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Comment by EugeneG | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of this... During Apple's 1980 Initial Public Offering (IPO), Massachusetts regulators banned residents from purchasing the stock. The state's securities regulators deemed the offering "too risky" and "over-valued," enforcing a state rule that prohibited IPOs with a price exceeding 25 times earnings.

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And it was probably prudent to wait. The investors who wanted to take more risk could do that.

Retroactive reasoning with investments (if I just bought X) is insane.

Indeed.

They IPO'd in 1980, yet their stock price was below the IPO price for the majority of 1980-1987.

It also fell to its IPO price for an extended period of time between 1996-1998.

You hypothetically could have waited 20 years after the IPO before investing without giving up theoretical gains.

> The investors who wanted to take more risk could do that.

What? How? By moving out of Massachusetts? I could understand banning such a speculative stock for e.g. pension funds or whatever, but blocking private individuals from buying with their own money seems insane.

You’re right. I read this as banned the state from buying it (pensions etc). I agree that’s absurd if you were not allowed to buy through a broker.

Well Apple followed being a disaster for two decades.

Apple was a pretty crappy stock till the late 90s so you would have had to wait almost 2 decades to make decent money

Well we are far more corrupt and in the last stages of late stage capitalism. 15 day waiting period for Nasdaq 100. Your 401k is now the exit liquidty for the country's 5k richest people.

I really dont see how America doesnt collapse on the weight of its own corruption. But maybe the was the plan all along....

The stock market (and in particular the US stock market) has been an incredibly positive influence on the average American's 401k... Great driver of allowing Americans and beyond to share in the upside of successful companies... big reason why Americans can retire.

Of course, it doesn't always go up...

I think you have an oddly negative bias.

Maybe don't buy QQQ in your 401k then if you're concerned about nasdaq100 inclusion

Tell that to everyones 50 year old mother who doesnt even know how to login to their account, let alone modify their allocations.

50 isn’t old? I would expect a 50 year old mother to be competent.

It's like the very first golden rule, do not expect competency from another human being.

I learned computers and investing from my mother. She’s pretty competent approaching 80.

I mean, idk what's in your 401k fund choices, but in all mine I'd have to take serious manual effort to get in to QQQ or equivalent

> last stages of late stage capitalism

how long does this last? I've been hearing it for a decade.

Just to put some numbers on it, under current rules and valuations, if all 3 of SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic were to go public with their current valuations and be part of the nasdaq 100, and you were 100% allocated to that, you’d have ~8% portfolio exposure to them. I suspect if you are the type of person who is 100% allocated to QQQ I’d guess you’d want _more_ exposure to those symbols than that.

For someone holding VTI its closer to 3% and a 2050 fund its more like 1.5%. Indexing is how most people are investing in their retirement accounts because controversies like these just don’t matter much. Hedging this off is going to cost more than its worth.

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