The problem is it's very easy to make a long-term bet the stock will go up (buy the stock) but it is very hard to make a long-term bet the stock will go down (you have to pick a date by which it occurs).
You're correct, but your assertion needs a qualifier: it's hard for small investors to make a long-term bet that a stock will go down.
Large investors do not need to purchase index funds, instead they can direct index and purchase the underlying stocks directly. If you're a small investor, the index funds offer diversification but without the ability to divest from individual stocks covered by the index; large investors that are direct indexing can just decide to exclude meme stocks and not buy them, and in so doing make a long-term bet that those stocks will underperform the rest of the index (and without needing to pick a specific date by which that underperformance will happen, unlike a short).
There's an argument to be made that there should be a maximum share price (stocks that reach the maximum trigger an automatic stock split), and that stocks should be allowed to trade for fractions of a penny (after all, what really prevents this in a day and age where all trades are electronically settled? Nobody needs to cash out for literal copper pennies...). Much smaller individual share prices would make it more feasible for smaller investors to build direct indexing strategies.
True, though there are some ways of even relatively small investors doing direct indexing.
But when you start modifying the index you're not really indexing anymore ...
And this is not really a bet against the stock, just a value tilt away from it betting that there are better performance elsewhere. You don't make money because TSLA tanked, you make money (or don't lose money) because your money was elsewhere.
It's been interesting to review my portfolio, such as it is, against this situation, and see that I'm down relatively little. Not because I've bet against anything per se, but I made a conscious decision years ago to diversify out of the SP500 ("VTSAX and chill!") into broader and exUS indices.
The broader US market is only about 25% bigger than the S&P500, FWIW. (Or put another way, S&P500 is about 80% of all US equity.) They also trade in almost lockstep:
This is specifically one of those points in stock history where it isn't true; the heavyweights of the S&P 500 are dragging it down while the smaller companies are less affected.
I brought a graph in my earlier comment! Even over the past year, they're highly correlated. (And the S&P500 is ahead over the period -- not the other 25%.)
I can't speak to their quality, but every time I see their name, I wonder about how they're received in England: Americans might generally be unaware, but "smeg" as a name doesn't land well there, as I understand it.
A UK comedy called RedDwarf used variations of smeg as a mild expletive quite liberally. When asked some of the producers claimed they made it up to get around broadcast rules, but most people think it's a shortening of smegma.
Some of us have hands (and wrists and arms) that are dealing with RSI. Keyboard use reduction is very important in these cases.
Greg Priest Dorman [0][1] had other physical issues such that he had to regularly switch between sitting, standing, and walking during his workday. His solutions included (in part) some very specialized keypads, but TTS might well have been another solution for someone with similar needs.
Another fellow on my team refuses to write/type anything other than pure code to solve issues at work, but will absolutely talk for hours on end about designs, considerations, issues, what-have-you, so we're actively trying to get him to adopt a TTS-based workflow for knowledge transfer, writing tickets/bugs, etc.
They're still out there; people are still posting stories and having conversations about 'em. I don't know that CmdrTaco or any of the other founders are still at all involved, but I'm willing to bet they're still running on Perl :)
Wow I had to hop over to check it out. It’s indeed still alive! But I didn’t see any stories on the first page with a comment count over 100, so it’s definitely a far cry from its heyday.
Curl fully supports the use of AI tools by legitimate security researchers to catch bugs, and they have fixed dozens caught in this way. It’s just idiots submitting bugs they don’t understand that’s a problem.
reply