Trading stocks makes me feel dirty
Trading stocks makes me feel dirty
I hate the whole publicly traded model of companies. I hate capitalism. But have to engage in trading stocks (I mostly do Mutual Funds and a small quantity of direct stocks) so that my money doesn't lose value by sitting in a bank or cash.
Same thing with credit cards, don't like taking loans and getting marked on a centralised list for that but it's a safer option than using your own money.
Fortunately I don't do crypto so that's a plus.
Even Marx speculated a bit, relax.
Marx was actually one of the biggest Dogecoin holders of his era
Saying "I wish capitalism didn't exist" isn't praxis.
We've got to work with the world as she exists.
Don’t beat yourself up. The fractional harm that your meager efforts to not get wiped the fuck out by inflation cause is comparable to every other type of consumption under capitalism.
You have to live and living means participating in your society. When does that effort to continue existing cross over into the lying and self dealing that, for example, people into effective altruism are famous for?
I don’t know where that line is, but you’ll figure it out.
Permanently Deleted
I feel better about credit cards when I pay my balance and full and every time I use cash back, knowing that I'm not causing them to make any money, and I'm actually costing them some money.
Yeah pretty much how I use them. But I'm pretty sure they earn money from every transaction or the whole thing would not exist.
you live by others labour , it is dirty .
and it will always be Dirty .. there is no escape to the Fact that you live Parasiticlly from other peoples Labour .. the ONLY avenue you have is the Avenue of Hirachy and Elitism.
You can start to consider yourself much more important then those that labour .. Of better Ideology ..Birth ... Culture ..Race ... Personal Biographie etc..
When you do that it will not feel so dirty anymore . but you will be then Dirty for others. So no escape from the Dirt without Abandoning Passiv income.
EDIT: Also you reduce it .. like a Hole Factory / Company all its Employees , there dreams and Hopes ... compressed into this crudes form.
He's not living off other people's labour. He's using it as a bank, cutting out the bank in the middle to maintain above inflation rates of interest.
If you're using a bank the bank is doing the exact same thing putting your money in stocks too.
nope . you can not trade without a Bank . And the Stocks Dividence come from other Peoples Labour.
this coment was not meant in a "fronting" / "personal" manner at all , obviously i dont demand he stop ,(what would that do? We live in a Society ) I dont follow vegan logic of personal Purity) . I simply explained that he feels dirty because it is Dirty.
When you live from other Peoples Labour, it is Dirty .. and the More you life by other Peoples Labour the More Dirty you become.
if it would not be dirty , he would not have felt it .
Ipso facto .
If all it took to start full-on exploiting other’s labor was downloading a stock trading app I don’t think there’d be that many poor people in the West
Get into highly leveraged options trading, you'll be too busy feeling other emotions from that to feel any guilt
there's mutual funds and ETFs that invest solely in ESG (environmental, social, and governance) funds. i honestly don't know if it's just marketing ploy or what but i know they're a thing and might be worth looking into [edit: i looked into these. they're a ploy. don't buy these. it's just S&P 500 shit with 4-10x the expense ratio]
finance capitalism is all dirty and bad. 401ks + others are just a trick to make people care about the market when it literally ONLY helps rich ppl and no one else. best to just do a total market fund try not to think about it so much.
hysa's are worse imo. they take your money and gamble the ever living fuck out of it a million times over until the economy collapses.
You have to be careful with those. I looked into something like that and the page about their principles touted opposition to nuclear power. Looked into who was running the fund and sure enough, big oil.
i went ahead and pulled some up ESGs out of curiosity to look at the holdings. ESGV, SDG, NUDV.
primary holdings were shit like microsoft, nvidia, tesla, amgen, novartis, home depot, johnson john, coca cola, etc. it's literally just S&P 500 but with like 4-10x the expense ratio.
fucking. lol.
A lot of the ESG stuff is shell companies owned by the usual suspects that technically don't do anything because it is literally just a shell company for Exxon or something.
I saw this post an hour ago but went past it because I thought it said socks instead of stocks and I was confused
That post exists as well
If I were you, I'd rather just keep the money itself as is, not trading stocks or using credit cards...
I honestly have no experience with that sort of thing and rather not go through the mental gymnastics to do so, regardless of how my money depreciates and how safe using credit cards is...
I'd just want a simple life... don't want to overcomplicate shit as I do...
I get it but it's simply not feasible. Every rupee I earn will be devalued continuously. The government in my country has also brought in massive inflation since 2014 and it only gets worse as the currency is weakening and the country is being sold off to capitalists.
Damn it, I have no business advising you, considering I've not experienced the same situation...
You cant just deposit your money with an institution that will match inflation? Here in Chile you can get a Deposito a plazo en UF and forget about it
You cant just deposit your money with an institution that will match inflation?
You literally fucking can't in my country. They've had some smaller scale sells of government bonds but you can't really do that in a bank on a regular basis, all you get are their garbage investment funds or a savings account with like 0.2% APY.
Not really. You can buy gold bonds or invest in mutual funds or fixed/recurring deposits in my country. Don't think there is a inflation matching thing here.
Deposito a plazo en UF
that sounds great, things like this used to exist in clapistan, however if you want to play at making passive income like our overlords you must now gamble
There's "I bonds" if you live in the states, but they don't pay much.
Trading stocks on speculation is just gambling against the random nature of the market. It's no different than going to a blackjack table and can be fun (also dangerous and addicting). You're not engaging in capitalism you're engaging in a game with other players (traders).
Owning stocks like in a 401k investment account is different. I won't do it. At least with pensions (i.e. a pension fund) you could gain some sort of political purpose through its corporate and government investments. This led to famous instances of corruption, as well, but it still demonstrates the political power of the investment.
The 401k destroyed that. It's now just all of the rent seeking with none of the voice. Pure liberalism. They're literally passing laws in states right now that make it ILLEGAL to consider what you're investing in and if it's an ethical business or not.
Saying that you have to invest in stocks or else you'll lose money is like saying you have to vote for Biden or else you'll lose rights. I don't really give a shit if you do either, and your personal situation is something I don't know about. But both should make you feel dirty, yes.
Owning stocks isn't just existing under capitalism. This isn't treat discourse. You're not buying an Xbox that someone was exploited into making. When you own a stock, you are the capitalist. Owning part of the company gives you a part of what's taken from the employees or others, directly. A lot of common retirement investment is with large funds that own real estate. When you get your 5% return on your investment it's not just magically growing on a tree. It's coming from rents.
There's no functional difference to buying a $200,000 apartment and renting it out as a landlord or putting $200,000 in a 401k managed retirement fund that owns several hundred apartments buildings. And they do.
There are more ethical ways to invest money than owning stocks.
Individual, alienated, consumer decisions are ethical? This is what happens when no class analysis. Landlords aren't bad because they make money from rents. Landlords are bad because their interests align with the interests of the ruling class, and they oppose the interests of the working class, who they exploit as a class. the contingent material realities of owning property for the sole purpose of getting personal income has the effect of changing peoples beliefs and behaviors. The system warps their worldview and pits them against the workers, but it is the system that benefits one class by exploiting another that is the enemy, not individual landlords. It is the system that alienates and exploits.
There are undoubtedly evil, unethical people who are drawn to real estate and speculation, and I would have serious reservations calling the bourgeois capitalist executive of some giant real estate development/property management company a "good person." But an individual owner of a 200k property (which is essentially nothing, a tiny house far from any urban area), which may have come to them through a lifetime of earnings, or just lucked into it or inherited it from a family member, is not by default a class enemy or individually ontologically evil. They may become that, though owning a single small property wouldn't produce much income; forcing them to either sell or expand with the market.
I really don't see the point of lecturing somebody over a fucking 401k. Must be nice living in a perfectly hermetically sealed ethical bubble, into which no evil ever permeates. People out here calling themselves leftists while recreating the underlying logic of religious purity politics.
Landlords aren't bad because they make money from rents.
I’m sorry, what? Any form of unearned income (i.e. not producing any real goods/services) is fundamentally taking away from productive investment and therefore bad.
Let’s not even talk about class interests or exploitation for the moment. If you spend 30% of your income on paying rent, you now have 30% less money to spend on real goods and services, spending that actually keep the local economy going and circulated into the hands of the working people.
Instead, 30% of that money (and that’s a huge proportion in aggregate of the whole population) are being funneled to the top 1%, most of whom will not re-invest into their local community or economy. Instead, those money will be spent on driving up even higher property prices, which in turn makes rent and mortgage more expensive for everyone else.
But yes, most people investing in 401k aren’t even anywhere close to the obscene amount of wealth of the top 1%. So there’s no point scolding them. However, the point that landlord’s rent seeking behavior isn’t “bad” is just pure nonsense.
Maybe you can enlighten me on more ethical ways to invest my money because at this point I think not putting money into a 401k is a terrible financial decision.
Tax deferred compounding interest is too good of a deal for the average person to pass up. Over 30 years you'll be looking at anywhere from 100-150% return on investment.
$50 a paycheck for 30 years with 5% avg return turns your $39k total contributions into $100k in retirement savings. $100 turns $78k in total contributions into $200k savings.
For many people who find saving difficult, me included, being able to set it and forget it, plus the understanding it needs to be for retirement to get the full return, has allowed me to save money I would have spent/wasted otherwise.
Due to the compounding factor, the sooner a person starts the better the return, so to discourage young people to not put money into a 401k is IMO actively harmful.
IMO It's like telling someone they shouldn't have health insurance. Yeah it's bullshit that society forces us to participate in a fucked up system but not having it puts future you at a terrible risk.
Just to clarify: a 401k is just a savings account that is tax deferred. By itself that doesn't make any money or interest. Most people then take that money and have it invested. That's what I'm commenting on.
The return in a 401k is from (typically) a managed fund or an index fund. It's a good return, as you note. That's because it's largely from rent extraction.
It's a great deal if you are ok with functionally owning a small apartment in some other state where a family pays half their paycheck so that you get your 5% return on investment. But know that is what is happening.
The whole "I have no other choice" position is past any point I'm trying to make. I don't know anyone's specific situation.
I would at least sympathize with the idea that in a worthwhile society someone who has served the country their entire life deserves a dignified retirement funded by people of working age. Insofar as that goes, the money in a 401k doesn't grow on trees, but it's still a reasonable way to appropriate the funds theoretically.
The government can always create the money for retirement funds out of thin air.
The fact that retirement is tied to 401k is an explicit instrument in financializing the entire economy i.e. turning America into one giant casino where a very small proportion of the people always win big while the rest of the people lose.
Yes, it sucks, but no way around it if you ever want to be able to retire. My employer pays double my pension contributions, so I've got that accumulating, and when I have enough in the pot I'll transfer it to a private pension and invest it myself as ethically as I can.
Unfortunately there is a tonne of greenwashing and lip service paid to ESG requirements, together with the high fees and lower returns means they aren't really worth it. Plus in a fund, yeah you get diversity, but no discretion if you want to participate in boycotts, and on a macro scale it makes fund managers too powerful.
But also no-one take advice from me I am literally still waiting until I have enough to minimise the fees before managing my own pension.
I’ve got a few thousand in savings should I be like investing it instead of letting it fester in the bank, like I have 4.35 APY which is okay but couldn’t I get more trading than through interest
A lot of normal workers here have 401ks and other retirement plans, and usually that involves stock trading, either by the worker or by the company holding the money. Hell, even banks gamble with your money when it sits in their accounts. And the HYSAs are high yield because some poor guy got finessed by the interest rates. And more than likely, that money is going to a bunch of weapons companies while sitting around.
Maybe I’m just coping because I have some money invested in ETFs and some of the larger percentages go to shit like Lockheed and I don’t want to think of myself as bad. But I don’t know. I don’t touch those ETFs once I buy them so they function no different than a bank account. Maybe even worse because there are penalties for selling.
The only thing that will redeem me is if my retirement money in the ETFs tank significantly. It will be fully deserved for willingly giving my money to Silicon Valley and weapons companies that enable genocide.
The other option is to manually choose the stocks, but would that be worse? You would become obsessed with stock performance and constantly checking the news and potentially becoming reactionary when your value goes down. At least with ETFs I buy and forget and can focus on the real world and try to negate my contribution to evil.
If my other comment doesn’t suit you, break your boy farting_weedman off a piece and I’ll personally guarantee you’re not betraying the working class or the colonized!
Buddy, do I have just the financial instrument for you!
Physically quite dirty but ethically clean.
If you have enough a HYSA may be a better option. You can get 5% annually if you have 100k, a little bit less for smaller quantities. Of course if you have 100k just sitting around you're probably going to be kicked off of hexbear so ymmv.
Very unethical, cynical pro tip: Option trade NOC and RTX. If the politicians are going to look you right in the eye and say, “fuck you” when you protest to demand a ceasefire, you might as well milk those dickheads for personal profit since you know it’s going to spike.