vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
One unit, Kenmore, started selling the products of other companies and placed them more prominently than Sears' own products. Units competed for ad space in Sears' circulars…Units were no longer incentivized to make sacrifices, like offering discounts, to get shoppers into the store. Sears became a miserable place to work, rife with infighting and screaming matches. Employees, focused solely on making money in their own unit, ceased to have any loyalty to the company or stake in its survival. We all know the end of the story: Sears share prices fell, and the company appears to be headed toward bankruptcy. The moral of the story, in Parramore's words: What Lampert failed to see is that humans actually have a natural inclination to work for the mutual benefit of an organization. They like to cooperate and collaborate, and they often work more productively when they have shared goals. Take all of that away and you create a company that will destroy itself.
In general, the goal of an S&P 500 index fund is to replicate the performance of the S&P 500 Index.  To do this, the fund will buy the same stocks in the same proportions as the weighting of the Index. The S&P 500 Index is free-float capitalization weighted.  This means that the higher capitalization stocks (based on publicly traded shares only) are more heavily weighted and factor into the Index value more heavily than the smaller capitalization stocks, or the stocks that have a smaller publicly traded value.  For example, companies like Apple, ExxonMobil, and Microsoft have a much larger weight in the index value than smaller companies. Alternatively, there are some S&P index funds that are equal-weighted.  In these funds, the managers have chosen to purchase all 500 of the stocks in the index, but in equal proportions instead of the weighted proportions of the index.  These equal-weighted funds will not as closely match the index price as the traditionally weighted index funds.  Instead, they might do better or worse than the index, depending on how the individual stocks do. You'll need to look at the prospectus of the index funds you are interested in to see which approach the fund is taking.
Remember that shares represent votes at the shareholders' meeting. If share price drops too far below the value of that percentage of the company, the company gets bought out and taken over. This tends to set a minimum share price derived from the company's current value. The share price may rise above that baseline if people expect it to be worth more in the future, or drop s bit below if people expect awful news. That's why investment is called speculation. If the price asked is too high to be justified by current guesses, nobody buys. That sets the upper limit at any given time. Since some of this is guesswork, the market is not completely rational. Prices can drop after good news if they'd been inflated by the expectation of better news, for example. In general, businesses which don't crash tend to grow.  Hence the market as a whole generally trends upward if viewed on a long timescale. But there's a lot of noise on that curve; short term or single stocks are much harder to predict.
"A stock split can force short sellers of penny stocks to cover their shorts and cauuse the price to appreciate.  Example:  Someone shorts a worthless pump and dump stock, 10,000 shares at .50.  They have to put up $25,000.00 in margin ($2.50 per share for stocks under $2.50).  The company announces a 3 to 1 split.  Now the short investor must come up with $50,000.00 additional margin or be be ""bought in"". The short squeeze is on."
I am in complete agreement with you.  The place i have found with the sort of charts you are looking for is stockcharts.com.   To compare the percentage increase of several stocks over a period of 2 market-open days or more, which is quite useful to follow the changes in various stocks… etc., an example:  Here the tickers are AA to EEEEE (OTC) and $GOLD / $SILVER for the spot gold / silver price (that isn't really a ticker).  It is set to show the last 6 market days (one week+)...the '6' in '6&O'.  You can change it in the URL above or change it on the site for the stocks you want... up to 25 in one chart but it gets really hard to tell them apart!  By moving the slider just left of the ‘6’ at the bottom right corner of the chart, you can look at 2 days or more.  For a specific time period in days, highlight the ‘6’ and type any number of market-open days you want (21 days = about one month, etc.).  By setting a time period in days, and moving the entire slider, you can see how your stocks did in the last bull/bear run, as an example. The site has a full how-to, for this and the other types of charts they offer. The only problem is that many OTC stocks are not charted. Save the comparison charts you use regularly in a folder in your browser bookmarks.  Blessings.  I see the entire needed link isn't in blue... but you need it all.
"Once you buy stocks on X day of the month, the chances of stocks never actually going above and beyond your point of value on the chart are close to none. How about Enron?  GM? WorldCom? Lehman Brothers?  Those are just a few of the many stocks that went to 0.  Even stock in solvent companies have an ""all-time high"" that it will never reach again.   Please explain to my why my thought is [in]correct.  It is based on flawed assumptions, specifically that stock always regain any losses from any point in time.  This is not true.  Stocks go up and down - sometimes that have losses that are never made up, even if they don't go bankrupt.  If your argument is that you should cash out any gains regardless of size, and you will ""never lose"", I would argue that you might have very small gains in most cases, but there are still times where you are going to lose value and never regain it, and those losses can easily wipe out any gains you've made.   Never bought stocks and if I try something stupid I'll lose my money, so why not ask the professionals first..? If you really believe that you ""can't lose"" in the stock market then do NOT buy individual stocks.  You may as well buy a lottery ticket (not really, those are actually worthless).  Stick to index funds or other stable investments that don't rely on the performance of a single company and its management.  Yes, diversification reduces (not eliminates) risk of losses.  Yes, chasing unreasonable gains can cause you to lose.  But what is a ""reasonable gain""?  Why is your ""guaranteed"" X% gain better than the ""unreasonable"" Y% gain? How do you know what a ""reasonable"" gain for an individual stock is?"
Also, how do you handle when constituents change over time? For example, suppose in the S & P 500 that a $100,000,000 company is taken out and replaced with a $10,000,000,000 company that shouldn't suddenly make the index jump by a bunch of points because the underlying security was swapped or would you be cool with there being jumps when companies change or shares outstanding are rebalanced? Consider carefully how you answer that question. In terms of histories, Dow Jones Industrial Average and S & P 500 Index would be covered on Wikipedia where from the latter link: The ""Composite Index"",[13] as the S&P 500 was first called when it introduced its first stock index in 1923, began tracking a small number of stocks. Three years later in 1926, the Composite Index expanded to 90 stocks and then in 1957 it expanded to its current 500.[13] Standard & Poor's, a company that doles out financial information and analysis, was founded in 1860 by Henry Varnum Poor. In 1941 Poor's Publishing (Henry Varnum Poor's original company) merged with Standard Statistics (founded in 1906 as the Standard Statistics Bureau) and therein assumed the name Standard and Poor's Corporation. The S&P 500 index in its present form began on March 4, 1957. Technology has allowed the index to be calculated and disseminated in real time. The S&P 500 is widely used as a measure of the general level of stock prices, as it includes both growth stocks and value stocks. In September 1962, Ultronic Systems Corp. entered into an agreement with Standard and Poor's. Under the terms of this agreement, Ultronics computed the S&P 500 Stock Composite Index, the 425 Stock Industrial Index, the 50 Stock Utility Index, and the 25 Stock Rail Index. Throughout the market day these statistics were furnished to Standard & Poor's. In addition, Ultronics also computed and reported the 94 S&P sub-indexes.
My interpretation of that sentence is that you can't do the buying/selling of shares outright (sans margin) because of the massive quantity of shares he's talking about.  So you have to use margin to buy the stocks. However, because in order to make significant money with this sort of strategy you probably need to be working dozens of stocks at the same time, you need to be familiar with portfolio margin.  Since your broker does not calculate margin calls based on individual stocks, but rather on the value of your whole portfolio, you should have experience handling margin not just on individual stock movements but also on overall portfolio movements. For example, if 10% (by value) of the stocks you're targeting tend to have a correlation of -0.8 with the price of oil you should probably target another 10% (by value) in stocks that tend to have a correlation of +0.8 with the price of oil.  And so on and so forth.  That way your portfolio can weather big (or even small) changes in market conditions that would cause a margin call on a novice investor's portfolio.
You are implicitly making that assumption. It doesn't matter if the rich are taking and increasingly large percentage of the pie, as long as the size of the pie is growing fast enough that the absolute wealth of the poor is rising at a reasonable rate over time.  The correct and reasonable measure is to compare the wealth of the poor, today with the wealth of the poor in the past in terms of real buying power.  I understand what you're saying and I disagree with your analysis. I disagree that relative proportions have any meaningful impact of human well being.
"TL;DR: Sure, ""do your own homework"" is sometimes a cop out. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't do our homework. I agree that in many cases this is a cop-out by commentators. However, even if you believe in perfect market efficiency, there is benefit in ""doing your homework"" for many reasons. One of which you already mention in the question: different stocks all with the same ""value"" might have widely ranging risk. Another factor that might vary between stocks is their tax consequences. High dividend stocks might be a better fit for some buyers than others. One stock might be priced at $40 because there is a small chance they might get regulatory approval for a new product. This might make this stock very risky with a 20% of being $150 in 12 months, and a 80% chance of being $20. Another stock might be priced at $40 because the company is a cash cow, declining in revenues but producing a large dividend of $0.40 per quarter. Low risk, but also with some potential tax disadvantages. Another stock might be priced at $40 because it's a high growth stock. This would be less risky than the first example, but more risky than the second example. And the risk would be more generalized, i.e. there wouldn't be one day or one event that would be make or break the stock. In short, even if we assume that the market is pricing everything perfectly, not all stocks are equal and not all stocks are equally appropriate to everyone. Sometimes when we hear an analyst say ""they should have done their homework"" they are really saying ""This was a high risk/high reward stock. They should have known that this had a potential downside."" And that all assumes that we believe in 100% pure market efficiency. Which many disagree with, at least to some extent. For example, if we instead subscribe to Peter Lynch's theories about ""local knowledge"", we might believe that everyone has some personal fields of expertise where they know more than the experts. A professional stock analyst is going to follow many stocks and many not have technical experience in the field of the company.
"Simple answer is because the stocks don't split. Most stocks would have a similar high price per share if they didn't split occasionally.  Why don't they split? A better way to ask this is probably, why DO most stocks split? The standard answer is that it gives the appearance that stocks are ""cheap"" again and encourages investors to buy them. Some people, Warren Buffett (of Berkshire Hathaway) don't want any part of these shenanigans and refuse to split their stocks. Buffett also has commented that he thinks splitting a stock also adds unnecessary volatility."
"Lending of shares happens in the background. Those who have lent them out are not aware that they have been lent out, nor when they are returned. The borrowers have to pay any dividends to the lenders and in the end the borrowers get their stock back. If you read the fine print on the account agreement for a margin account, you will see that you have given the brokerage the permission to silently loan your stocks out.  Since the lending has no financial impact on your portfolio, there's no particular reason to know and no particular protection required.  Actually, brokers typically don't bother going through the work of finding an actual stock to borrow.  As long as lots of their customers have stocks to lend and not that many people have sold short, they just assume there is no problem and keep track of how many are long and short without designating which stocks are borrowed from whom. When a stock becomes hard to borrow because of liquidity issues or because many people are shorting it, the brokerage will actually start locating individual shares to borrow, which is a more time-consuming and costly procedure.  Usually this involves the short seller actually talking to the broker on the phone rather than just clicking ""sell."""
For each setup in the past jot down the prices you would have entered at, where you would have set your stop, work out your R, and go day by day, moving your stop as you go, and see where you would have been stopped out. Work out your profit or loss in terms of R for each setup and then add them up. If you get a positive R multiple, then this may be a good stock to trade on this setup. If you get a negative R multiple, then maybe give this stock a miss and look for the next setup. You can setup watch-lists of stocks that perform well for both long setups and short setups, and then trade these stocks when you get a new signal. It can take some time starting off, but once you have got your watch-lists for a particular setup, you just need to keep monitoring those stocks. You can create other watch-lists for other type of setups you have backtested as well.
I was commenting on your other assessments.   I have investments in various funds and some stocks I think may end up being bought up.  Your judgements on the health market and student loans fails to scratch the surface of why we have these issues.  There will be a market bubble burst though it always happens.  Short any consumer stock you see as it'll likely be the most hurt by the bubble. Also any of these tech stocks with no profit.
With regard to commodity futures, a paper released in January 2010 by Aulerich, Irwin, and Garcia, concluded that index funds have essentially no impact on commodity futures. Looking at stocks, a stock that gets included in a major index does increase in price. It increases its turnover by 27% and increases its price by between 2.7% and 5.5%, according to information cited by Kula in this paper, though it looks like the price increase tends to happen in the lead up to the stock being included. Interestingly, I have read an article but cannot now locate it, which states that there's a measurable, albeit fairly small, price bubble on stocks included in common indexes, on Monday mornings, Friday afternoons, and at the start and end of the month. That is, the times when mutual funds are most likely to rebalance their holdings. This almost certainly applies to a lesser extent to other stocks, too. My understanding is that the price difference was very small, however. Generally speaking, stocks which make part of well-known indexes will tend to be in higher demand than stocks which do not. It remains the case that almost all actively-managed mutual funds are unable to consistently beat the indexes, even with this taken into account.
I used to assume that but now I have price check most things elsewhere.   Also, the labeling/pricing practices of sellers have gotten out of control.   I recently bought tea on amazon and I'm not joking when I say that the exact same products would be listed at vastly different prices from different sellers - in one case, at the same time, the same item was priced at $6, $8, $23 and $29 from different sellers. You may think (as I first did) that the differences are due to size, quantity, shipping, or slight feature differences - nope.   There's no unit standardization, so it's hard to compare the prices of the same product from different sellers.   IDK why amazon allows that crap. It can't make much money relative to the costs of teaching users that they have to doublecheck everything on amazon.
You can either borrow money... credit card, line of credit, re-finance your home, home equity line of credit, loan, mortgage, etc. Or you have other invest in your company as equity.  They will contribute $X to get Y% of your company and get Z% of the profits.  Note amount of profits does not necessarily have to equate to percentage owned.  This makes sense if they are a passive investor, where they just come up with the money and you do all the work.  Also voting rights in a company does not have to equate to percentage owned either. You can also have a combination of equity and debt.  If you have investors, you would need to figure out whether the investor will personally guarantee the debt of your company - recourse vs non-recourse.  If they have more risk, they will want more of a return. One last way to do it is crowdfunding, similar to what people do on Kickstarter.  Supporters/customers come up with the money, then you deliver the product.  Consulting practices do something similar with the concept of retainers. Best of luck.
"I use TIAA-Cref for my 403(b) and Fidelity for my solo 401(k) and IRAs.  I have previously used Vanguard and have also used other discount brokers for my IRA. All of these companies will charge you nothing for an IRA, so there's really no point in comparing cost in that respect.  They are all the ""cheapest"" in this respect. Each one will allow you to purchase their mutual funds and those of their partners for free.  They will charge you some kind of fee to invest in mutual funds of their competitors (like $35 or something).  So the real question is this: which of these institutions offers the best mutual and index funds.  While they are not the worst out there, you will find that TIAA-Cref are dominated by both Vanguard and Fidelity.  The latter two offer far more and larger funds and their funds will always have lower expense ratios than their TIAA-Cref equivalent.  If I could take my money out of TIAA-Cref and put it in Fidelity, I'd do so right now. BTW, you may or may not want to buy individual stocks or ETFs in your account.  Vanguard will let you trade their ETFs for free, and they have lots.  For other ETFs and stocks you will pay $7 or so (depends on your account size).  Fidelity will give you free trades in the many iShares ETFs and charge you $5 for other trades.  TIAA-Cref will not give you any free ETFs and will charge you $8 per trade. Each of these will give you investment advice for free, but that's about what it's worth as well.  The quality of the advice will depend on who picks up the phone, not which institution you use.  I would not make a decision based on this."
Well... First off, good luck getting many rational, cogent responses to a hypothetical economics question this sensitive. Lol.   So in the interest of a *purely academic* exercise and expressly not any form of recommendation (!!!) or road map for application (!!!), let's dig in:  You would need to clarify a few things in order to assess the economic impact of adding slaves to your society.  1) Is the supply of slaves limited?  2) is the ownership of slaves limited to a small sector of society or available at large to a wide portion of society.  3) Do your slaves represent a net increase to population? Or are you enslaving some percentage of your population?  4) Does the nature of work that slaves are capable of, compete directly with, or effect the employment levels of your population?  5) is the level of (and relative cost of) automation, robotics and artificial intelligence in your society advanced to the point where slaves would even be beneficial?  6) Does your society have the means of enforcement, security and subjugation (technological or otherwise) to control a population of slaves over the long term.  7) Are other countries (namely your trading partners) also introducing slaves?  8) What are the costs of acquiring, housing, feeding and maintaining slaves? (They are not zero-cost)  Its not possible to answer the question without those answers, but note that the addition of slaves is most likely deflationary in economic terms, as you are increasing productive capacity at (an assumed) lower cost. At the same time you are most likely displacing some percentage of conventional paid workers, thereby increasing unemployment. (Which, if the Phillips curve still applies, edges us towards lower inflation or deflation).
"In 2005, Apple announced a split on Feb 11... CUPERTINO, California — February 11, 2005 — Apple® announced today that its Board of Directors has approved a two-for-one split of the Company’s common stock and a proportional increase in the number of Apple common shares authorized from 900 million to 1.8 billion. Each shareholder of record at the close of business on February 18, 2005 will receive one additional share for every outstanding share held on the record date, and trading will begin on a split-adjusted basis on February 28, 2005. ...one month after announcing earnings. CUPERTINO, California—January 12, 2005—Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2005 first quarter ended December 25, 2004. For the quarter, the Company posted a net profit of $295 million, or $.70 per diluted share. These results compare to a net profit of $63 million, or $.17 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Revenue for the quarter was $3.49 billion, up 74 percent from the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 28.5 percent, up from 26.7 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 41 percent of the quarter’s revenue. I wouldn't expect Apple to offer another split, as it's become somewhat fashionable among tech companies to have high stock prices (see GOOG or NFLX or even BRK-A/BRK-B).  Additionally, as a split does nothing to the underlying value of the company, it shouldn't affect your decision to purchase AAPL.  (That said, it may change the perception of a stock as ""cheap"" or ""expensive"" per human psychology). So, to answer your question: companies will usually announce a stock split after releasing their financial results for the preceding fiscal year. Regardless of results, though, splits happen when the board decides it is advantageous to the company to split its stocks."