vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
An investor provides capital that the company uses to be able to produce things**, and as the company grows, it increases in value. As the population increases and more workers and customers are born, and as more useful things are invented, the economy will continue to grow as a whole. * Certainly, it is possible, even common, to profit from someone else's loss. People lose money in the stock market all the time. But it doesn't have to be this way. The stock market goes up, on average, over the long term, and so long term investors can continue to make money in the market even without profiting from others' failures. ** An investor that purchases a share from another investor does not directly provide capital to the company. However, this second investor is rewarding the first investor who did provide capital to the company. This is the reason that the first investor purchased in the first place; without the second investor, the first would have had no reason to invest and provide the capital. Relating it to our tree analogy: Did the builder who installed the door help out the tree farmer? After all, the tree farmer already sold the tree to the sawmill and doesn't care what happens to it after that. However, if the builder had not needed a door, the sawmill would have had no reason to buy the tree."
"Investors aren't ""job creators"" ... they're job *haters*.  The top folks cannot think past one business quarter, so they hate wages and increasing wages to get their jobs done.  It will only change when someone realizes they are losing the race because they don't want to buy the gear they need.  And they do need it.  Companies don't need better investment advisors or magic business consultants to worship.  They need workers.  Sadly ... they are told by the expensive consultants that paying for the latter is always the problem."
Activists generally take stakes larger than 2% and have a lot of experience in influencing boards; there's also a self-fulfilling prophecy where successful activists are known to be successful and so, other investors tend to support their suggestions.  Furthermore, activist investors often fail to advance their policies and give up.  In any case, making shareholders happy only matters as far as preventing them from actually putting together a solid proxy challenge -- professional activist investors with solid economic arguments can make a credible threat of that whereas activists with non-economic goals present a much less credible threat.  Additionally, you say the demand is so low but IMO, Trump using Twitter keeps it in the news and prevents it from sliding even further into irrelevance.  I suspect the value of that one account is greater than their whole marketing budget.  Think not just of Trump but of people retweeting, rebutting, arguing, etc -- that whole ecosystem is huge!  I'd imagine that if Trump announced tomorrow that he's no longer using Twitter and instead will post on Facebook or Instagram or whatever, Twitter's stock would slide by 10% at least.
Your impression about banks and bankers is very wrong.  Wall street banks can and often do lose in transactions.  In fact, banks go bankrupt and/or require massive bailouts to survive because they sometimes lose a ton of money.  The business of investment banking often involves bearing risk for customers, which, by definition, means they lose some of the time.  Generally the risks they take on individual transactions are not large enough to bring the whole bank down, but sometimes they are.  Banking is a job like any other, except that it has more risk than most. Anyway, to your point, how do underwriters make money on shares that fall in value before the sale?  On the commission.  The issuing company will normally pay the investment bank a percentage of the funds raised in the offering, regardless of the price.  Of course, it's possible for the bank to still lose money if their contract stipulates a minimum price and they are not able to meet it.  In that case, the bank may lose on that offering, contradicting your preconceived notion. By the way, one other question implicit in your post: Why was the secondary offering considered bad news?  If the CEO and other insiders have private information that indicates that the stock is overvalued, then doing a secondary offering at the inflated price will greatly enrich them.  Because this happens some times, investors are wary about secondary offerings.  This makes companies that would otherwise do a secondary offering shy away from it, even if shares are not overpriced.  Therefore if a company is doing a secondary offering, the market is likely to worry that the stock is overvalued even at a reduced price.
"From the perspective of an investor and someone in high-tech during that period, here is my take: A few high tech companies had made it big (Apple, Microsoft, Dell) and a lot of people were sitting around bemoaning the fact that we all should have realized that computers were going to be huge and invested early in those companies. We all convinced ourselves that we knew it was going to happen (whether we did or not), but for some reason we didn't put our money where our mouth was and now we were grumpy because we could be millionaires already. In the meantime the whole Internet thing transitioned from being something that only nerds and academics used to a new paradigm for computing. Many of us reasoned that we weren't going to be suckers twice and this time we were getting on that boat before it left for money-land. So it became fashionable to invest in Internet stocks. Everyone was doing it. It was guaranteed to come up in any conversation at parties or with friends at work. So with all this investment money out there for the Internet's ""next big thing"" naturally lots of companies popped up to take advantage of the easy money. It got to the point where brokers and Venture capital firms were beating the bushes LOOKING for companies to throw money at and often they didn't scrutinize these company's business plans very well and/or bought into insane growth projections. Frankly, most of the business plans amounted to ""We may not make any money off our users, but if we get enough people to sign up that HAS to be valuable, right?"" Problem #2 was that most of these companies weren't run by proven business types, but that didn't matter. It worked for those rag-tag kids at Google, Apple and Microsoft right? Well-heeled business types who know how to build a sustainable business model are so gauche in the new ""Internet Economy"". Also, the implicit agenda of most of these new entrepreneurs is (1) Get enough funding to make the company big enough go public while keeping enough equity to get rich when it does; (2) Buy a Ferrari; (3) Repeat with another company. Now these investors weren't stupid.
Then you have two problems.  A better solution would be in invest in education and training so that you reduce the number of unskilled, low wage workers.  One way would be to get these people out of retail and back into manufacturing, but that is unlikely in the US.       Another proposal has been to get people working in coal mines, but I'm not sure if a nineteenth century solution fits a 21st century problem.
Stock prices are set by supply and demand. If a particular stock has a high EPS, say, $100, then people will bid more for that stock, driving up its price over one with a $10 EPS. Your job as an investor is to find stocks with low share prices, but which will give you high earnings (either in dividends, our future share price). This means finding stocks which you believe the market has priced incorrectly, for whatever reason (as an example, many bank stocks are being punished right now, even if the underlying banks are in good shape financially). If you want to beat the market indices, be prepared to do a lot of research, because you're trying to outsmart the market as a whole.
"Look, we don't have to agree but the US has the most advanced military in the world, one of the most stable societies, and an amazingly innovative economy. Why do you think ""investors"" are still buying US debt with such low rates? People don't buy US debt as an investment but as a preservation tool. These people have such large amounts of money that they give it to us knowing they will see it back. The US controls the printing press of the world's most important currency. The US has such an upper hand in this world. Can you provide me with any good arguments for your position?"
"It's a matter of social policy. The government wants people to make long term investments because that would lead to other long-term government goals: employment, manufacturing, economical growth in general. While speculative investments and day-trading are not in any way discouraged, investments that contribute to the economy as a whole and not just the investor are encouraged by the lower tax rates on the profits. While some people consider it to be a ""fig leaf"", I consider these people to be populists and dishonest. Claiming that long term social goals are somehow bad is hypocrisy. Claiming that short-term trading contributes to the economy as a whole is a plain lie."
Not necessarily, the whole reason the investors ousted him so frantically is because they're perilously close to a down round, which would have a domino effect on its valuation. The consequences of the past year and its massive cash-burn could be long term.
Although it is impossible to predict the next stock market crash, what   are some signs or measures that indicate the economy is unstable? These questions are really two sides of the same coin.  As such, there's really no way to tell, at least not with any amount of accuracy that would allow you time the market. Instead, follow the advice of William Bernstein regarding long-term investments.  I'm paraphrasing, but the gist is: Markets crash every so often.  It's a fact of life.  If you maintain financial and investment discipline, you can take advantage of the crashes by having sufficient funds to purchase when stocks are on sale.  With a long-term investment horizon, crashes are actually a blessing since you're in prime position to profit from them.
Retail is the operative word. Local retailers don't raise prices because they need to compete with uninhibited e-commerce retailers.  I wouldn't be surprised if progressives tried to correct for this by increasing the tax rate on online purchases to offset the e-commerce advantage, which of course would hurt consumers even more.
Bingo. And remember, hedge funds are for a specific kind of investor (UHNW, institutional) as a *hedge* against when things go bad.   I won't argue against the fees being exorbitant. And I certainly think that the explosion of funds has led to a lot more people just trying to beat the market (instead of providing a differentiated strategy).   HFs will always get slammed in times like this because of what they charge. But any of the good ones (at least on the equities side) are always likely to struggle to beat the benchmark when the benchmark is a roaring bull. Some judgement really should be reserved for times of distress
You can see that the S&P500 index lost 50% of its value twice within ten years, whereas before it was doubling itself every several years. Many people who were only invested in that index (or what's underlying to it) lost a lot of money. But consider you've diversified, and in the last 20 years you've invested in a blend of indexes that include the S&P500, but also other investments like S&P BSE SENSEX mentioned by Victor below. You would reduce your risk of loss on the American market by increasing your gains on the Indian market. Add to the mix soaring Chinese Real Estate market during the time of the collapse of the US real-estate, gains on the dollar losing its value by investing in other currencies (Canadian dollar, for example), etc. There are many risks, and by diversifying you mitigate them, and also have a chance to create other potential gains. Now, another question is why invest in indexes. That has been answered before on this site. It is my opinion that some methods of investing are just gambling by trying to catch the wave and they will almost always fail, and rarely will individual stock picking beat the market. Of course, after the fact its easy to be smart and pick the winning stocks. But the problem is to be able to predict those charts ahead of time."
Again lots of negatives but no offer of how to bring back jobs.  talking down everything and not thinking of ways to activate the job mkt or how to active a new basis for economic stability, what with all the put down everyone else, dont come with feasable answes or any answers at all and quote politicians, geez its politicians who got us into this mess in the first place.  i see you are one of the keep the people poor and we can stay rich bunch..bussines were doing fine with US and Euro workers, sure they were not record profits by using slave workers in 3rd world countries, they were not making the highest profits in the history, but they had a mkt, that worked, workers had jobs and could feed a family, buy a house and cars, now they need 2-3 jobs just to survive, retail has crashed and the companies are giving massive bonus'to execs even though this is not sustainable. the persuit of ever greater investor profits has killed the job mkts at home, the retail mkts are now showing the trickle down problems and millions of unemployed and their families are living in poverty in both the US and Europe, WHY? because of the relentless search for higher profits.
"In theory, investing is not gambling because the expected outcome is not random; people are expecting positive returns, on average, with some relationship to risk undertaken and economic reality. (More risk = more returns.) Historically this is true on average, that assets have positive returns, and riskier assets have higher returns. Also it's true that stock market gains roughly track economic growth. Valuation (current price level relative to ""fundamentals"") matters - reversion to the mean does exist over a long enough time. Given a 7-10 year horizon, a lot of the variance in ending price level can be explained by valuation at the start of the period. On average over time, business profits have to vary around a curve that's related to the overall economy, and equity prices should reflect business profits. The shorter the horizon, the more random noise. Even 1 year is pretty short in this respect. Bubbles do exist, as do irrational panics, and milder forms of each. Investing is not like a coin flip because the current total number of heads and tails (current valuation) does affect the probability of future outcomes. That said, it's pretty hard to predict the timing, or the specific stocks that will do well, etc. Rebalancing gives you an objective, automated, unemotional way to take advantage of all the noise around the long-term trend. Rather than trying to use judgment to identify when to get in and out, with rebalancing (and dollar cost averaging) you guarantee getting in a bit more when things are lower, and getting out a bit more when things are higher. You can make money from prices bouncing around even if they end up going nowhere and even if you can't predict the bouncing. Here are a couple old posts from my blog that talk about this a little more:"
As a solo-investor I'm not sure how I'd prove that.  Showing statements? Sorry, not out of privacy but out of embarrassment.  I've made quite a few mistake of investing in companies against market sentiment that proved to be god awful right, and god awful wrong for me.    I'm hoping for a helluva rebound in the 10's
&gt; There are plenty of people that consistently beat the market. If the market were truly efficient, then everyone should just passively invest, which would make the market inefficient, leading to active investment.  Passive investing  a.) Doesn't mark the market *less* efficient, I don't know how you came to that conclusion.  b.) There is not a big group of people who consistently beat the markets. There's a tiny, *tiny* sliver of a fraction of a portion of a group of people that beat the market over any ten year period, which is *consistent* with pure randomness. You're statistically likely to say those kinds of anomalies. In fact, it'd be stranger if we *didn't*.  c.) The markets aren't *truly* efficient. They can't. There's imperfect information. The point is the potential exploits cannot 1.) be exploited on scale, because that creates market efficiency, and cannot 2.) be public, because that also creates efficiency. As more and more exploits are found, we're eliminating all these black swans. If you compare all 400 professionally managed mutual funds, only 2 have ever beaten the market, and by less than 50 basis points. That's 0.5%. That's not even consistent with randomness, that's worse than random. It goes to show how few and far between any potential exploits exist. It's simply not worth your time as an investor, because if giant firms employing hundreds cannot find them, a handful of people won't be able to find them by anything other than chance. It's almost always better to passively invest.  You can read more about this, because while intuitively you may feel active investment can be better, the numbers don't lie and I promise you you're very wrong.
That's overly simplistic. The stockholders made millions. She kept the ship afloat and maintained their multi-billion dollar investments long enough for the acquisition. She paid for her shortcomings through the years through stock withholding and cuts, so while the investors were making x amount of money, she was making x-y. Imagine a more skittish CEO who would cash out investments to plug a hole in a ship that was destined to sink, delay the inevitable. The company fails anyway, just later rather than sooner, and the stockholders lose their money.
"I will solely address your fear because from what I read you fear investing in something that could possibly go down in the future.  This is almost identical to market timing, so let's use the SPY as an example.  Look at the SPY on Yahoo Finance, specifically in 2011.  The market experienced a little bit of a pull back during the year, and some ""analysts"" claimed that it would fall below 600 (read this).  In fact, a co-worker of mine said that he feared buying the S&P 500 in 2011 (as well as in 2010), so he bought gold (compare the two from 2011 to now - to put it bluntly he experienced 50% less gain than I did). Did the S&P 500 ever fall below 600 in that timeframe, or according to the linked analyst (there were plenty of similar predictions then)?  No.  If you avoid doing something because you're afraid it could drop, technically, you should be just as afraid of it rising (Fear of Losing Everything, FOLE, vs. Fear of Missing Out, FOMO - both are real).  That's not to say invest out of fear, but that fear cuts both ways, and generally, we only look at it from one side. Retirement investing should be a boring, automated process where, ideally, we don't try and time the market (though some will try, and like in 2011, fail).  If you can't help your fear, you can always approach retirement investing with automated re-balancing where you hold some money in ""less risky"" forms and others in ""higher risk"" forms and automate a rebalance every month or quarter."
Just looking at your question I can tell it's not worth it financially, even if you didn't borrow the money to do it. At your current rate, you'll be making 54,384 in 5 years, which is roughly a growth of 2.5% per year.  If you go for the masters, in 5 years you'll be making 55,680, with roughly the same growth rate (2.5%). So it's costing you $70,000 (the cost of school plus the 2 years of reduced income) to raise your salary by $1,300.  The payback period would be about 25 years.  It would be MUCH worse if you borrowed the money to do it. Not a chance.
Lets imagine two scenarios: 1) You make 10.4k (40% of total income) yearly contributions to a savings account that earns 1% interest for 10 years. In this scenario, you put in 104k and earned 5.89k in interest, for a total of 109.9k. 2) You make the same 10.4k yearly contribution to an index fund that earns 7% on average for 10 years. In this scenario you put in the same 104k, but earned 49.7k in interest*, for a total of 153.7k. The main advantage is option 1) has more liquidity -- you can get the money out faster. Option 2) requires time to divest any stocks / bonds. So you need enough savings to get you through that divestment period. Imagine another two scenarios where you stop earning income: 1-b) You stop working and have only your 109.9k principal amount in a 1% savings account. If you withdraw 15.6k yearly for your current cost of living, you will run through your savings in 7 years. 2-b) You stop working and have only 20k (2 years of savings) in savings that earns 1% with 153.7k in stocks that earns 7%. If you withdraw your cost of living currently at 15.6k, you will run through your investments in 15 years and your savings in 2 years, for a total of 17 years. The two years of income in savings is extremely generous for how long it starts the divestment process.  In summary, invest your money. It wasn't specified what currency we are talking about, but you can easily find access to an investment company no matter where you are in the world. Keep a small amount for a rainy day.
"I would like to add my accolades in saving $3000, it is an accomplishment that the majority of US households are unable to achieve. source While it is something, in some ways it is hardly anything.  Working part time at a entry level job will earn you almost three times this amount per year, and with the same job you can earn about as much in two weeks as this investment is likely to earn, in the market in one year.   All this leads to one thing:  At your age you should be looking to increase your income.  No matter if it is college or a high paying trade, whatever you can do to increase your life time earning potential would be the best investment for this money.   I would advocate a more patient approach.  Stick the money in the bank until you complete your education enough for an ""adult job"".  Use it, if needed, for training to get that adult job.  Get a car, a place of your own, and a sufficient enough wardrobe.  Save an emergency fund.  Then invest with impunity. Imagine two versions of yourself.  One with basic education, a average to below average salary, that uses this money to invest in the stock market.  Eventually that money will be needed and it will probably be pulled out of the market at an in opportune time.  It might worth less than the original 3K! Now imagine a second version of yourself that has an above average salary due to some good education or training.  Perhaps that 3K was used to help provide that education.  However, this second version will probably earn 25,000 to 75,000 per year then the first version.  Which one do you want to be?  Which one do you think will be wealthier?   Better educated people not only earn more, they are out of work less.  You may want to look at this chart."
So you think there is a business that can take $X and in two weeks turn it into $10X plus their profit.  That means that in two weeks you can turn $1,000 into $10,000. So every two weeks you add a zero, in six weeks you add 3 zeros. In 12 weeks total your $1,000 is now $1,000,000,000; and in a few weeks after that you are richer than Bill Gates. All Guaranteed! Run away.