For the same reason you trust an auditor and accountant hired by Tesla to produce quartely earnings report - they are on the hook if they lie.
Surely you do not hire an independant accountant every time you buy stocks?
Surely you do not hire an independant accountant every time you buy stocks?
I had a friend who bought a house with major termite damage (i.e., every wall had to be removed to repair the studs basically), and 2 inspectors overlooked the damage. He said in retrospect (after doing a bunch of research on termite damage), it should have been obvious to inspectors, but they missed it.
He tried to pursue legal action against either the seller or the inspectors, and basically was told: impossible to prove seller knew (as there was no repairs done), and inspectors are not held liable.
If you really don't know anything about houses (or feel as if you do not), then having someone walk you through some of the things you may have to face living in a particular house is probably a good idea.
However, even as just an enthusiastic amateur, I know more about home construction and repair than most home inspectors. When I bought my current house I skipped the home inspector, and hired an electrician, a roofer and a structural engineer. It cost me more, but I got seriously informed reports about the property, not just boilerplate fill-in-the-blank PDFs telling me that one of the windows rattled.
An auditor hired by the buyer has no such incentive.
The “regulatory capture” principle might apply here – an auditor only meets any one client once in their life, but probably meets some landlords many times, presumably develops a relationship with them, and might want to tend to not upset that relationship.
“On the hook” has different meanings when you have the enforcement power of the US federal government and criminal courts versus an individual who has to cough up tens of thousands for lawyers in civil court.
Of course not, I let the short sellers do it for me.
Also, making decisions around catching Tesla or GME at the right timing in the market… that’s not a great starting point for investment strategy.
I thought the same thing for years, and just avoided the market except for a 401k and stock granted by companies I worked at. Then I got into trading because I thought I could make money trading volatile stocks and I've never looked back (I've already made enough to retire). So far I've only lost money on my value stocks.
To each his own.
The best advice I can give is pretty generic - follow the data. First of all actually find the data. Don't trust some finance news rag to tell you anything meaningful, some of them actually have a direct incentive to lie to you. Now that you have the data, what does it say? This sounds simple, but everyone told me I was an idiot to invest in GME in January. They said the same thing in March. So far my investment in GME has more than a 10x ROI. I'm just using GME as an example because it's topical - people tell me I'm in a cult while I'm actively making money betting against them.
"Buy the rumor, sell the news" is pretty easy to understand, just find a stock you know well (I would guess something in tech, like Alphabet or Amazon but whatever) and look at dates for stock movements, rumors, and announcements. You can do this retroactively to find a pattern then try to apply it moving forward. "Never invest in something you don't understand" is general advice outside of stocks, but just an extension of what I said initially - do your own research until it makes sense to you.
I think a huge amount of inertia is just people afraid to try it because they've been conditioned their entire lives to believe they can't make money doing it. I'm quickly realizing how much of this is bullshit (I realize I'm lucky and I understand I'm likely in a local maxima, but I am still extremely confident a lot of the things I've been told are just wrong). So take a small amount of money and invest it and see how it goes. Learn. Iterate. Improve. The goal is to start making money before you lose it. I actually started with just $10k and once I started to figure it out put in more money as I wanted to increase my profit.
At the end of the day it's your money and you should do what you want with it. So long as you understand you will definitely lose money sometimes and are willing to learn from it, give it a go with whatever money you're willing to lose.