I never understood the argument against speculation. Many stocks are losing money or do not yet have a working product, so how is speculating on these kinds of stocks any different from speculating on cryptocurrencies?
Vanguard says it's more of a speculation than an investment. Vanguard isn't saying speculation is bad entirely.
Stocks are ownership of a tiny part of a company that has assets, cash flow, and does something in the world. Stocks are a speculation as well, some more than others, but the balance of speculation to investment is weighted differently.
Bitcoin on the other hand is almost always only purchased for speculation that the exchange rate will go in your favor. You don't own a tiny part of anything.
From my perspective, a big issue with Bitcoin speculation is that it's inherently zero-sum. Investing in a company is usually positive-sum (even if it you don't profit).
Ability to send vale across the world, to anywhere, for relatively low fees, could count as providing value, don't you think? A lot of people do.
Bitcoin got labeled just a "store of value", but with Bitcoin Lightning it can be used for low fee payments too.
Pity about mining though, I wish they followed Ethereum into staking. It doesn't matter how much value you provide if you burn the planet along the way.
If it's working as intended then there's no point in holding on to the crypto itself as there should be a race to the bottom to keep fees low. By investing in crypto as a technology you're hoping that the technology becomes popular but remains expensive.
Blockchains can potentially produce value by receiving transaction fees and burning them. This is similar in some ways to a stock buyback.
Both Ethereum and Solana are currently coded to do this, though AFAIK neither of them are currently cash-positive due to their burned fees not being enough to offset issuance yet.
If you’re buying stocks in a company which _doesn’t have a working product_, then, er, yeah, that’s not a million miles away. You probably shouldn’t do that. Arguably those stocks should never have made it onto the public markets; where this happens it’s generally due to SPACs, which arguably should never have been allowed in the first place.
“Losing money” is a bit different; if a company is, deliberately, investing in growth rather than generating a net profit, that _can_ be a _good_ thing, as it implies greater future profits. Amazon, say, _could_ have become profitable far earlier than it did, but it would be a much smaller company if it had. If they’re buying something for $20 and selling it for $10, then yeah, not so much, but again that’s in the class of companies that you should not invest in, that most people do not invest in (they’re not in the major indexes), and that arguably should never have been allowed to float.
When people talk about investing in the markets, they’re usually talking about either investing in an index, or in some approximation of an index (whether through active management or cobbling together their own portfolio of real companies which will generally more or less mirror the top 10 of at least one major index). They’re not talking about buying shares in weird scam companies; _that_ is speculation.
Aside from that, wouldn't the same train of thought preclude buying overvalued stocks?
Even if BTC was determined to have value, wouldn't the risk of tether be enough to avoid it (if - aside from giving BTC value - speaking from verified facts only. Meaning it's an established FACT that the people who control tether have not proven it is or was ever backed by an equal amount of capital).
Seems like a lot of HN is bitter about not buying a tech-centric in-their-face asset when it first started that they thought about but didn't grab a bag and could have changed their lives from great to giant multi-millionaire. Stonks are traded at some > 40x their company's worth, but somehow's not laughed at on here.
And fuckin hell. You see the doses they use in these studies? 300mg is a huge dose. Weed shops only tend to sell 10mg doses. And even the stuff you find at drug stores... it's like 25-50mg per capsule.
Haven't done any interviews but did talk to a recruiter who was asking upfront if I was okay with a 6 day work week. Just a single data point, but I would assume employers are also trying to leverage the situation to get more out of their employees.
The layoffs are due to higher interest rates. Higher interest rates are due to higher inflation. Higher inflation is due to money printing. Money printing is due to covid and other central bank activities.
> Money printing is due to covid and other central bank activities.
A very small nuanced clarification that you might or might not agree with, but I'd argue that it was the reaction to Covid, and not Covid itself, that led up to the issues we face now and will face for years.
