Considering they were $17/sh in Nov 2024 and $36/sh in Nov 2025, today's price of $67.50 seems like a huge return in just two years.
That's kinda the point; something as important as this shouldn't be a casino.
I increasingly get the same feeling I did as back in the early 2000s when there were endless 'house flipping' shows on TV where somebody would go buy a house on an insta-improved loan, add some granite counter tops and mop the floor, then resell it within a couple of weeks for $20k profit and repeat. Not sure how people didn't see that was basically 'Bubble - The TV Show!'
Fwiw, I bought 100 shares when they were 19€/share and sold 80 when they reached 100 this summer, so I followed it's development somewhat.
The low was itself after it's share dropped by like 25+%. That's what made me buy them - I thought "no way is the USA government going to let them go insolvent, their losses are gonna get socialized for sure". One year later Trump announced a large injection into Intel, causing the stock price to overshoot my expectation massively.
This fall is just it's share going closer to a more realistic valuation after Trump blew it up, I think it's gonna settle around 40 in a year or so
Casinos are awesome! So welcoming. :) (/s)
Customers because a product they use from a company won't work because...?
Employees because they not only work at the company (I'm assuming they're paid for their labor), but also can buy stock in it?
Taxpayers because of bailouts?
When you have a small business, or even a large business that has a single owner, that person has to care about things like their own reputation and might sometimes have preferences for things other than maximizing returns. There is a significant difference in behavior between a profitable company that makes money by providing something people want and a company that makes slightly more money by turning the screws at every opportunity.
And typical funds only care about number go up. Even the ones that nominally exclude "bad" companies/industries have their rules, but then hold shares in Comcast rather than Exxon and still expect Comcast to turn the screws. Whereas to do the real thing, you would need funds with missions to do things like specifically fund companies who are new entrants to concentrated markets to increase the amount of competition. Which to most funds is a conflict of interest, because if the fund has that industry as a target then it already owns shares in the companies the new entrant would be competing with. Conversely, mergers they're all for, because they own shares in all three companies in that industry, so causing three to become two is higher margins for everybody.
So it produces market concentration and drives obsession with quarterly profits, harming customers and employees. The consequently larger companies then buy off the government to get subsidies and insist they're too big to fail whenever they screw up, use the nature of multinational conglomerates to arbitrage tax rates and shift tax incidence to purely domestic companies and workers, etc. All of which the funds like because they make number go up.
It's basically a paperclip optimizer which is trying to accumulate money rather than paperclips.
Maybe? Maybe not! Just saying it doesn't make it true.
I'll skip the step asking Claude to produce the lengthy list of examples where market concentration richly benefitted customers, employees, and taxpayers.
One difference: the longer your money is in a casino, the more likely you are to lose it; while the longer your money is in the stock market (especially in a total market index fund), the more likely you are to win:
* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2023/05/the-stock-market-is...
After five years, you're up 90% of the time. Buy and hold for fifteen years, and you're up 100% of the time.
In a casino the house generally wins eventually, in the stock market you do.
It reflects people's perception of reality.
How exactly would you design a meter of actual reality, in the sense of where capital value is going to go in [delta-time]?
It's how everything always works. If you perceive that you have cancer, based on doctors' gathered and interpreted data, you will act on that perception.
With that attitude, sure.
There are real, objectively measurable signals that could be used to help moderate a purely perception-based market. But the “pure” “free” market system of US-style ultracapitalism doesn’t allow for that.
The scare quotes are because it’s not really a pure free market, it’s biased in favor of those who are most able to manipulate perception, and in general towards those who have the most paper wealth, which is not real economic value but rather based on those manipulated perceptions.
In other words, it’s a vicious cycle that pumps up valuations to continually move the market further and further away from any kind of reality. It’s a big part of why we see enormous boom-bubble-bust cycles.
Musk would be a good example: there’s no sane way to connect the actual economic value his companies have ever produced, or are ever likely to produce, to the market value that makes up his net worth.
The idea that “that’s as close as we can get” is basically a version of the Simpson’s quote, “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.”
There’s plenty of existing work that focuses on these issues. Just one example is C.H. Douglas’ “Social Credit”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit, which is a good starting pointing for thinking more seriously about the subject.
Those are merely your perception of "facts". And, surprise!, you are not the first person to ever determine there are "real, objectively measurable signals that could be used to help moderate". There's an entire legion of workers out there trying to do that.
If you genuinely perceived "real" indicators the market was overlooking, you should implement them and become a billionaire. Go ahead.
I understand that at a lofty, ethical plane, it's a reflection of value, of growth and progress and confidence in all of that.
But in practice, it's not even gambling. It's humanity's hope bastardised by HFT and recurring insider trading. It's confidence for all the wrong reasons, institutional HODL.
It's a mugs' game.
Over the long term it’s the investment class most likely to grow capital.
Occasionally there are long periods where returns are low (or even negative), but in terms of risk it’s the least risky place to put your money compared to all the alternatives (if properly diversified).
(Not financial advice, just my rule-of-thumb understanding)
This is a very US-centric viewpoint, my recollection is that the FTSE didn't beat inflation for like a 20 year period.
That being said, index funds focused on equity are definitely a good way of getting reasonable returns over time (as long as you don't retire into a massive crash).
Since you don't know if it's going to rain or not, you are going to value it based on how likely each of these events are. Now the weather report came out, and there's not going to be any rain.
The stock market has lots of guards against volatility, but the AI story bypasses all of them - they're saying that AI is the only thing that is going to matter economically, and AI value is exponential - meaning past performance can be discounted, since almost all value resides in the future.
This means that all companies valuations have been reduced to a single dimension - how much companies can contribute to AI, this increases volatility, since now their value is highly correllated with AI
Usually insiders just trade early (and push the market closer to the correct number).