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Comment by robocat | Hacker News Reader

And how much of that is owners of tech companies that they founded?

The US economy depends on those tech companies: try succeeding in a country that only has old school businesses: I remember the top stocks for France are terrifyingly old. I'm in New Zealand and we hardly have any tech stocks. Xero, RocketLabs? We often sell our successes overseas.

Edit: many of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_Americans_b... are founders. Looking at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_billionaires_by... and too many of the businesses are over a century old, more than a few from the 1800s.

Edit: The irony of rich Americans talking about wealth inequality is harsh. There's billions of people that desperately want the resources that a poor US citizen spends. If you are American and want to talk about the wealthy, look at yourself and ask how your wealth should be taken from you and given to the poor of the world...

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Tech isn't the world. In fact if anything tech as an industry is performing awfully for us people. Lay offs lay offs for years

Tech as an investment has been doing well, and that's what he is talking about. The labor market is something else. I expect a tech crash eventually that will nuke the stock market, but good luck predicting it.

Tech stocks are the market now. If you bought Nasdaq before, at peak or after dotcom bust, then you had to wait 15 years to "break even". If you bet against tech stocks (e.g. buy S&P500) then you're down.

It is historically risky to bet against the US stock market.

https://infogram.com/all-recessions-1h7v4pw0g7jxj6k

It's not risky to stay on the sidelines when the market is so overvalued. This is what Warren Buffet is doing. Regardless of what you think of him, he is more sophisticated than we are. Hindsight is 20/20. The market also drops every 5-10 years by 30-50%. If you take a 50% loss even once, your money has to work way harder just to get you back to where you were before. I mean, you need to double your money to recover from a 50% downfall, which is way harder than you think and prone to another major drop. Therefore, it is worth exercising some caution in your investments. If returns look too good to be true, they probably are.

Perhaps listen to Buffett and Charlie saying they didn't time markets: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=secMNCDsxBc ...

Spelling his name wrong will generally bias people against your financial opinions.

> I mean, you need to double your money to recover from a 50% downfall

Nonsensical argument if you already doubled your money by being in the market for a long time - which appears to be especially true for tech stocks. Buffett talks about "time in the market".

Timing the market is often regarded as gambling: maybe because the idea is so alluring.

Disclaimer: I like trying to time the market, even though I believe the experts that say I shouldn't. Sold all crypto related investments about a month ago (not just timing, also opinion from looking at how crypto is used while I was travelling in Argentina, and other reasons). I believe any investment should have multiple good reasons, and can maybe have one or two poor reasons too!!!

I don't think it's impossible to time markets. But it is really hard to do. If you think buying something overpriced in a bubble is worth the risk, I would argue it is you who is timing the market. Either you think you can pull out fast enough (a MUCH harder timing problem than figuring out when to get in), or else you think that the market will never get wise to the bad value.

>Spelling his name wrong will generally bias people against your financial opinions.

Yeah let me worry about that as I type it on a phone with an unruly keyboard lol.

>Perhaps listen to Buffett and Charlie saying they didn't time markets

Where did I say you should time it? I just said, don't invest in things that are obviously overvalued. Buffett is having trouble finding anything that isn't overvalued, so his cash stockpile is growing. You can view that as timing the market or whatever, but the bottom line is that buying overvalued stuff is a guaranteed loser. And when prices come down, you need to have money available to buy anything that is at a reasonable price. Of course inflation makes it difficult to figure if prices are actually good or not, and makes it harder to preserve value while waiting for a good buy. But it's a lot safer to try to do that in general.

Where are the stats for France? Asking genuinely

I dont have the exact stats under the hand but if you look in the CAC40. There is not a single innovative company founded independently in the last 40 years. All offshoots at best, at worst companies literally founded between 1890-1920, similar in Germany, Spain and Italy. It's kinda crazy ngl.

Indeed. However this is more reflective of a problem of private capital and attractivity of EU stock markets rather than the innovation horsepower.

Criteo, Datadog, Snowflake and the likes are European-based ventures but listed on the NASDAQ.

  France : top 10% own 60%, Bottom 50% own 5%
  USA : top 10% own 72%, Bottom 50% own 2%
  Sweden : top 10% own 60%, Bottom 50% own 5%

Source : https://wid.world/country/france/

I don't find these numbers particularly indicative of a massive difference between the EU and the US.

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