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Comment by martin_bech | Hacker News Reader

Just as a sidenote, here in Denmark, our Version of the 401k, its illegal to have more than 20% in a single stock, for your own safety.

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I love to make my own decisions about my safety. That's a ridiculous. Does the state compensate those who 'for their own safety' were disadvantaged?

This is for pensions only, If you want to do stocks on your own, you can do whatever, and even leverage the f out of it.

But I actually think this is fine for pensions.

A pension is very unlike a 401k. A 401k is an investment account that you, the employee own. A pension is an account the employer owns, m along with a promise they’ll pay out of it at a certain rate.

Pensions are different in Denmark, the employee owns the pension, and has a lot of options on how it works, how its invested etc. Thats also why pensionplans cant really default in Denmark, because its the employees own account, with money already in it.

I wonder if you can have 20% in the stock and the remaining in various forms of options that end up acting as the remaining 80%. If each of the options counts as its own stock you can do some interesting financial engineering work to make it happen.

Although options themselves are riskier so not sure what sort of incentive that sets.

Nope you can't. And you can't split by buying Class A and Class B stock.

You can loose your money outside of your retirement account too though.

And if I cross the street I could get hit by a car. I'm all for countries teaching their citizens about financial responsibility, right in school with the rest of the curriculum. But I would not want the state to tell me how I can invest, they are protecting their own interests as much or more than mine.

> But I would not want the state to tell me how to...

well then I would advise you to stay far away from Denmark. I personally don't feel like I have to rebel against the man every minute of the day and safeguarding people from engaging in hazardous financial behaviour is about as reasonable as forcing them to put a seatbelt on

Except you get tax advantages in exchange from the restrictions on your retirement account. You can use a non retirement account if you’re not happy with them.

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