> People buy into ponzi schemes, too, knowing full well that they are ponzi schemes.
Ponzi schemes are only bad if you are in the last batch of investors. The first ones do get a nice return (otherwise the scheme itself would not last long).
A smart investor could decide to put some money in a Ponzi scheme, as long as he knows what's his number in line, deciding to gradually disinvest some % as times goes on in order to collect the enormous gains.
It is literally true. People who bought at $50K around this week, have to hope there are people who will buy at $60K, then those people have to hope there are people who will buy at $70K, then $80K, then $90K....
From that perspective this looks like a kind of a Ponzi scheme already.
Of course like most Ponzi Schemes the early investors reap massive gains. It's the ones who come later who suffer.
> Most people in Ponzi schemes are being directly mislead. They don't think it's a gamble.
Most people are being directly mislead. This is true for the vast majority of the human experience. Politics, love, advertising, the list goes on.
Why are Ponzi schemes less palatable than being fleeced by automated scripts on a sports-betting site? In both cases, people think they will make money because they are smart, when they actually will lose money because they are dumb.
> Huh? How exactly do you play ponzi schemes conservatively?
Get in and out quickly taking the, presumably higher-than-normal, ROI with you. Typically with ponzi schemes, folks put in and keep their money in to compound because, on paper, they have insane ROIs. Their greed blinds them to the "too good to be true."
Still, Ponzi schemes do payout to some amount of people, those who pull out before it is too late. None of this is to say you won't be left holding the bag, but if you're an "in-and-out" player you have a better chance of not being the one left holding the bag compared to those who see fake numbers and let greed wash over them.
> you are incentivized to keep your money into the system so you can control more and more of it. It's like a ponzi scheme where you are incentivized to re-invest your winnings.
So you think the stock market is a ponzi scheme? Shares pay dividends, you are insentivised to keep putting money into the system
> If somebody genuinely to risk their money as an investor, it's not in their self-interest for us to forbid them to do so. That is what they want to do. And it's also not in anyone else's self-interest to forbid them from doing it. Investment and entrepreneurship is what drives the economy.
It isn't, at all. The increase in prices is tied to increase in GDP, interest rates and disposable income. Unless you think investing is a Ponzi scheme.
> There are oodles of people doing the same thing, who have access to better information, have more experience, have better search/screening systems, and so on.
If you're playing the short-term investment game, all of those things matter hugely. It's a zero-sum game. In order to make money at it, you have to have a better system than the rest of the people playing -- just like making money on sports betting.
They don't matter nearly so much in the long term. Long-term investing isn't zero-sum; economies can grow, and your goal is to own a growing piece of the economy. There are oodles of people playing the long-term game, but the market is big enough that even I, with my relatively limited information, can make good solid investments.
Consider this a corollary to "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". The market can offer irrational bargains to such a degree that even once those with better information have had their fill, there's some left over for people like me.
> if you stick with it and don't sell, things will turn out pretty well
I think that thinking is at fault, at least in part, for the massive loss that's pending in terms of a deep market correction, because it's valuing based on growth and not on fundamentals.
If you can sell eggs for 10 cents each, you have a cap on the price of chickens. Now you can adjust this for future growth but you still have a limit in the fundamentals of getting a return on your money.
But when you invest ignoring that, you might do well for a very long time. As chickens go from $500 to $1,000 to $10,000, etc. more people see it and join in, pushing the price higher. In the end, it's a Ponzi scheme. You'll only do well if you get out before it comes crashing down.
> stocks are only worth something now because future rubes will buy them for more later
Stocks are valuable because they are a claim on the assets and future profits of a company, as well as a claim on the ownership and control of the company.
Some people buy stocks just in the hope that a Greater Fool will buy them for more money later, but that's not the same thing as calling stocks in general a "ponzi scheme".
>How can this process of continually tricking the next investor possibly work out quarter after quarter?
I imagine that if the next investor was someone like a retirement fund this could work out pretty well, since they have a steady flow of money being paid in. I don't know to what extent that actually happens.
>it is ending up in the pockets of a few at their expense.
Everyone is aware of that. The group of people that will get rich are those who bought the stock 2 weeks ago or earlier.
Heck, when someone put their entire life savings in ornamental gourd futures WSB crapped about that person saying how stupid that was. They aren't stupid. They are fully aware of what they are doing.
Ponzi schemes are only bad if you are in the last batch of investors. The first ones do get a nice return (otherwise the scheme itself would not last long).
A smart investor could decide to put some money in a Ponzi scheme, as long as he knows what's his number in line, deciding to gradually disinvest some % as times goes on in order to collect the enormous gains.
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