You had lots of choices, you made this choice, and you can always change your mind. Do we really need to have the government step in to prevent you from having to choose something else?
By portfolio theory, all assets are part of the market. Public and private. The challenge is rebalancing cost, which is driven by transaction costs. Having a tiny percent of every single asset rebalanced every second is great in theory, since you'll be diversified across the market as a whole, but you'll also lose all your money to fees.
This is why the S&P 500 exists. It's a limited number of names that are very liquid, i.e. transactable at scale at reasonable cost. As trading fees went down we saw larger and larger indices.
You aren't required to invest in the stock market. There is nothing stopping you from exclusively investing in CD's, corporate bonds, Government bonds, or even cash for your retirement.
Of course those are less volatile, and therefore provide lower returns, hence you will need to save significantly more and spend significantly less, but that's not you being forced to invest in the stock market. That's just the reality of risk/return trade-offs.
I believe that the Anthropic IPO price will be too high, but also in the long run it might turn out to be a great investment.
The most important thing I believe is that this is what I signed up for when I bought lots and lots of VTI. And that I can change to a different set of investments pretty much instantly for 9 hours a day, 5 days a week. With no tax hit because it's in my retirement account.
I don't think that's what avg 401k holder is doing
So even if one believes in AI the rational choice is to invest into hardware that AI companies needs (GPUs, gas turbines, batteries, solar panels)
Why do you think you don’t already have more than that many months of audited Anthropic financials?
The alternative is don't invest in them?
Or, if you are this certain that they are going to fail, then short their stock. You could make millions.
The wealthiest Americans have never owned so much of the stock market, with the top 10% now holding a record 93% of US equities, according to Federal Reserve data.
the bottom 50% of Americans owned just 1% of all stocks and mutual fund shares
People buying etf loves that. in their mind, they shift the risk and responsibility to an external party (oh yeah; free money without risks!!) but forget the new responsibility they have to take: you gave the decision power to someone else; now you have to live by it.