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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • What does fairness have to do with it? Compound interest is just math.

    One could trivially make an argument that we should redistribute the wealth among the population, but there is not a clear way how to do this effectively, or it would have been done already.

    The hard part is taking on the appropriate amount of risk in order to actualize those gains; a bank won’t just give you a 10% interest rate, you have to work your ass of for it. An entrepreneur needs to assess the landscape and invest in what the market will want tomorrow, and most people guess suboptimally (3-6%), or end up losing money, whether in fact (negative returns) or relative to inflation (0-3%).

    Even pointing to the S&P 500, as most people do, you still need to make the conscious decision to sell and take profits, FOMO be damned. Or alternatively, taking a perceived loss but actual profit (e.g., you didn’t sell right at the peak, but that’s usually okay). It’s not easy, and most people don’t have the time or stomach for it; these people are best served by long term, government-backed bonds, after which you will come out only slightly ahead of inflation.

    Using the rule of 72, and a 3% bond rate, it would actually take you 24 years to double your money, not seven. And that, my friend, is why you and I are not billionaires.


  • And guess what those business have? Valuations. Stock price is just an aggregate indicator of the valuation for a company, for the given percentage of shares that are publicly traded. But private companies have valuations, too, and even if they’re not tied to a public stock offering, those valuations are used to form these Billionaire lists.

    Same thing with real estate. The value of any asset is based on what someone is willing to pay. Sometimes, you’ll find some crazy billionaire or investment firm who grossly overvalues an asset relative to their peers, and that insane overvaluation does get rolled into those lists.

    But such is the nature of economics. You’ve neither gained nor lost value until someone pays you. Until then, it’s anyone’s guess.