I mean, people crap on Wall Street a lot for good reason, but honestly it's a reasonably well-regulated entity. It's not perfect, and you can find cases of utterly gross mismanagement (e.g. the 2008 crash), but stuff like insider trading and unregistered securities and the like do get attention from the SEC, particularly if they're reported.
I've said a lot of negative stuff in the past about the Wall Street banks, and I have come to regret most of it after learning a lot more about finance. Stocks absolutely can be a way for the "rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer", and of course the traditional exchanges aren't a vaccine against that, but I do think that they do some level of vetting to make sure that companies aren't just Ponzi schemes.
I mean, for example, WeWork had its IPO rejected in 2019 because regulators were afraid about its business model, and it only ever went public through a SPAC loophole. Clearly they shouldn't have gone public at all, but some basic sanity checking is better than zero.
To be clear, I'm totally onboard with Texas making their own exchange if they can actually do it better, or at least as-well. Competition is a good thing.
> I've said a lot of negative stuff in the past about the Wall Street banks, and I have come to regret most of it after learning a lot more about finance.
Ironically, the more I learned about finance, the more I disparage it. I worked (actually) on Wall Street back when it wasn't a strip mall. It's just a casino for the vast majority of people that call themselves investors.
I don't think that investing in stocks is inherently a casino; if I buy a share of AAPL then there's not inherently a loser; if the price goes up then both Apple and I benefit from this. Even if it goes down, I still retain whatever value the stock is currently worth. Still, I used to make sweeping statements about finance that I don't agree with anymore; I used to say short selling was inherently evil for example, and I actually don't think that anymore [1].
I do think that option contracts might be evil and a glorified casino though. It feels like they kind of end up with a means of really really rich people to extract money out of poorer people without those people actually gaining anything back; since options are (as far as I'm aware) a binary "make money or lose your entire investment" situation, and each transaction requires a winner and a loser, it definitely is very analogous to a casino.
I do call myself an "investor", but 95% of all the money I have in the market is in low-risk ETFs (VOO and VTI), which I don't think is gambling.
[1] Well, they might still be evil but I think it's a necessary evil in order to put downward pressure on the market to avoid ponzinomics.
I've said a lot of negative stuff in the past about the Wall Street banks, and I have come to regret most of it after learning a lot more about finance. Stocks absolutely can be a way for the "rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer", and of course the traditional exchanges aren't a vaccine against that, but I do think that they do some level of vetting to make sure that companies aren't just Ponzi schemes.
I mean, for example, WeWork had its IPO rejected in 2019 because regulators were afraid about its business model, and it only ever went public through a SPAC loophole. Clearly they shouldn't have gone public at all, but some basic sanity checking is better than zero.
To be clear, I'm totally onboard with Texas making their own exchange if they can actually do it better, or at least as-well. Competition is a good thing.