[cipheredStones]

> Taking money away from mismanaged companies, and giving it to well-managed ones, is a net positive of stock trading.

Where "well-managed" means "good at delivering money to its shareholders", which is at best obliquely related to a positive impact on the world. (Also, I'm skeptical that the stock price in itself makes that much of a difference to what the company is able to do.)

> Another net positive of stock trading is making buyers and sellers available all day, for anything on the market. Yet another benefit of stock trading is to make it more difficult to manipulate the market - there's a reason why pump and dump scams only occur with assets that see very little attention (i.e. are low-volume).

In other words, the benefit-to-the-world of stock trading is that it makes it easier to trade stocks? And both of these are the result of unprofitable trading as much as profitable trading, so they can't be the proof that the money comes from the value delivered!

[glompers]

Not GP, but if I recall correctly, "taking money away from mismanaged companies" only occurs if the companies choose to do another issuance of shares in the future to raise equity, or stock options in the future to compensate people, in which case they would have to issue shares at a lower valuation, or issue more stock options to provide a similar benefit, than if they were a desirable company.

But stock trading also penalizes well-managed companies in slow-growing or more mature industries by giving them a higher cost-of-capital, just as it would if they were poorly managed. It seems a haphazardly blunt instrument for allocating liquidity to value generation. It piles on where rewards seem ready to be reaped, and makes it harder for mature sectors to renew or reinvent themselves.