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by brwnll 3795 days ago
While humorous, this is nonsense, and a complete mischaracterization of what a stock market actually is.

A stock market is a place where a group of businesses are able to offer ownership stakes in their company in exchange for cash.

The fact that people have built a speculation market around it is very different than a gambling wager. If you buy stock and it decreases in value, you still own the stock.

Edit: As CPLX points out below, in reference to a derivative market, the point is much more valid.
2 comments
CPLX 3795 days ago
My assumption was that he was talking about derivatives and synthetic securities (i.e. "non-collateralized" as he said). If that's the case his analogy is actually quite reasonable.
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vonklaus 3795 days ago
I am talking up structured financial instruments like that. Obviously, DraftKings doesn't map perfectly to etfs and options, but i think the analogy stands.

To be clear, I think that skill based wagers should be allowed. I was begging the question, is there a difference here, and it is:

It is a lot better known how the outcome of a football match will be determined than other fin. products.

Football is pretty discrete and doesn't have a broad impact on soccer outcomes (unless you are not American the soccer === football)

This is discretionary capital and not investment money.

So, my sarcastic point was: thanks for protecting me from having fun with $20 i earned weekly, don't you have anything else you might want to look into?

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joezydeco 3795 days ago
A stock market is a place where a group of businesses are able to offer ownership stakes in their company in exchange for cash...

..10 microseconds at a time.

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vonklaus 3795 days ago
You don't think the stock market maps perfectly to real world markets? Average investors need nano-second liquidity. Hedgefunds help the price stay consisten so that when a massive order comes in it goes into a blackpool and is split up, that way the price isn't off by 0.001% which in my opinion, is well worth destabalizing tge global economy.

I mean, prices are just information, don't we want that information to be a meaningless and irrelevent measure? Luckily, equities prices are well known to be irrelevent to investors.

a well known fact that price was dropped from standard metrics several years ago in favour of popularity.

Popularity / earnings

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