195 karma · joined July 18, 2013
You or I might value a video game more, but some people who gamble actually derive utility from the games themselves (and from a purely scientific standpoint, even a near-miss in gambling results in the release of dopamine [1]).
[1]:http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v36/n5/abs/npp2010230a.htm...
None, which is why that grouping would only make sense in a society of extremely generic robots.
In contrast, those with a common birthday or name have no distinguishable political desires in aggregate, so the likely result would be 538 generic congress members.
Furthermore, if we assume people exhibit a bias toward candidates from their home state (they do, on average), grouping by birthday or last name is actually a net negative choice since it would likely result in overrepresenation of Californians in congress (assuming first-past-the-post).
Active trading, by definition, incurs higher transaction costs than passive investing. Since transaction costs are generally priced per trade, active trading is more costly on a percentage basis for individuals with less capital.
Not necessarily--often, money-losing operations are valued by investors because of their potential to be profitable in the future.
Also, the market is likely more efficient with large companies like Google, Apple et al., but short-term price movements still aren't always rational.
Not to mention that currency appreciation is questionably positive and does not warrant the label "top performing."
Furthermore, my logic is perfectly valid. Scientific research is time-sensitive by nature. If someone were to post an article hailing the discovery of Neptune, while interesting to someone who has been wholly ignorant of Neptune their entire life, it warrants a caveat noting that it's an outdated discovery. And yet under your logic, you would reply: "There's no logical scenario under which someone would find this event notable, but be bummed out because it happened 168 years ago."
tl;dr: This is old news; temper your expectations.