[Mvandenbergh]

Agreed. While I think it is sensible to have rules that prevent gullible members of the public from being bamboozled, I also think that a more sensible policy is what the UK has. Here you can self-certify as a "sophisticated investor" which is basically the same thing except that there is no obligation on anyone to check your self-certification i.e. there is no penalty to claiming to be one when you're not nor is there any penalty for allowing someone to invest who self-certifies but doesn't actually meet the criteria. That seems fair. If you're willing to confirm that then you should be able to invest in whatever damn fool thing you want.

(Note that in the UK private individuals can trade things like contracts for difference and spread bets which I actually think is slightly mad)

[asciimike]

This is basically Matt Levine's argument [1], though he calls it a Certificate of Dumb Investment:

To get that certificate, you sign a form. The form is one page with a lot of white space. It says in very large letters: “I want to buy a dumb investment. I understand that the person selling it will almost certainly steal all my money, and that I would almost certainly be better off just buying index funds, but I want to do this dumb thing anyway. I agree that I will never, under any circumstances, complain to anyone when this investment inevitably goes wrong. I understand that violating this agreement is a felony.”

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-09-24/earnin... [2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-19/privat...

[nullc]

I was okay right up to the never complain part.

There is a lot of fraud that goes unpunished because the victims feel hopeless and embarrassed. As a result, it's a lot more attractive to defraud people.

A dumb investment might be dumb, it might be likely to be fraud. But if it turns out to actually be fraud, the victims should still be able to seek restitution or otherwise you are giving a free pass to commit fraud and creating a huge economic advantage for people willing to do it over people who aren't.

[sk5t]

Maybe the other side of the coin is that allowing all these dumb investments to take place would have the effect of overwhelming regulatory bodies and prosecutors with less-than-clear-cut missteps. I don't know, perhaps it is easier to regulate entities that have to file a 10K than it is to understand anything at all about private entities that have no similar filing requirement?