vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
"There is no fundamental, good reason, I think; ""that's just how it's done"" (which is what all the other answers seem to be saying, w/o coming out and admitting it). Just guessing, but I'll bet most of the reason is historical: Before up-to-the-moment quotes were readily available, that was a bit tedious to calculate/update the fund's value, so enacted-laws let it be done just once per day.  (@NL7 quotes the security act of 1940, which certainly has been updated, but also still might contain the results of crufty rationales, like this.) There are genuinely different issues between funds and stocks, though: One share of a fund is fundamentally different from one share of stock: There is a finite supply of Company-X-stock, and people are trading that piece of ownership around, and barter to find an mutually-agreeable-price.  But when you buy into a mutual-fund, the mutual-fund ""suddenly has more shares"" -- it takes your money and uses it to buy shares of the underlying stocks (in a ratio equal to its current holdings).  As a consequence: the mutual fund's price isn't determined by two people bartering and agreeing on a price (like stock); there is exactly one sane way to price a mutual fund, and that's the weighted total of its underlying stock.  If you wanted to sell your ownership-of-Mutual-Fund-Z to a friend at 2:34pm, there wouldn't be any bartering, you'd just calculate the value based on the stated-value of the underlying stock at that exact moment. So: there's no inherent reason you can't instantaneously price a mutual fund.  BUT people don't really buy/sell funds to each other -- they go to the fund-manager and essentially make a deposit-or-withdraw.  The fund-manager is only required by law to do it once a day (and perhaps even forbidden from doing it more often?), so that's all they do. [Disclaimer: I know very little about markets and finance. But I recognize answers that are 'just because'.]"
20.8% of the market isn't anywhere close to a monopoly. I understand that it's over twice as much as their nearest competition, but there is still a lot of competition. Eh, but perhaps my definition of a monopoly is skewed by, you know, historical examples like Standard Oil and AT&amp;T.
There is empirical data to suggest deregulation in healthcare would drive down prices. https://thinkprogress.org/how-one-oklahoma-hospital-is-driving-down-the-cost-of-health-care-by-thousands-of-dollars-f507cdf32111. In a free market where prices are transparent, prices go down.   As to your pharmaceutical example, that is a form of protectionism regulation. The reason why epipen is able to charge that price is because they have a patent protection (protectionism) that lasts through 2025. https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/09/epipen-lack-of-innovation/. There is no substitute.   If there were a reform in pharma laws that made pharmaceutical company have to share their patents for licensing costs (similar to how cellular providers must provide access to their networks for a fee) then the price would go down.   Market forces do reign supreme. It is supply and demand. As simple as that. If there is a market with a lot of profit, in a free market, participants will enter the market until the profit drops down to zero. That is why you cannot charge 10 dollars for a big mac in the same city where a McDonalds 1 mile away charges 5 dollars.
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"This is 100% accurate: ""Conversely, an industry with two or three firms can be more competitive than one with 50, such as supermarkets or online platforms like Uber where economies of scale can enhance competition between fewer but healthier players. The last 40-plus years of economic research is clear: Simply counting the number of firms in an industry tells you very little about competition."""
I see what your point is, but I would argue that the barriers to enter the web market are almost non-existent. It doesn't take huge capital to create a great product. Check out the author's product at http://letsfreckle.com/. It's a perfect example that it doesn't take VC's to make a good product and viable business. Everything that you mentioned can and is being done by entrepreneurs without the help of VC money. By the way just because you have investors involved doesn't mean you'll create a commercially viable product either.  That being said some people will still opt for the VC route because you can't be the next groupon without VC money right? Without investors how would companies with no business model survive?
Is there some evidence in the article or elsewhere that the purpose is to kill off these competitors rather than simply to compete?  Competition is normally considered good in these kinds of situations, as it cranks out better efficiencies (for which an argument can be made here), but taking actions specifically for the purpose of killing off competition is not good because it reduces the pressures on efficiencies.  Killing off competition by artificially lowering prices below real market value is considered dumping, but I don't really see evidence of that in the article. Is there some hidden somewhere or is the article just trying to make a point without any basis?  I do have concerns about the Amazon play, but sensationalist or bias-driven reporting won't help me puzzle through them.
&gt; So in natural cases competition would be healthiest way but i don't believe other firms can emerge in this markets  Just because you believe they can’t doesn’t mean they can’t. We have to prove doing so is infeasible.  &gt; and amazon could kill real life retailers in 10-20 years time.  That’s not very compelling. Walmart did so faster in the 90s. Customers eventually started drifting to alternative merchants. In the case of Amazon retail sales, one competitors is AliExpress. Google is an advertising company and there are plenty of those around. Facebook is a social media platform and several competitors exist in that arena.
I mean sure but there have [been underlying problems with Whole Foods business](https://www.forbes.com/sites/brycehoffman/2017/04/30/the-problem-with-whole-foods/#4ac1755019d6) for a while.   I'm trying to understand why Amazon would specifically target Whole Foods vs another Grocery chain. Does the relative decline of Whole Foods market put it in a place where Amazon can acquire it for a discount? I'm guessing yes, but the source article is rather short on reasons.
While the US hosts most of the world's innovative startups, its own financial and banking systems are very slow to change.  The infrastructure exists, however the ACH transfers are not wide-spread between individuals. Banks much prefer the option of bill-pay (i.e.: as you said, mailing a check, something in other countries people wouldn't even think of), than letting you do it yourself.  Why? Because they can. There's no real competition over consumers, and the consumers themselves are not educated or sophisticated. Thus, the banks are comfortable with the lack of innovation - since as long as they are all lacking innovation - consumers won't demand it because they won't even know things are possible. And it is definitely cheaper for the banks not to innovate and keep your money for a week while the bill-pay check is en route, than try and develop new things. In other countries, the regulator would step up and force banks to develop new infrastructure and widen the options, but in the US regulation is considered a bad thing, and people are easily swayed, being uneducated and uninformed, by the corporations to support politicians who act against their (people's) best interest in protecting the corporations and reducing and limiting the regulators even further.
Personally I think as long as they aren't breaking any monopoly laws, then size isn't really an issue.   To put it another way, I'd be more concerned with Google Search having a 90% market share than with one company owning Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, and Android. The latter makes for a really huge company, but it's all different products and they all have competitors.
"The percentage of market share alone isn't determinative of whether an illegal monopoly exists, and it's theoretically possible to violate antitrust law with as little as 50% market share. Specifically U.S. courts have interpreted the Sherman Antitrust Act, Section Two, to mean that [""A market share greater than 75 percent indicates monopoly power, a share less than 50 percent does not, and shares between 50 and 75 percent are inconclusive in and of themselves.""](http://law.jrank.org/pages/10247/Sherman-Anti-Trust-Act-Monopolies.html)"
"In essence the problem that the OP identified is not that the FX market itself has poor liquidity but that retail FX brokerage sometimes have poor counterparty risk management. The problem is the actual business model that many FX brokerages have. Most FX brokerages are themselves customers of much larger money center banks that are very well capitalized and provide ample liquidity. By liquidity I mean the ability to put on a position of relatively decent size (long EURUSD say) at any particular time with a small price impact relative to where it is trading. For spot FX, intraday bid/ask spreads are extremely small, on the order of fractions of pips for majors (EUR/USD/GBP/JPY/CHF). Even in extremely volatile situations it rarely becomes much larger than a few pips for positions of 1 to 10 Million USD equivalent notional value in the institutional market. Given that retail traders rarely trade that large a position, the FX spot market is essentially very liquid in that respect. The problem is that there are retail brokerages whose business model is to encourage excessive trading in the hopes of capturing that spread, but not guaranteeing that it has enough capital to always meet all client obligations. What does get retail traders in trouble is that most are unaware that they are not actually trading on an exchange like with stocks. Every bid and ask they see on the screen the moment they execute a trade is done against that FX brokerage, and not some other trader in a transparent central limit order book. This has some deep implications. One is the nifty attribute that you rarely pay ""commission"" to do FX trades unlike in stock trading. Why? Because they build that cost into the quotes they give you. In sleepy markets, buyers and sellers cancel out, they just ""capture"" that spread which is the desired outcome when that business model functions well. There are two situations where the brokerage's might lose money and capital becomes very important. In extremely volatile markets, every one of their clients may want to sell for some reason, this forces the FX brokers to accumulate a large position in the opposite side that they have to offload. They will trade in the institutional market with other brokerages to net out their positions so that they are as close to flat as possible.
The markets are a construction intended to serve people.  These programs do not allow participation from either the general public or enlightened members of r/Economics, nor is there any scenario by which they distribute capital so as to enhance the functioning of the real economy which is about provision of goods and services to people.
You're suffering from two basic mistaken ideas:  First, major breakthroughs basically never happen in one big step by a single, identifiable person or team. Even Einstein's theory of relativity was composed of a bunch of existing work - what he did was show that two or three disparate pieces were compatible.  Second, granting monopolies is a terrible way to promote the use or improvement of ideas, since it makes the first more expensive and leaves the second stuck in a legal morass. If the government has to get involved in research, steady funding + prizes would be a much more effective model.
Because the standard contract is for 125,000 euros.  http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/fx/g10/euro-fx_contractSpecs_futures.html You don't want to use Microsoft as an analogy. You want to use non financial commodities. Most are settled in cash, no delivery. But in the early 80's, the Hunt brothers caused a spectacular short squeeze by taking delivery sending the spot price to $50. And some businesses naturally do this, buying metal, grain, etc. no reason you can't actually get the current price of $US/Euro if you need that much.
U.S. companies have two fundamental problems not within their control (plus others of course)  1. Growth in China is slowing dramatically, cutting prices and demand for commodities we export.  Even companies like Yum (which owns KFC) are hurting)  2. European demand for finished and high tech products is down sharply.  So while American demand is trying to make a comeback, we are so inter-linked that American businesses cannot fix this by themselves.  If I were buying stock, I'd look at companies that produce and sell entirely in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.  Edit: And I'd stay the heck away from new investment in the BRICS  Edit2: And its fine (from an investment POV ) if companies source parts or material outside of the U.S./Canada/Mexico - just don't count on any sales strength to China or Europe or the BRICS.
Well thats a natural monopoly, nobody needs competition in search engine or social websites, who uses two social websites if one has everyone in it anyway. Learn before you talk.  Some industries are born to be monopolies but the problem that people are arguing is that companies like amazon give you much better prices and deliver stuff to your house. This is different than normal monopoly situation where they increase the price to a higher one than the market equilibrium and cause welfare loss.  In this case for example, amazon actually kills all the retailers which are earning normal amounts of money anyway, uses underpaid workers for more profit, don't pay taxes to us government for more profit and basically takes away money from the buyers indirectly(who are very happy with their new x which was cheaper than retailer price).
What you have exampled is essentially the Amazon paradox.  Why would someone shop only in one place?  Convenience, ease, familiarity, one credit card storage, etc.  I have ordered an item from Amazon because of the ease and it has been shipped to me in a Wal Mart box.  People do this all the time and is basically why there are marketplace sellers on Amazon.
The US is boxed in by its own trade policy, intentionally, so we can't, its [barred by free trade deals](http://www.pnhp.org/sites/default/files/Nick%20Skala%20GAT%20and%20Health%20Reform.pdf) since 1995, the three we are working on will even [bar it in other countries](http://www.oneillinstitutetradeblog.org/slovakia-prevails-investment-treaty-claim-concerning-universal-health-coverage/).   This kind of reason is what all the secrecy is for.
"I agree it's an agency problem. This why firms that are astute at making acquisitions properly align the incentives of managers and shareholders, and strive to make negotiating prowess a core competency (see [here](https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21708671-two-economists-win-nobel-prize-their-work-theory-contracts-hard) and [here](https://www.economist.com/news/economics-brief/21725542-if-markets-are-so-good-directing-resources-why-do-companies-exist-first-our)).   This is easier said than done - there are many more Valeant Pharmaceuticals type companies (making acquisitions for financial engineering and ""growth"") than Gilead Sciences type companies (making acquisitions based on a keen understanding of the market's demands)."
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I read the “ad” they had.  I’m afraid EVERY economic system and our market style are all fantasy methods that don’t conform to reality.  Hence our current breakdown and division among classes.  So that is a poor argument.  The better idea is to figure out what WOULD work, would quell the Real Issues each side observed, and would leave us all stronger in the end.  It is BERY easy to criticize anything you disagree with.  It is much more difficult to come up with a solution.  So let’s come up with a solution.  You state your grievances with the system, I’ll then state mine, and we can see if we can find a solution that will handle all the issues brought up.
All openly traded securities must be registered with the SEC and setup with clearing agents.  This is a costly process. The cost to provide an electronic market for a specific security is negligible.  That is why the exchange fees per electronic trade are so small per security.  It is so small in fact that exchanges compensate price makers partially at the expense of price takers, that exchanges partially give some portion of the overall fee to those that can help provide liquidity. The cost to provide an open outcry market for a specific security are somewhat onerous, but they are initiated before a security has any continual liquidity to provide a market for large trades, especially for futures. Every individual option contract must be registered and setup for clearing. Aside from the cost to setup each contract, expiration and strike intervals are limited by regulation.  For an extremely liquid security like SPY, contracts could be offered for daily expiration and penny strike intervals, but they are currently forbidden.
I already know of this method. I was creating a peer group and found 4-5 very similar companies, however one of them is a foreign public company with a subsidiary competing directly with a company I am trying to find the beta for. I guess I have to omit this company because it's strictly foreign?   Also, what do I do if I can't find any public companies that are similar to the company I am trying to value?
You're offering a false choice where a lack of mega-corporations results in prices that are beyond the reach of a significant amount of people.  It is false because the mega-corporations have not always existed, and yet we did not have prices that were beyond the reach of a significant amount of people. In fact, our economy was actually a lot better and we had less income inequality across the board.
I think India and Africa are going to center of the economic growth market in the next two decades. Probably more India, since they have the means to develop and a culture that wants it. I think the growth rates are all relative, but you obviously know the standard growth rate of the Sp500. I just can't see it falling because we are still in the middle of a complete globalization and I really think it won't be over before I retire. It will probably yake Africa 50 years before they reach a first world living standards we enjoy now. God only knows what we will have as the definition of first world by then.   The medical industry alone will drive a large portion of growth. Cyber security is going to be the next frontier in tech as the internet of things explode into our daily life.   I am not as weary about long term growth. We are always innovating and creating new markets. The beauty of the Sp500 is that it doesn't even have to be in the US to make money off it.
"Roughly about 1 of 2 Swiss francs is won abroad. So, yes it is easier for Swiss companies to export when the Swiss franc is not ""too high"" as it has been those last years. The main export market for Switzerland is the UE. Some companies are doing most or all of their business on the Swiss market. Others are much more exposed to the the health of the global economy. When the Swiss franc appreciates, some companies suffer a lot from that and other less. It depends on their product portfolio, competitors, and other factors. The last decades have shown that how the Swiss Franc valuation is less and less correlated with the performance of the Swiss economy. The Swiss franc is used as a safe haven when the global economy goes bad or is uncertain. In those times, the Swiss franc can be overevaluated, at least as compared to the purchasing power. When the global economy is improving, the over-appreciation of the Swiss franc tends to disapear ; this is happening now (in Mid-2017). As a summary, the Swiss franc itself is not truly correlated with the competitiveness of the Swiss economy, but more about how people in the world are anxious. In this regard, it behaves a little bit like gold."
It sounds good on paper, the problem is licensing fees paid to foreign subsidiaries for IP and trademark use.  That's how Apple makes 80% of it's revenue in the US and still makes 80% of it's profit in Ireland.  If the US doesn't take foreign income into account, every multinational would offshore their profits the same way.  Many do it now, and the loop hole isn't as big as people are advocating for.
A free market requires consumer feedback in the market as a check to the actions of the producer/seller.  Because of the nature of health care, the consumer doesn't have the power to check the price setting power of the producer/seller by going to another seller with a better price.  Market competition in the health care market is illusory.
Actually the insertion part is interesting because they actually aren't middlemen just faster buyer's and sellers on the open market. They just buy what one person is selling and sell it to someone else who is at the same time looking to buy. So I guess the issue is the 'same time' isn't the same for all parties concerned. On the other hand both buyer and seller can set limits on the bounds of the price and only transact when someone meets their terms. If you are willing to accept 'whatever the market will bear' then it seems like you should be OK with getting it.
"Large multinationals who do business in multiple locales hedge even ""stable"" currencies like the Euro, Yen and Pound - because a 5-10% adverse move in an exchange rate is highly consequential to the bottom line.  I doubt any of them are going to be doing significant amounts of business accepting a currency with a 400% annual range.  And why should they?  It's nothing more than another unit of payment - one with its own problems."
They all have competitors, but not many competitors. I feel like they're all in cahoots to get around monopolizing. Like, they realize there needs to be the appearance of competition and so they help each other stay at the very top by buying up all the little guys.
Surely they have a legal duty to the shareholders of each individual company. Each company in each country has its own shareholders (admittedly, some might be completely owned by other companies). So it would not be in the interests of the UK shareholders for profits to exported to Switzerland. There is not one fiduciary duty across the whole network of companies.
"The simplest answer would be: Because they can. Why charge less for something if people will pay more? One example are Apple products. While there the price number is not exactly the same in EUR and USD, they are so close that, effectively, the EUR product is more expensive. Many things go into a price. There might be reasons for products in the EU being more expensive to produce or distribute. Or people in the EU might be in general more willing to pay more for a certain product. In that case, a company would forgo profits when they offered it cheaper. Also, prices are relative. Is the USD price the ""correct"" one and the exchange rate should dictate what the EUR price is? Or vice versa?"