded "job training". This makes the situation of those who don't go to college for "job training" very precarious since the job market doesn't want them. I put "job training" in quotes because the overlap between what businesses and colleges want isn't that great. After everyone finishes college we run away from our declining hometown and move to next greatest city where all the new jobs that need your fancy credentials are. Cities aren't prepared and some of them even don't want you, forcing you to find your own way into the city which often displaces existing residents. There is a form of extortion going on. Your hometown sucks and all the best jobs are in a place where you are being charged extreme amounts of money. Money alone isn't the problem, the lack of housing causes externalities like a large homeless population. It's a lot of pain only to be told how you don't deserve the money and how the existing residents hate you for figuring out a way to go against their selfish wishes. The vast majority of people don't even get into this "paradise". Their remaining hope is to simply take advantage of the odds being stacked them and engage in the same activities as the rich but they are looking for greater profits since their investment base is so small. People are looking for 10x cryptocurrencies, GME as a 15x pump and dump and lots of other risky strategies that only make sense if you don't have enough wealth to care about protecting it.
Economies are fair towards workers when there is a surplus of jobs. If there is a way to create jobs artificially, people will still favor the highest paid ones that are accessible to them. Therefore one way to stimulate the economy would be for the government to simply analyze how much economic value can be extracted from the average unskilled worker today and decide on a reasonable wage. Since the jobs are wholly artificial they can be used to do any work. A good starting point is real estate and public infrastructure. If there is a way to generate at enough value in the process to equal or exceed the economic value of your average worker then you can hire an infinite amount of workers who are willing to accept the government sponsored job. Will this drown out private companies? Probably, but it would primarily get rid of companies that are unable to generate more value than the government from a worker. Since the government isn't looking to maximize returns in every single industry branch there will be lots of opportunities for private companies to outcompete the government and thus reduce the number of people being dependent on government jobs. Since we are assuming a net positive deployment of government money there is no restriction to how much money can be obtained for financing. Even in the extreme situation where one would assume that the money is being printed from nothing the expected inflation could be well below what critics assume. However, if inflation were to suddenly pick up and significantly exceed the target 2% inflation rate then the jobs program would have to be canceled or reduced, mostly because it succeeded at what it was trying to accomplish, namely achieving full employment, but also to no cause price instability.