Buddy, bro, my pal, finance friend.
Nvidia went up 350% over the past year. You should have written a fake story about videogames.
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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My mom around 8 months back went to Micro Center, Denver.
She needed a new graphics card. The salespeople there urged her to buy the brand new Nvidia 4090 for $1500.
She used to get free AAA games with purchase, now that was withdrawn
Damn, $1500 is actually a great price for a 4090. If only...
Edit: I don't know how I got here. I just realized this post is 4 months old.
"capitalism is a horrible system that tried to bankrupt my family though medical expenses.
But don't fight it, support it by giving them your money anyway, and then any that you earn after that.
You are a fool of you don't buckle to the whims of big business"
"support it via ✨️ g a m b l i n g ✨️"
Bruh, it's not gambling if you know you're gonna win *taps forehead meme*
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What's extra annoying about this is that in his story, his mom gets screwed over by the hospital so rather than thinking to complain or go elsewhere he thinks 'yah im gonna invest in that'. Investing in bad actors like that just reinforces their shitty behavior.
Are you fucking joking that a hospital is on the stock market? I know, its the company that owns the hospital, but its still fucked up. Should not be allowed.
Why not? Companies that make pharmaceuticals, prosthetics, imaging devices, etc are all on the stock market too, so if hospitals weren't on there, you could build a portfolio to approximate it by buying producers of medical equipment.
The real issue isn't whether something is publicly traded, but collusion between groups to keep prices high. For example, it's mutually beneficial for insurance, hospitals, and medical equipment providers to increase costs. Higher equipment costs means care providers can charge more (what's another few hundred when the bill is in the thousands?), and higher total bills means insurance companies can charge higher premiums (they're usually limited to a certain percent of cost as profit). Hospitals generally don't have direct competitors since it's prohibitively expensive to build one and there's lots of bureaucracy based on "need," so you can't just go next door to an org that's not involved in the collusion.
Here's some YouTube videos about it:
There are lots of viable solutions here, but banning them from the stock market isn't going to solve anything. The first order of business imo is making everything more transparent.
The real issue is the belief that essential services should make profit. Socialized, regulated Healthcare FTW.
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Market competition is fine, but corporations are specifically obligated to focus on profits over other considerations, and in this case that is inappropriate and creates perverse incentives. Consider people like in the OP who have cynically bought in (or are in some retirement fund that bought in on their behalf) and now their financial wellbeing depends on hospitals continuing to be allowed to extract significant money out of people. Are they going to vote for candidates pushing actually effective measures to reduce how much people pay for medical care, if that means the stock will go down? Probably not.
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The real issue isn't whether something is publicly traded, but collusion between groups to keep prices high. For example, it's mutually beneficial for insurance, hospitals, and medical equipment providers to increase costs. Higher equipment costs means care providers can charge more (what's another few hundred when the bill is in the thousands?
This isn't how pricing is set for medical equipment....... Nor is high equipment cost the reason behind the pricing increase.
Every hospital that accepts Medicare utilizes CMS guidelines when it comes to billing. Medicare sets the general price for items, factoring in things like historic pricing, cost of purchase from vendor, and the price of labour required to fit or make the device function.
The complex and expensive aspect of hospital billing stems from the introduction of private insurance companies. The ones that require more paperwork and processing time than Medicare, and will attempt to make the process as hard as possible.
Hospitals generally don't have direct competitors since it's prohibitively expensive to build one and there's lots of bureaucracy based on "need," so you can't just go next door to an org that's not involved in the collusion.
Because hospitals are a natural monopoly, not only are they prohibitedly expensive, but it's also extremely hard to profit from them in the long term. Which is why there's a large amount of bureaucracy to get them built.
Pretty much every ER room in America is a huge money sink that the rest of the hospital has to economically support. You add too many hospitals, and the services that are profitable get too spread across the area to support their individual ER operations.
Which is why about 10-15 years ago there was a large push from venture capital to build "hospitals" without trauma rooms. These hospitals began to eat up all the funding in the area and began shutting down hospitals with trauma wards. This is when a lot of states adopted legislation that would help curb this behavior.
There are lots of viable solutions here, but banning them from the stock market isn't going to solve anything. The first order of business imo is making everything more transparent.
Banning private insurance is the only thing that would lower prices for Americans. None of the issues you covered are even close to the reason why things are getting expensive.
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Because demand and supply don't self-regulate healthcare. How much do you value your health? How about your own life? Oh, you're willing to pay ANYTHING to live? Even if it's not life threatening as long as it leaves you crippled, unable to work, you may as well be dead.
As a customer the only way to be an informed buyer is to be a physician yourself. Even if a treatment doesn't work you still get charged, no refunds!
For-profit healthcare is fundamentally inhumane and is incompatible with capitalism. The forces that would usually regulate the market are non-existant. Demand is infinite, undercutting is pointless, customers have no way to be informed.
There's a huge difference between emergency, life threatening care and relatively routine care. For example, if I need to get a tooth extracted, I can certainly wait to shop around a bit, and living with some pain for a few days could be worth finding a cheaper solution. I can also choose between hospitalization and self-care in many circumstances as well (e.g. normal baby delivery can happen at home or in the hospital).
For those cases where informed decisions are possible, supply and demand can work efficiently. It doesn't work as well when there's a monopoly on care, like in an ER, ambulances, etc.
And no, you don't need to be a physician to be informed, you just need to consult one. I may not know the practical difference between operations, but I do understand chances of success and costs, and I know how to get multiple opinions and decide from there. That works for any field, I can convert a problem from needing an expertise to evaluating experts. Tell me what expected outcomes, the chances of various outcomes, and the costs, and I'll get a second or third opinion if I'm not satisfied.
This gets even better the more transparent things are, because other experts can do independent reviews. A newspaper, for example, can hire a physician to review posted prices for routine operations and give an idea of how realistic those costs are. Insurance companies so exactly that, so I don't see why a private organization couldn't. News organizations routinely consult experts on stories.
But there are areas where there's a monopoly, and those mess up the market's ability to regulate prices. That's why I'm in favor of universal coverage for emergency care, but against universal coverage for other forms of care.
Inflation (when considering the rise of cost of living): 6%
Returns of investment funds my bank offers: 5%
Disposable income to use for investing: 0
Yeah, the math works out just fine on this one.
Well obviously, you should have just picked a better stock. Crystal balls aren't really that expensive you know!
And you should have picked a better disposable income.
Yeah, rookie mistake.
Investment returns of broad market: 10-15%. Don't invest with your bank, invest with a brokerage.
That doesn't exactly work if you don't have money to begin with though...
Step 1. Have money
Well I guess we're fucked.
The first rule of making money: Have money.
Don't forget to short the stock prior to the malpractice lawsuit when mom dies
Let me just reach into thin air and pull out some gold bars so I can buy some of these stocks too, asshole
Better figure out how to turn lead into gold, and quickly!. Alchemy revival, so haaawt this year!
Big “let them eat cake” energy.
Yes this is a wonderful idea when you live in a magical fantasy world where the vast majority of people do not have any ability to invest in any stocks whatsoever.
These idiots truly just actually think everyone is slightly different versions of themselves.
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So this is absolutely a capitalist horror story, but investing in stocks is one of the best long-term strategies to counter inflation. Just not so much in the short term like the OOP says, due to the heightened risk.
If you can't beat em join em!
All shareholders are liable for the actions of the company they own and control. When a company commits a crime, the shareholders should be held personally accountable. No fines. Jail time.
I disagree. Shareholders don't have a say in how the company is run, and buying shares in a company doesn't really change anything about how the company is run.
I do think execs and board members should be jailed for committing crimes though. If you have a part in the decision making, you're culpable.
I sort of disagree. It should be tackled from both sides. Shareholders do have some culpability for investing in unethical businessed and not doing enough due diligence. Your average person saving for retirement probably did nothing wrong, dumped the money in an ETF or IRA or 401k and the investment company handled it, but the investment company should have been looking at business practices and not solely stock performance.
Jail time for the decision makers. We already have a way to punish shareholders: Fines on the company. They should just stop being small fines and start at the very least exceeding the amount the company made through crime.
Jailing the decision makers will discourage crime to some extent. The temptation will still be there to pump numbers and make a lot of money. Hitting investors and investment firms in the wallet will encourage a culture of giving a shit about where you're putting your money.
Buying stocks is not wrong and never will be wrong. There's nothing wrong about buying shares in an unethical company, it doesn't provide them any money, it just pushes the stock price up slightly.
investment company should have been looking at business practices and not solely stock performance.
Investment companies should merely look at the strategy of the fund. If the fund's goal is to match a benchmark index (e.g. S&P 500), it should only look at market cap. In most cases, the practices of the company are irrelevant, that's why you're buying a fund.
If you want, you can buy an ESG fund, which buy companies with a high enough ESG score. I personally think those aren't the way to go, I think you'll have far more impact by investing for return and buying products from ethical companies with the proceeds, assuming that ESG funds trail the overall market.
So I reject the notion of "ethical investing" and instead promote ethical consumerism.
Investing in a company is, in a real sense, providing them money. Stocks aren't pretend money totally separate from corporate finances, they are intended to provide capital for expanding a business. If it goes well, the company makes money, the value goes up, and you can sell at a profit. If it goes poorly, you can lose up to 100% of the money you spent to buy the stock. That's why it's "investing." You make it sound like a dog track where the money you put in has no actual effect on the outcome of the race, but that's not true.
Even if it were true, where is the line? If I come to you with my meth business, a proven track record, and a high potential rate of return and I just want money to help expand, you would consider that a good business? What if it's assassination? Suppose it's a totally legal banana company but also they moonlight in overthrowing democracies?
It may be that my literal dollar bill that I invest does not end up in the hands of a guerilla, but in helping dump money into the company I am helping enable the behavior. In this scenario, I think figuring out who is legally culpable and should have known is impractical and the risk is too high of innocent people ending up in jail for us to lock up shareholders, but losing the money invested is absolutely a risk you take when investing, and if people lost their money more often they'd probably pay more attention and it would be a net good.
Investing... it's providing them money
Companies only get money from stocks when they issue new shares, other than that, you buying a stock has no impact. If you spend $1000 on shares, maybe the stock price goes up by a penny or so, but the company gets none of that $1000 because you're buying from another investor.
So no, it's not giving them money in pretty much any sense at all unless you're making a deal directly with the board to issue new stock at a certain price.
If I come to you with my meth business, a proven track record, and a high potential rate of return and I just want money to help expand, you would consider that a good business?
That's completely separate from public shares.
If I buy a public share of your meth business, that doesn't give you any new capital at all, it only gives capital to the seller. That sale has an infinitesimally small impact on the share price, so you'd see pretty much no impact unless I'm buying a very large quantity. My share is also likely not a voting share, so I have no say in how the company is run.
It's closer to buying second hand products. It provides no direct revenue to the original manufacturer, though it does slightly increase demand for their products, which could mean they might make a little more money in the future, though most likely it's not going to change anything at all. The main difference is that, instead of products, it's a small piece of the company, so the market value should reflect the value of the company, not the market value of a single product.
Let's say your meth company doubles in value because you're a real Walter White. I could then sell my share and use the proceeds to buy ad space to oppose meth. The purchase and sale has no impact on your business, but my ad space absolutely does.
So me buying shares of an unethical company does pretty much nothing to their bottom line. If I bought a single product from them instead, it would have a much larger impact than spending the same amount on a share of their stock. So the best thing you can do is invest wisely (i.e. chase returns) to grow your money and spend your gains on ethical products.
losing the money invested is absolutely a risk you take when investing
Absolutely! That's why I shouldn't buy Enron stock or whatever. Due diligence is absolutely important, but the due diligence should be on future growth potential (well, market sentiment about long term growth, actual growth is less important), not in ethics. If a company is doing illegal stuff, that's a risk to long term growth since the government will likely step in.
Invest to grow your capital, and spend ethically. There's something cathartic about making a bunch of money investing in oil and then buying green products with the proceeds.
Major shareholders only. People just trying to retire aren't the problem.
So people with IRAs should be punished for using an investment vehicle that actually allows them to retire?
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