[tosseraccount]

"this is a zero-sum game"

Minor quibble. That is not accurate.

You see teenagers buying hotdogs with a credit card. Visa and Mastercard go public, you buy shares, it goes up, up, up.

There's no zero sum here and people can spot special values without deep analysis.

[evanpw]

If you bought the shares after IPO, then someone sold them to you, and they missed out on all of those gains. Even in the IPO, it's very common that you're buying shares from insiders and private investors rather than from the company itself.

(But even if trading is zero-sum in a strict monetary sense, different risk preferences, desire to liquidate positions in order to buy something you value more, etc. mean that it's not zero-sum in a utility sense.)

[phamilton]

You had to buy from someone. Even Visa loses out when going public because they could have offered at a higher price. So in that sense it is a zero sum game. You profit instead of Visa (or whomever the seller is).

There are, however, externalities that make it less costly for Visa to sell lower than the theoretical max. Happy investors are easier to manage, market momentum is strong, etc.

[afarrell]

But those things will almost certainly be priced into the market already, so you will capture that value with purchases of VOO.

(Brexit nonwithstanding)

...actually that is a hole in my argument.

Okay: if you can find a cultural trend that you earnestly believe thatFinance people are out of touch with, then it makes sense to do arbitrage there.