From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Thu Mar 01 2001 - 13:06:41 MST
All true (although unless you have a really really large amount of money
to blow, buying stock in any public stock with a decent daily volume is
not going to have any impact at all when it comes to "supporting the price")
I guess, but it remains important to draw a big line between directly
investing in a company you want to help vs. indirect methods. In terms of
real impact of your capital the former probably has orders of magnitude more
effectiveness.
In other words going out and buying $100,000 worth of Intel stock ain't
going to get the Singularity or nanotech or anything else here faster. But
if you take that money and put it into a startup venture to pursue some new
technology then you would have a chance at making something happen.
GBurch1@aol.com wrote:
>
> In a message dated 2/22/01 3:50:36 PM Central Standard Time,
> brian@posthuman.com writes:
>
> > Of course remember: if you really intend on /helping/ the companies in
> > question, you have to invest during the IPO or before. Otherwise your
> > cash is just going to some other random person/org, not the company itself.
>
> Actually, this isn't true in almost all cases. First, the entrepreneurs who
> start and build the company almost always retain some fairly significant
> portion of the stock of the company. So 1) you may be buying the stock
> directly from such an "insider", thus providing a direct return to the people
> who's energy and inventiveness you want to reward and 2) even a purchase from
> a non-insider serves to support the stock price, providing an indirect
> benefit to those people. Second, companies often possess "treasury stock",
> i.e. "issued" stock that hasn't yet been sold to the public. Such shares
> serve as a kind of private currency for the company that they use to both
> raise cash and regulate the market value of their equity. Finally, as I
> point out above, every purchase of a company's shares serves to support its
> value, which is a continuing issue for any company. Buying XYZ, Inc.'s stock
> today may be helping it to raise new money, by serving as a signal of its
> value to new direct investors or lenders.
>
-- Brian Atkins Director, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:06:10 MST