Socrates99
Bottoms up!
The primary driver of that "wage cliff" is losing Medicaid if you begin working a low wage job. The solution was right in Ironsided's post.
2020 US Election (Part Two)
- Thread starter Lexicus
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RCP has Trump over 43% now... Biden is still under 50%.
Patine
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Thematically, American foreign policy has been the same crap, just rehashed, since WW2. And, by the legality that the U.S. fully supported and participated in the Nuremberg Tribunals, a LOT of American politician, military officers, and the ENTIRETY of the CIA should be hanging or grey, foreboding prisons like the Nazis that were tried. Genocide was NOT the only crime tried at Nuremberg, by far, you know? Of course, I definitely believe this abundance of war criminals that should definitely face such trial - and the legality backs it - applies to the four other Permanent UN Security Council members, too, without a doubt.
Another good one:
"In a well-managed nation, poverty is shameful. In a poorly-managed nation, wealth is shameful,"
-Confucious
Edmund Ironside
White Rabbit Object
Everything sadly seems to be politicized these days, even things which shouldn't be, like wearing masks during the pandemic, or climate change.
I'm sure its only a matter time before whether Hawaiian pizza is good or not will be split down party lines (just for the record, I'm on Team Hawaiian Pizza)!
Money is probably half the problem; the other half is people. Politics might address some of the money part but cannot fix the people part.
Medicaid is part of it, but in the end to over come the cliff you need $20/hour jobs. For most poor people the pay needed and the skills required usually don't match the people. I spent 3 years working with Circles USA (gets people out of poverty) to develop a program structure to overcome the currently silo approach used by state/local governments and non profits. It is a mess.
Somebody should start a thread on how to solve poverty. I'd be curious how folks see the path.
So tl;dr individual owners of wealth have been bought/cleared out of the market?
You're on full campaign mode, man!
Start by here:
Cloud_Strife
Deity
I'm out. I'm going to leave this country regardless if Trump loses; his victory will only hasten it, America is diseased and sick and nothing will change any time soon.
I've scraped enough money to get out and I have family in othe countries.
I've scraped enough money to get out and I have family in othe countries.
My wife and I are strongly considering it too. My employer is global and supports such moves if there's any business sense behind it at all, to say nothing of ongoing telecommute options.
From today's WSJ!
Individuals Reshape Stock Market
BY ALEXANDER OSIPOVICH
It’s one of the year’s biggest market stories: Mom-and-pop investors have fallen back in love with stocks, lured by free trading apps, a resurgent bull market led by technology companies and a pandemic that has left millions of Americans at home with little to do.
New data show a number of ways in which the individual-trading boom has reshaped the U.S. stock market. Here are five takeaways:
On some days this year, about 25% of market volume has been individual-investor activity, said Joe Mecane, head of execution services at Citadel Securities, an electronic-trading firm that executes orders for such brokerages as Robinhood Markets Inc. and Charles Schwab Corp.
- Individual stock trading is at a decade high
- Trading by individuals accounts for a greater chunk of market activity than at any time during the past 10 years, according to Larry Tabb, head of market-structure research at Bloomberg Intelligence.
- During the first six months of this year, individual investors accounted for 19.5% of the shares traded in the U.S. stock market, up from 14.9% last year and nearly double the level from 2010, Mr. Tabb estimates. His data don’t go back further.
[edit: So on the best days individuals get to 25% of volume; most days it is less. So 75% or more of daily volume is not by individuals. While this may be a change from the recent past, the vast majority of stock volume is still traded by institutions.[end of edit]
Trading activity among individuals started climbing late last year, when Schwab and other major brokerages cut stock-trading commissions to zero. Mr. Mecane drew a parallel with the dot-com boom in the 1990s, when web-based brokers made it easier to trade stocks, just as a bull market was under way. “It was really the start of a similar trend,” he said. “Back then, technological and business innovation provided the first foray into instant execution and self-directed retail investing.”
Small investors power big moves in stocks
It has been called the Robinhood effect, the idea that stampedes of investors using the popular app are driving irratio- nal stock moves. In fact, such activity doesn’t matter much for most stocks, according to Nick Maggiulli, chief operating officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management.
But there is evidence of a Robinhood effect in some smaller stocks, he said. Mr. Maggiulli has studied the relationship between how many Robinhood users own a particular stock and its share price. If Robinhood investors were pushing prices up and down, one would expect a high correlation between those two things. For some of the hottest stocks on the app, including Apple Inc. and Tesla Inc., such correlations are weak. With others, such as Google parent Alphabet Inc., they are negative, meaning that as more Robinhood users buy a stock, its price tends to drop. Mr. Maggiulli found there are some stocks, though, with a high correlation between Robinhood popularity and price— indicating that the app’s users may indeed be driving their share prices. In recent months, such stocks have included Eastman Kodak Co., electric-truck startup Nikola Corp. and biotech firm Novavax Inc.
Asia is where individual investors truly dominate
Many Asian stock markets have traditionally been dominated by individual investors, unlike the institution-heavy U.S. market. In places such as mainland China, frenzied trading by individuals can create a casino-like feel, with exuberant bull runs followed by spectacular crashes.
Individuals often account for more than 80% of volume on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, while on the Korea Exchange’s main Kospi market, nearly 84% of shares traded so far this year were on behalf of individual investors, according to data compiled by Hee-Joon Ahn, a finance professor at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. There are several reasons why there is so much individual- stock trading in South Korea. These include an underdeveloped mutual-fund industry, a tech-savvy population accustomed to trading on smart-phones and price wars by brokers that have led to zero or near-zero commissions, according to Mr. Ahn. All that leads to heavy speculation, he added. “Individuals in Asia tend not only to crowd in trading of small stocks but also to be very short-term oriented,” Mr. Ahn said.
More of the U.S. stock market is going dark
The individual-investing boom has led to historically high levels of “dark” trading, in which stocks are bought and sold on opaque private venues, rather than public exchanges. That is because online brokers typically funnel small investors’ trades to electronic trading firms that execute the incoming orders. In July, 43.2% of U.S. stock- trading volume took place off-exchange, according to Rosenblatt Securities, a brokerage firm. That is the highest level that the firm has recorded since it started tracking such data in 2008. Stocks that are popular with small investors, such as United Airlines Holdings Inc., are more likely to trade in the dark. In July, 62.6% of trading of United shares took place off-exchange, Rosenblatt data show.
Exchanges such the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq Inc. have long complained that too much dark trading harms market transparency. “It’s always a concern when a large part of trading goes on outside the price-discovery process,” said Justin Schack, a managing director at Rosenblatt.
Big winners may be electronic traders
The firms that execute individual investors’ orders have enjoyed surging volumes. The three biggest players in that business—Citadel Securities, Virtu Financial Inc. and Susquehanna International Group LLP—traded a combined 69.4 billion shares over the counter in June, more than triple the level from November, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Most of the firms’ over-the-counter trades come from individual investors. OTC trading is a type of off-exchange trading. Electronic trading firms profit from individuals’ trades by collecting a small difference between the buying and selling prices of a stock. It’s hard to know how much money they are making, though, because most are private and don’t report financials.
At Virtu, which is public, net trading income more than tripled to $744 million in the second quarter. Virtu’s stock is up 56% since the start of 2020. Although the firm doesn’t say how much of its trading income comes from individuals, Chief Executive Douglas Cifu said on an Aug. 7 earnings call that the retail boom had been a big boost to Virtu. “It certainly is great for our business,” he said.
Individuals are not out of the market, but except for the day traders, many of them are buy and hold or are invested in index funds or EFTs that do not require active following. And if one has a diversified portfolio, 40-60% of that would be in bonds. I haven't bought an individual company stock in decades until last month when I bought Apple when it announced its split. I have not plans to sell it though. All those IRAs and 401ks are bought and sold by institutions, but the owners are individuals who mostly just sit and watch what happens.
Lexicus
Deity
Nah man you really can fix it with money, it's pretty easy to design a system where no one has to live in poverty
Ajidica
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Or it tells you how far up Poop Creek America is, where that many people are doing some variation of "Biden is underwhelming with a neo-liberal history, Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy and the planet; both are equally bad."
Good luck with that. Theory and design is one thing. Implementation is another and people are experienced at breaking their best toys. 40% of American won't wear masks in a pandemic and you think you can fix poverty with a good design? Please start a thread and tell me all about it. I will listen.
Ajidica
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Lexicus said it was easy to design a system, not that it was easy to get it past the American public and congresscritters. There are many problems that have an easy solution but will never get implemented due to intransigence. For example, the solution to the obesity crisis is easy: eat less and walk more. Asking Americans to please stop using drive-through and waddle to the counter, or consuming gallons of soda a day, is not so easy.
Then you have examples of small societies that have met the threshold you're describing
Patine
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Canada? Scandinavia? The Netherlands? New Zealand? Costa Rica? There definitely are far superior choices if you're measuring by living standards and decency of society. The fact that the majority of nations on Earth are WORSE in those ways than the U.S. notwithstanding, of course - unfortunately. I happen to live in, and have lived all my life in, one of the shining beacons of civilization I listed above.
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