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Comment by zackbloom | Hacker News Reader

The obvious way of ensuring long-term performance is to slow down the buy/sell process. For example, the company could offer a discount on its stock for anyone who agrees to hold it for six months. This seems like a more practical solution than a whole bunch of policy nods which, as far as I can tell, can't actually prevent someone from day trading the stock based on short-term performance. Am I totally off base?

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Nope, that's a very good idea. I personally don't think long-term investors should have to pay the same price to buy stock as speculators. But in finance this is still considered a very radical notion, so I think it will be some time before we see this idea adopted

Has the LTSE considered paying dividends based on holding time?

Yes, I think that’s something companies may consider eventually.

Can you backdate dividends? Each quarter, pick a random date 1-2 months back as the date of record.

Both NYSE and Nasdaq rules require the record date to be announced at least 10 days in advance, so a mainstream U.S.-listed company can't backdate it. Whether it'd pass SEC muster if we take exchange rules out of the picture, I don't know.

These all seem like complicated ways of avoiding charging more for trading.

Make trading expensive and it will become less voluminous and short term. Allow companies to exclusively list where trading is purposely expensive.

At the present moment, this is illegal in the US. Some day things may change, but that's where things stand right now

Bummer. Thx.

I think this does exist already as corporate bonds.

Bonds with a maturity date though are fundamentally a different asset class than a stock in terms of risk and rewards.

It's a lot closer to convertible preferred stock, except the date would reset on sale.

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