Why 99% of trading is pointless
An astonishing $32 trillion in securities changes hands every year with no net positive impact for investors, charges Vanguard Group Founder John Bogle.
Meanwhile, corporate finance — the reason Wall Street exists — is just a tiny slice of the total business. The nation's big investment banks probably could work for less than a week and take the rest of the year off with no real effect on the economy.
"The job of finance is to provide capital to companies. We do it to the tune of $250 billion a year in IPOs and secondary offerings," Bogle told Time in an interview.
"What else do we do? We encourage investors to trade about $32 trillion a year. So the way I calculate it, 99% of what we do in this industry is people trading with one another, with a gain only to the middleman. It's a waste of resources."
Rent seekers
It's a lot of money, $32 trillion. Nearly double the entire U.S. economy moving from one pocket to another, with a toll-taker in the middle. Most people refer to them as "stock brokers," but let's call them what they are — toll-takers and rent-seekers.
Rent-seeking as an occupation is as old as the hills. In exchange for working to build up credentials and relative fluency in the arcane rules of an industry, one gets to stand back from actual work and just collect money.
Ostensibly, the job of a financial adviser is to provide advice. Do you actually get that from your broker? It is worth anything?
Research shows, over and over, that stock brokers can't do much of anything demonstrably valuable. They don't know which stocks will go up or down and when. They don't know which asset classes will outperform this year or next.
Nobody knows. That's the point. If you're among that small cadre of extremely high-level traders who can throw loads of cash at a short-term fluke, fantastic. If you have a mind for numbers like Warren Buffett that allows you to buy companies on the cheap and hold them forever, excellent.
If you're a normal retirement investor trying to get from A to B and retire on time, well, you have a really big problem to face: The toll-taker wants your money.
Dead weight
So he needs you to trade — a lot. Because that's how stock brokers make money. Not by doling out retirement advice, but by ensuring that your account is active and churning commissions on behalf of them and their employers.
What's a highway with no traffic on it? If you're a toll-taker, it's a money loser. So Wall Street's rent-seekers need traffic in the form of regular trading. An account that sits invested for months at a time with no trades is dead weight to them.
Nevertheless, as Bogle maintains, doing nothing is the key. "Don't do something, just stand there!" he has often said.
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