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Comment by nightski | Hacker News Reader

You could replace what you said with stocks, investing, and finance in general actually.

Surely a retail investor understands that the AAPL represents claims on the future earnings of Apple, and TSLA represents claims on the future earnings of Tesla. People know what those companies do in the real world.

And most understand that Dogecoin and Ethereum are different coins, and probably even that Ethereum and Ethereum Max are different coins. But they often do not know the difference between these protocols or projects.

It would be like putting stock tickers on all the hundreds of competing JavaScript frameworks on GitHub and asking the average non-dev what to invest in.

You might be surprised. In my experience many people have no idea what a stock actually is or how the market works and prices are "determined". I have run into so many folks that even have a 401(k) and don't even know they can invest it in things other than the default allocation. Even if they did know they would have no idea what to do, which is even worse because a 401(k) heavily limits your investment options so it makes it simple.

I’m not surprised, because all of those things you mention are different and much more specific than I’m referring to.

The vague idea that “if Tesla the company does well, TSLA the stock goes up, in a loose sense” is much simpler and it’s hard for me to imagine there are many retail investors that don’t understand that on some level.

I'll give you that (although that principle is so generic it isn't even actionable in practice). But if you asked the average person in the U.S. who has a portfolio (I believe it's only like 50% of Americans hold stock), I'd imagine a good deal of them couldn't even tell you what companies they own.

Probably true (given that it’s true of me and I work in finance), but again irrelevant to my point.

I’m not sure how the principle is not actionable in practice. Surely recognizing that everyone has iPhones and that trend isn’t stopping is enough for a lay person to recognize AAPL is reasonably safe as an investment.

AAPL might be a safe bet, but maybe not? I'm sure the company will be profitable for quite some time but stock prices are not driven by profits as you know. They are built on expectations. A lot of the expectation for Apple is built into it's $2T market cap.

You might of thought AAPL was a safe bet at the beginning of the year, but now it's down 22.23%. At this point we don't know if it's going to take a year to recover or a decade.

So I know I am preaching to the choir but it's not just "company doing well so stock is safe". There's the context of the overall economy not to mention a lot of companies look like they are doing great until one day they don't.

I don't think so. They think "I like my Tesla", that's it.

The barrier-to-entry for listing on a stock exchange is rather a lot higher than it is for creating a crypto token.

While your statement is factually correct, you may be surprised at just how easy it is to be listed on a "stock exchange". While the larger, well known exchanges have a higher barrier to entry, there are lots of smaller exchanges willing to list all sorts of things.

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