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What are the signs to look out for to know one is ready? Perhaps even more important, what are the signs to look out for to know one NOT is ready? I would like to hear from those who have been there, done that and most probably wiser.
Lets take the mining industry for an example, it generates millions of dollars in value for Australia every day, in the form of royalties, wages, taxes on wages, dividends etc etc.
Now, is this large amount of value created solely through the labour of the employees?
Unless the mine workers are scratching at the earth with their bare hands, and walking a hand full of ore to a chinese steel mill, then no its not just labour.
Investors have had to put up the funds (which they could have used to go to Disneyland), to buy the billions of dollars of mining equipment and rail and port infrastructure, to make it possible for the labour to do their job effectively, without the investment, there wouldn't be a mine to work at.
Now the next thing people say is, "But if you are just buying an existing share, you aren't doing anything".
Well would the initial start up investor have invested if he wasn't confident there was a market to sell his shares to later on? No
Also, when you own shares in an operating company, they company is continually reinvesting earnings back into the business, share holders allow this to happen, they could all vote at the annual general meeting to make no further investments, and just have BHP pay out 100% of all future cashflow and run the mines till they are depleted and then go home.
without labour, those capital will just sit there.
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But if a person have two hands, a good work ethic and zero dollar... they will earn then accumulate capital, then use both their labour and capital to employ more labour
The wisest time to invest is when you have a property, fully paid for, worth $2 million and a few more apartments, also fully paid for, worth $800k each, to rent. A pension pot worth $2 million and $2 million savings, leaving $1 million to invest in stock markets. You may be quite old at that point and leave it all to your sons and daughters, or a charity of course.
Maybe that's your eventual aim one day anyway.
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Anything different has to be some form of gamble and investing just happens to be that way.
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- Social pressure
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Yes, that's why I said this,>>> " in our society for the economy to function you need labour and capital,"
(unless of course 99%+ Automation takes over, and then it would be just a capital game mainly)
That's the same thing, at first they use their labour combined with another investors capital to generate earnings.
Then later they take on the role of both investor and labour, they haven't gotten rid of the need for capital investors, they have just taken on a dual role, and should hopefully be compensated financially for both if they are successful.
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You shouldn't be ashamed to be an investor, its a great profession, and can be very enjoyable for the type of person who enjoys learning new things and doing research, as long as you have emotional stability and can think clearly through out the various ups and downs, you will find it a very rewarding job, both financially and mentally, look at Warrren Buffett, 80+ and still tap dancing to work.
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Here is a little something to lift you mood, this song is one of the things that got me thinking about investment from a young age,
The wisest time to invest is when you have a property, fully paid for, worth $2 million and a few more apartments, also fully paid for, worth $800k each, to rent. A pension pot worth $2 million and $2 million savings, leaving $1 million to invest in stock markets. You may be quite old at that point and leave it all to your sons and daughters, or a charity of course.
Maybe that's your eventual aim one day anyway.
Anything different has to be some form of gamble and investing just happens to be that way. So you wont ever be ready really until you are mature enough to accept losses. Remembering of course that a paper loss is a real loss and a profit is not a profit until it's banked.
You can have an imaginary portfolio of shares over one year. You could even have a number of different portfolios and see how you go on that. Unfortunately it is very easy to cheat as real investing is that final click on the mouse and that's that.
If you start investing and are uncertain, and you cant afford to lose all the money, stick to the ASX100.
but the real value of capital must align to its labour and productivity - not financial engineering.
Deep yea?
Buffett is quite a boring guy. Smart and all. But boring.
I guess we all find different things interesting, I would find mowing lawns boring, I think I would much rather drink a coke and do my research than work a jims mowing round, but each to their own.
Financial engineering certainly has its purpose,
I mean take a hippy tilling the field in his 2 acre block he calls an organic farm, he might work many hours and put in lots of "labour", but is not very productive by modern standards.
Then take his cousin, who might take 3 investors capital and buys 200 acres, he all loans money from a bank to buy another 800 acres, and uses a lease to buy farm equipment, he plants 1000 acres of corn and sells it on a futures market locking in a price, and then insures the crops against disaster etc.
He will be very productive if all goes well, much more than the organic hippy.
FE is more like buying back shares to the EPS (and the CEO's bonuses) looks better;.
.or redefining what are generally considered an expense to be an asset
It will get quite complicated when we want to look at productivity and profit in a broader sense than just the bottom line.
Share buy backs are a legitimate use of excess capital, especially at mature companies where they are generating cash faster than they find ways to deploy it wisely.
Buy backs are really just like paying a business partner to walk away from the business leaving his share of the company in your hands.
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I would call that fraud, (unless of cause the expense is actually creating an asset, eg exploration expenses that are actually proving up resources costs associate with growing a pen full of salmon etc)
remember we are just discussing the value of labour, and whether it is the sole source of value.
Obviously, the increased capital intensive economy we now have produces a lot more goods and services than the prior labour intensive one, it may even get to the point where almost no labour is needed, at that point would you still argue that money is a claim on labour? or that labour is the only genuine moral source of earning income?
Any one that believes that labour is the sole source of moral earnings and that the harder you work the better you serve the economy, should spend 1 day harvesting wheat with a sickle and 1 day with a combine harvester, then see which provides the most value.
What I'm saying is that all capital are ultimately the result of labour. And labour here don't just mean the hand and physical human labour... but the brainy and brawny labour and all that results from human creativity and inventiveness.
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I don't think you gain anything in terms of increasing understanding by trying to blur the lines and join the two words together.
In my understanding and the way I feel the words are used, is labour is work (whether that be physical or mental) and capital is either money or assets.
Money and assets is different to work, it doesn't matter that you may have got the money from work, once you have earned it, and banked it, it becomes capital, it isn't the same thing as "Work" which is an action, not an object.
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Would you still consider capital the equivalent of labour in a society where 100% of products and services were made by robots and automated machines, and every one in society was just some form of investor owning different portions and varying amounts of the economy?
I think you could get rid of labour entirely and still have the concept of capital, without it being linked to labour/work, Investors and capital owners would still exist, but workers wouldn't, So could you really say money is a claim on labour? I don't think so, that's why I said its a claim on production.
No body cares how much human labour goes into products when they buy them, they care about how much produce/production they are getting, and at what quality.
But if you ground capital to what it really is - the fruit of human labour and innovation packed in a plastic note..
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Just that production is the result of labour
If I go to work tomorrow to keep the lights on (literally keep the lights on in my case) then I'm doing something of value to society via my physical labour and thinking.
If I buy shares in XYZ and hold them then I'm deploying capital into something that creates value via producing whatever the company produces.
But if I sit at home day trading shares in XYZ all day then arguably I haven't really added to society. I've put my time and effort into something that whilst it has made me a profit, hasn't changed anything else. XYZ would still be running their actual business with or without me buying and selling their shares every few minutes.
Something that many technical people, and by that I mean not just engineers and the like but anyone technical eg medicine, laments is that we've come to a point where the shuffling of money is now a highly attractive career option for the brightest minds. Whatever money you might make designing, inventing, discovering or simply building things comes nowhere close to what a few are making simply looking at a screen shuffling money around. As a society we'd arguably be better off if the best minds were lured into something else that actually moves us forward.
If every truck driver in Australia walks off the job tomorrow then we've got a massive crisis straight away. Within a fairly short period of time the same applies if every doctor, tradesman or teacher walks off the job and stays out. But if day traders all decide to not bother trading any more then I don't think the rest of society will realise that anything changed unless they hear it on the news. The ASX will still be there, there will still be a market for everything there's a market for today, it's just that there won't be anyone shuffling money back and forth hoping to grab some for themselves.
I'm not opposed to trading by the way, I do some medium term trading as well as longer term holding of stocks, but I've no doubt that simply moving money back and forth hasn't actually produced anything of real value to anyone but me.
There was far less money shuffling in the days before computers were used to do it. That didn't stop us doing everything from inventing cars and building highways through to putting a man on the moon. And we still had markets for stocks, commodities and currencies too.
As for the original question, I'd say that someone is ready to do it full time when:
1. They have a proven profitable system and have actually been running it for a decent length of time.
2. They have adequate capital deployed to produce, with a realistic rate of return, enough money to sustain the lifestyle they want.
3. They are no longer interested in working in whatever they do now and are happy with the idea that trading / investing will become their actual job.
If I go to work tomorrow to keep the lights on (literally keep the lights on in my case) then I'm doing something of value to society via my physical labour and thinking.
If I buy shares in XYZ and hold them then I'm deploying capital into something that creates value via producing whatever the company produces.
But if I sit at home day trading shares in XYZ all day then arguably I haven't really added to society. I've put my time and effort into something that whilst it has made me a profit, hasn't changed anything else. XYZ would still be running their actual business with or without me buying and selling their shares every few minutes.
Something that many technical people, and by that I mean not just engineers and the like but anyone technical eg medicine, laments is that we've come to a point where the shuffling of money is now a highly attractive career option for the brightest minds. Whatever money you might make designing, inventing, discovering or simply building things comes nowhere close to what a few are making simply looking at a screen shuffling money around. As a society we'd arguably be better off if the best minds were lured into something else that actually moves us forward.
If every truck driver in Australia walks off the job tomorrow then we've got a massive crisis straight away. Within a fairly short period of time the same applies if every doctor, tradesman or teacher walks off the job and stays out. But if day traders all decide to not bother trading any more then I don't think the rest of society will realise that anything changed unless they hear it on the news. The ASX will still be there, there will still be a market for everything there's a market for today, it's just that there won't be anyone shuffling money back and forth hoping to grab some for themselves.
I'm not opposed to trading by the way, I do some medium term trading as well as longer term holding of stocks, but I've no doubt that simply moving money back and forth hasn't actually produced anything of real value to anyone but me.
There was far less money shuffling in the days before computers were used to do it. That didn't stop us doing everything from inventing cars and building highways through to putting a man on the moon. And we still had markets for stocks, commodities and currencies too.
As for the original question, I'd say that someone is ready to do it full time when:
1. They have a proven profitable system and have actually been running it for a decent length of time.
2. They have adequate capital deployed to produce, with a realistic rate of return, enough money to sustain the lifestyle they want.
3. They are no longer interested in working in whatever they do now and are happy with the idea that trading / investing will become their actual job.
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