This is what I wanted to say. And I assume the most likely response would be that the stock market is a ponzy scheme, derivatives shouldn’t be allowed, and Wall St deserves to be wiped out by a tsunami (yes someone actually said that).
For the rest of us, if we’re holding a long position that we plan to own for a year or more, it’s not always going to go up the entire time. One option is to exit when ever we think the stock might go sideways or down and then have my cash doing nothing. The other choice is to is to **sell **a call option, which is a short position betting against the market. Having this possibility means I can continue to hold my shares in the company, and also earn income from it while it fails to go up.
Me *selling *a call option lets other people *buy *call options bringing liquidity to the options market.
The other way to protect my position is to buy a put option as a form of insurance. If the stock goes down my put option will go up and offset my losses. But buying a put option is betting against the market. Again, if I couldn’t do this I’d be more inclined to get jittery and sell any time I think bad news is approaching. This also requires someone else to sell a put option meaning they’re short.
I’m also not a big fan of the “zero sum theory of the stock market.” And for the record I’m not a big fan of naked shorting either.
Oh, what a relief! The reason you keep repeating rudimentary capitalist platitudes and dogma is that you are talking down to me! Which is good, because it allows for the possibility that you are not so Ricky Retardo as to actually believe the empty bromides you offer! You just figure I’m dumb enough to buy it.
Of course, the answer to your snarkeriffic “question” is that it is not relevant to my point. The coal, the dirt, the grass that grows in the dirt…all these are natural resources of our country, and, as such, are ultimately the property of the people of our country.
While this sounds nice is a kumbaya sort of way, all of those things you describe are worthless until someone does something with them.
So a smart country leases out the rights to those resources to someone that’s capable of turning it in to something useful. Sort of like if you have a house sitting empty, you could choose to lease it out to someone thus earn income.
As an example, consider the socialist utopia of Zimbabwe. Mugabe followed your principles and decided to give the people’s farm land back to the people. Sounds great in theory except that “the people” really sucked at farming, so the people’s land failed to provide food for the people to eat.
On the other extreme there are countries that essentially gave away the land rights and forgot to get something in exchange.
In the middle are countries that lease land rights and allow people/corporations to turn resources into something useful, and tax them in the process.
You seem to enjoy your coal powered house more than you like unusable sedimentary rock under an otherwise unused mountain.
That’s cute. I try to teach you about how the real world really works, and you dismiss it as repeating platitudes . . . and then follow that by the most saccharine bullshit platitude probably yet seen on this board. That’s like rain on your wedding day (or something).
I see you are afraid of answering my questions. Afraid you might learn something?
Here’s another question for you: If a country adopted your platitudes as policy, how many coal mines do you think there’d be?