[hash872]

>If your only contribution to a business is giving it money, you are essentially always better sticking that money in the stock market.... the idea that you can beat the market with no special benefit that you bring to the table is a fantasy as old as capitalism

I feel like EMH is increasingly becoming a strange & unfalsifiable quasi-religion for some people. I believe even the strongest forms of EMH cover publicly traded stocks, and not investments in privately held companies. Are you saying that it's literally impossible for me to invest in a local gym, real estate development, plumbing company, landscaper etc. and not beat the US equity market's average return of 9% a year? Because that's obviously ridiculously untrue. The main reason why I can't price say Apple better than the stock market can is the absolutely staggering amount of global competition to do so. But there's exponentially less competition to invest in a smaller, privately-held local business- I'm not competing with hedge funds and so on.

I'm a Boglehead, and the good parts of EMH have a lot of wise things to say about the impossibility of pricing individual publicly traded companies better than the broader stock market. But super-strong EMH has become a bit of an intellectual cult, and I see people way over-extending it into domains that it was never supposed to cover. It's becoming like a learned helplessness 'it's impossible for anything to be profitable because EMH'

[gnicholas]

In case anyone else was wondering, EMH = Efficient Market Hypothesis (which is a reason people think that investing in an ETF is the best way to go, since trying to pick individual stocks is a losing game).

[t_mann]

Not defending EMH in any way, but there's a logical flaw in your argument: your wording implicitly pits a cherry-picked example against a broad average: "it's literally impossible [to invest in a small business and beat the market]" - that's not the point. There will exist examples where that worked, but there will also exist some where it failed (like in the article). You have to consider all those cases to compute an average return. And even if you do come up with a higher expected return for a private investment (I don't have the data), you also have to consider the variance/risk: a bad outcome for the S&P500 is maybe minus 20-40% in a year [0]; a bad outcome for a franchise can look like bankruptcy and/or eviction, like in the article.

I'm with the GP poster: if you're thinking about running a business in passive mode as an investment, as it seems it was pitched to those franchisees, you're highly likely better off keeping it in boring investment products. That's not even saying that sane (ie positive risk-adjusted return) passive income opportunities don't exist, but they almost certainly won't look like what's described in the article, with no strategic freedom (you're not allowed to close an unprofitable shop, wth?); apparently coupled with personal liability and massive fixed and upfront costs, that's an absolutely deadly mix. More generally, they will almost never come to you as a pitch, which should be self-evident.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/2526/sp-500-historical-annual-re...

[hash872]

If you don't have data on private investments, how can you say anything about how they compare with an index fund? As a passive investor in a local business, my losses are pretty limited by their corporate structure.

I've been self-employed for about 6 years now, and my return on my original invested capital is hundreds of % a year. My potential losses are highly limited by being incorporated- I can always just close the business and walk away. I think it's ridiculous to compare my little company with an index fund, but I also think it's pretty silly to make sweeping statements comparing public stock markets with private investments. It's OK to say that 2 completely different things are apples & oranges

[t_mann]

I'm saying what data you should be looking at when you're comparing investment opportunities, not doing the work of assessing specific investments for you.

Being self-employed isn't a financial investment, it's a form of labor and most certainly not passive, hence why the comparison fails.

[hash872]

What is the body of evidence that leads you to think you can't exceed a (totally unrelated) benchmark when investing in privately held companies? Can you cite some studies? The reason we know EMH 'works' for public markets is decades of research. What research lead you to a similar conclusion for private markets, can you link some of it here?

[t_mann]

I haven't said nor implied that, I've made a nuanced statement, but you seem hell bent attacking some strawman, good luck with that strategy and bye.

[hn_throwaway_99]

That's not what I'm saying. Two points:

1. Obviously some people with zero unique insight or skill in a business will make out big (i.e. "beat the market"), just like some people will win the lottery. But drastically increasing your risk/volatility and then saying "some people beat the market average!" is not actually a counterpoint to EMH, which primarily says something about risk-adjusted returns.

2. More importantly, though, if you do have some special insight into why a private business may outcompete its competitors, by all means, go for it. But TFA is basically highlighting that the vast majority of these people had no special skills in business, marketing, etc. beyond "I like fitness and once took one of their classes!" If you're in that boat, on average, you're better putting that money in the stock market. If you're a gambler and think you can, literally, beat the odds with nothing but luck, again, go for it, but I'm not going to have sympathy for you if you decided to, essentially, put your life savings on double-0.

[lotsofpulp]

> Are you saying that it's literally impossible for me to invest in a local gym, real estate development, plumbing company, landscaper etc. and not beat the US equity market's average return of 9% a year?

Yes, without taking additional risk. SP500 is risk free, everything else, you need to be pricing in additional risk OR you need to have an edge other than providing money (which you can do buy buying VOO). hn_throwaway_99’s second paragraph explains it well.

One common arbitrage opportunity is to be part of an immigrant diaspora. They won’t have access to credit, but will be willing to work 100 hours per week. You can take advantage of that and basically use the fact that you are getting under minimum wage labor that is very invested in the business to get better than public equity returns.

[hash872]

>SP500 is risk free

I'm sorry, what?

[lotsofpulp]

Compared to an equity investment in a local business, sure. On a 5 or even 3 year timeline, the federal US government is not going to let the broad market indices fall. And if they do, Americans have bigger problems to worry about.

[smogcutter]

I think you’re missing parent’s point, which is about these sort of “business in a box” pitches sold to the aspirational middle class, and not some kind of statement that it’s impossible to profitably invest money.