Could even go so far as to say that the same issues are exhibited in other species, too.

Lack of education driving much of the problems in the world - story as old as time, I guess.

"These two things are bad, so we should just equivocate and throw our hands in the air and give up!"

"Miscellaneous"... Over $12,000!? Hmmm now.... what are you doing young man/woman?! ... kidding, but I am curious!

You're a liar.

It was answered you numbskull.

The fact of the matter is your position on democracy and voting is inconsistent with the near entirety of the civilized and educated world. As such, there's no point even talking any longer. You're a disgrace to everything a "good" andor "virtuous" person is and will be.

Booo lol .. you can't even say you agree with the basic tenets and foundations of democracy and voting Booo <smh> lol

I already told you, there are numerous examples in Naked, Short, and Greedy and I'll donate $40 to the charity of your choice if you order and prove you have the book - you don't even have you read it. As well, you can find numerous examples searching for "naked short selling."

The fact of the matter is...

You're a true disgrace and are intellectually dishonest and deceptive. Your grandparents would be ashamed of what you've become - and your grandchildren, if they knew the real you, would want nothing to do with you.

Booo go back to whatever grimy shithole you slithered out of.

... you can't even say you agree with the basic tenets and foundations of democracy and voting.

Edit: ... truly, go back to whatever grimy shithole you slithered out of....

... really. Just go away.

The rest of this here is for anyone else who may be reading. (AftyoftheUK: if you haven't changed your mind on the above, don't worry about reading or responding to any of this!)

>but the entire problem the author highlights is that brokers are failing to keep track of which revenue is taxable versus which is not.

That's not the only implication related to that chapter and is a misunderstanding with relation it to the subject at hand. (If someone comes away with that then it needs to be re-read andor read the link below this paragraph as a clarification and suuplement.) The fact of the matter is you and your family and myself and family and a vast majority of people pay more in taxes than they should - while those responsible pay less. Furthermore, as already stated, individual states and associated citizens are losing due revenue year after year after year. See here for primary research on the subject. This equates to standard of living, health, education, well-being, and innumerable other issues.

>Further, investors incur economic damages when they are denied the use of funds between trade date and actual delivery date. Using publicly available data on FTDs in NYSE and NASDAQ "threshold securities" alone, I calculate that loss to have been $762 million in 2007. This is not a one-time loss, but an ongoing monetary loss to investors that will not diminish as long as the system tolerates FTDs.

(my emphasis; see here for source; "page 5")

>Can you give me examples of people who have been harmed by these votes, and the events which caused the harm?

The examples have already been given in the form of the links throughout the previous comments. This is like asking "Can you give any examples of the damage lead in gasoline AND the municipal water system has caused?" There are countless people harmed and countless lives destroyed.

For more reading someone can hunt through the shitshow that is "naked short selling" when searching. There's a lot to sift through; not all is accurate, but a lot is. As well, reading Naked, Short, and Greedy by S. Trimbath will give numerous examples (as an aside, if AftyoftheUK is reading (naughty chap, isn't he? Aren't you?): I will donate $40 to a charity of your choice and in your name if you order and prove you have the book - you don't even have to read it, but you should if you're intellectually honest and someone grandparents and grandchildren can respect and not be ashamed of).

There's also a documentary that came out in 2012 called "The Wall Street Conspiracy" which can be watched here for free. In it a numerous credible people including Robert Shapiro of Georgetown University (He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, a M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and an A.B. from the University of Chicago. He also has been a Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Brookings Institution, and Harvard University.) and Wes Christian, a longtime "whistleblower" and attorney - both of which spoke relatively highly of the documentary. The movie The Big Short and Inside Job are also worth a watch which give some context and history. See here for more documentaries on the broader housing and derivative subject).

To end: it should be noted that FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) and the NYSE are Self-Regulatory Organizations (SROs) - "We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing!. More importantly, though, the DTCC/Cede & Co. is also an SRO and it is impossible (for "regular people" - for non-executives of the DTCC) to tell the extent to which FTDs are laced throughout the system because they do not provide that information. This wouldn't be a problem if they just came clean - which can be done in a safe and privacy-oriented way by publishing related raw numbers that can then be cross-referenced with public information and data.

Let's back up a moment and make sure anyone reading (including yourself) that per your own statements, you ignore andor don't value the principles of basic democracy and voting. Perhaps you misspoke or didn't think things through and would like to change your mind, which I encourage you to do on all accounts and wouldn't fault you for.

>But when a company with 100 million shares has 101 million shares turn up, I'm not going to get my panties in a twist.

According to your feelings here, 1% of the vote isn't anything to get worried about andor to twist any knickers about or whack the ol' knob in an angry fashion about. It's well-known that many an election has come down to 1% of the vote - both politically and corporate-ly. Life and death, literally and figuratively and business-ly and socially and psychologically, hangs in that balance very often.

Furthermore, the votes associated with phantom shares and overvoting (via lending, shorting, and FTDs) have been found to be commonly far more than 1%. Again, out of 341 elections studied, all 341 found to have more votes than there should have been (see previous source here). Even if the issue were relegated to "only 1%" - it would be "only 1%" of nearly, possibly ALL elections happening now.

(Edited addendum): the whole "only 1%" thing is a red herring of sorts when viewed through Hu and Black's research (and a few others) - considering the relative ease associated with fixing elections through phantom shares; indeed, deceptive parties would naturally not want to create too big of a difference / waves in an election, as to make the charade appear plausible.

I see from your comment and post history that you're an avid "free market" advocate and big-time golfer and, likely, a conservative of sorts. You definitely don't like healthcare in the form of "universality" or "government sanctioned." That's fine - <shrug> - it's just somewhat (read: extremely) hypocritical and suspect that you find the dilution of company shares via phantom shares, both in a voting context, as well as a principled "free market," market efficiency, market equity, and fairness context, as nothing to worry about. That tells me you A) don't value the fundamentals of democracy & voting andor B) you're making money off the current cheating and deception (that's what it is at the end of the day, is cheating and deception) and are biased to the point of blindness and a troll-like, sea-lioning, gaslighting mindset andor C) you're misunderstanding the entirety of the situation and breadth of the problems.

With that said, if you haven't changed your mind on that position, then our values are wildly different - and your values are wildly different from almost the entirety of academia across the world, as well as politics, as well as within the average Joe and Jane world (of which is the vast, vast majority of the population on the planet), along with much of modern, reasonable, rational civilization. As such, there isn't much to talk about if your position hasn't changed.

Edit: addendum

You mean enticing people to invest that otherwise would not / who are just putting it in savings?

Aside from that, yeah, I don't disagree that index funds are good in many respects.

Within context of this discussion, they would be performing better for individuals and the pensions and so on without all the legal and illegal lobbied-for loopholes that result in skimming and manipulation. It could be effectively argued through the links here and a few others (and, for example, a book titled Naked, Short, and Greedy that lays a lot of this or very clearly, in both data and abstractly) that the middle and lower classes have been... robbed... of billions and billions and billions (and billions) of dollars over the past decade alone.

Well, you'd be wrong to think it doesn't matter or make a difference "in any meaningful degree."

To start, the fact there are "phantom shares" aka synthetic shares through stock lending, short-selling ("naked" or otherwise), and indefinite failure-to-delivers (FTDs) results in severe degradation of a company's overall value. If someone is making and selling counterfeits of something - then that harms multiple parties - in this context, often including shareholders, customers, the company itself, and employees.

The problem isn't a one off thing - it's a common practice in the Mitt Romney-esque Bain Capital firms of the world. You can read more about the specifics in this.

As well, there are serious tax implications related to the whole thing for both individual investors and states. You can read more here (I tried to get the pages oriented in easy to read format, but when uploading they reverted; I tried to fix it a couple ways, but it wouldn't; nonetheless you can turn your head or save them to your comp and then do it yourself): page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4, page 5. As can be seen there, individual investors are paying far more in taxes than they should be - while states are getting far less (to the tune of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions) every single year than they should be. The problem has only gotten worse in the past decade, so those estimates/numbers are now low.

When companies and individual investors fall into the sights of the larger hedge funds and banks, etc... it must be remembered that we're talking about people's livelihoods, families enjoying income and fruits of labor, standards of living maintained, pensions, retirements, and more. When we're talking about mechanisms and reasons for wealth inequality and the problems that arise and come from that, these are some of those major, key mechanisms.

In some ways, maybe, sure. But people need to understand that shares held with a broker means you don't really own them - they don't have your name on them and, subsequently, they can (and, statistically, will) be used in convoluted schemes by the army of quants/greedy psychos/"kids"/algorithms/naïve/etc... working at hedge funds, investment banks, and the like - such that value is lost and consolidated in fewer and fewer hands.

When there's talk about "wealth inequality" this and that and "rich getting richer" and "CEO pay has risen X amount while workers' wages have remained flat" - these are some of the major, key mechanisms by which that is happening.

The problem with "phantom shares" born of lending, shorting, and failure-to-delivers isn't only relegated to corporate governance and voting as you may/are thinking. It means companies can be destroyed or dubiously changed -- that means lives, livelihoods, families, pensions, retirements, and more are destroyed, changed, malformed, and so on.

Average shareholders think their company has XYZ shares, but really there are XYZ10 shares - as such the value has been unjustly (and sometimes illegally) degraded.

If you didn't see it already, this speaks to the issue, as does this, and here, too which is a little more specific, but laid out in pretty easy to understand terms.

I'm not arguing against that necessarily. Sure, that is good to do and know as an option. It's also good to be aware of the other mechanisms and functions that may be at play.

At the bottom of this comment is a research paper that speaks to the importance of having a robust, honest, factual, accurate corporate voting system if you're interested. If we don't have that, then (as you can read from that paper), companies can be entirely destroyed or "forced" to do things that the majority do not want done/performed. It goes against the very foundation of democracy and voting.

> It would be odd if it was unusual. It's not unusual though, so no it's not odd

The fact more votes come in than shares is odd and counter to every principle democracy and voting is founded upon.

>What's counter to wise investing is spending huge amounts of time on fringe issues that don't have a significant detrimental effect on you.

It's not a fringe issue, though. What are you talking about? The fact shares held in a brokerage aren't actually owned by the person purchasing them - and are lent out without people's knowledge - multiple times - is NOT a fringe issue. That word doesn't mean what you think it means.

>Oh? But it's yours?

What is here is educational information with reputable sources. You have nothing of the sort. In fact, you have emotion and subjective knee-jerk hand-waving bullshit.

>It isn't because nobody fucking cares. Because it doesn't fucking matter.

Huh? That's patently false on the face of it and just as much when learning more about it.

>But when a company with 100 million shares has 101 million shares turn up, I'm not going to get my panties in a twist.

It's on a larger scale than 1% of shares most of the time. Nevertheless, the fact you hand-waive this away - even if it were only one share - speaks to your principles and values as a basic, educated, democracy-respecting, math-respecting, reasonable person.

>The New Vote Buying: Empty Voting and Hidden (Morphable) Ownership; As published in Southern California Law Review, Vol. 79, pp. 811-908, 2006; University of Texas Law, Law and Econ Research Paper No. 53

>Corporate law generally makes voting power proportional to economic ownership. This serves several goals. Economic ownership gives shareholders an incentive to exercise voting power well. The coupling of votes and shares makes possible the market for corporate control. The power of economic owners to elect directors is also a core basis for the legitimacy of managerial authority. Both theory and evidence generally support the importance of linking votes to economic interest. Yet the derivatives revolution and other capital markets developments now allow both outside investors and insiders to readily decouple economic ownership of shares from voting rights. This decoupling, which we call the new vote buying, has emerged as a worldwide issue in the past several years. It is largely hidden from public view and mostly untouched by current regulation.

>Hedge funds have been especially creative in decoupling voting rights from economic ownership. Sometimes they hold more votes than economic ownership - a pattern we call empty voting. In an extreme situation, a vote holder can have a negative economic interest and, thus, an incentive to vote in ways that reduce the company's share price. Sometimes investors hold more economic ownership than votes, though often with morphable voting rights - the de facto ability to acquire the votes if needed. We call this situation hidden (morphable) ownership because the economic ownership and (de facto) voting ownership are often not disclosed.

You're free to provide some sourced commentary andor rebuttals from professionals in the industry about any of this at any time rather than the hand-waiving bullshittery you're making a habit of.

The fact of the matter is you don't really care for democratic foundation and principles - which is made obvious by your comments here. Just admit it. Just fucking admit it already, geez. <smh> lol

I want to know my vote counts in the quarterly voting.

You don't find it odd that there's too many votes in almost all corporate elections/votes? And there needs to be a reduction of votes made in an arbitrary way? The entire course of a company's trajectory can be changed that way.

I don't want my shares lent out multiple times in various schemes.

I guess you don't. Ok, that's really naive and short-sighted - and counter to competent due diligence and wise investing, in my opinion, but that's on you.

>But that knowledge has little to no real value

That's not your decision to make for people and it's folly and ridiculously idiotic for you to assert otherwise. Apparently lots of people find it valuable.

This is financial education and information that should be common-knowledge and it isn't.

People always complain about no one having enough financial knowledge/education - well here's some.

Ok, so you have nothing substantive to offer in a rebuttal. Just the general Trumpian-esque bullshit.

Again, this isn't "conspiracy" - at least in the way you're using it - it's all right there in Bloomberg Market articles and Investopedia entries. It's really not that difficult to understand. You simply do not own your shares if they're not directly registered with the transfer agent & company and, as such, they can be used in such a way as to harm your investment through myriad avenues, mostly from hedge fund algorithms and dubiously legal derivatives and swaps.

Seems to me Payment-for-Order-Flow being illegal in Canada, Europe, U.K, Australia, and Singapore - but legal in the U.S. - should be enough to tip someone off that something may be a little goofy, to say the least.

If anyone is interested in learning more about this in more depth, I'd recommend reading "Naked, Short, and Greedy" by S. Trimbath.

Edit: clarification

Edit2: it should be noted that FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) and the NYSE are Self-Regulatory Organizations (SROs) - "We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing!. More importantly, though, the DTCC/Cede & Co. is also an SRO and it is impossible (for "regular people" - for non-executives of the DTCC) to tell the extent of the problem (namely Failure-to-Delivers, FTDs) throughout the system because they do not provide that information. This wouldn't be a problem if they just came clean - which can, unequivocally and certainly, be done in a safe and privacy-oriented way by publishing related raw numbers that can then be cross-referenced with public information and data.

Furthermore, the SEC has made it obvious, for whatever reason, that they only fine companies pennies compared to 100s of dollars in profits - meaning these companies just see it as a cost of business and nothing to really be worried about. The regulatory capture andor corruption is palpable.

When there's talk about "wealth inequality" this and that and "rich getting richer" and "CEO pay has risen X amount while workers' wages have remained flat" - these are some of the major, key mechanisms by which that is happening.

Not sure why you're talking about a conspiracy - what is laid out here is entirely factual. If there's anything you see that's not, please feel free to point it out and include a source.

If you/we are to buy index fund shares and keep them in a broker those shares are - unequivocally - not in your own name.

>Stocks held in street name may be loaned to short-sellers and resold to others. So, it is possible for more than one person to own shares held in street name.

^source

>...stocks can be lent repeatedly, allowing three or four owners to cast votes based on holdings of the same shares.

>The Hazlet, New Jersey–based Securities Transfer Association, a trade group for stock transfer agents, reviewed 341 shareholder votes in corporate contests in 2005. It found evidence of overvoting—the submission of too many ballots—in all 341 cases.

^source

... which is problematic, to say the least. :/

Edit: I don't know of any other business that functions like that. You "buy/purchase" something in full, but that thing is not, technically, yours - and furthermore can be "duplicated" numerous times and lent out without your knowledge.

Generally speaking, I'd agree, certainly. Though, there are definitely things to be aware of. The larger Wall Street network over the past few decades has changed a lot and could be said to have truly astounding amounts of concentrated wealth and power - with access to a propaganda machine more acute and voluminous than anything in the history of humankind.

In those terms and with that said, with respect to financial literacy and a broad lack of education / misunderstanding more people really, really, really need to be aware of this: if someone owns stock in a company or has a pension/retirement fund, they - in fact - DO NOT actually own those shares (i.e. they are, unequivocally, not in their own name), contrary to popular and widespread belief. This is tangentially related to the "free trades" you get at brokerages now when buying/selling stocks.

>Cede technically owns substantially all of the publicly issued stock in the United States.[2] Thus, investors do not themselves hold direct property rights in stock, but rather have contractual rights that are part of a chain of contractual rights involving Cede.

Someone can insure shares are in their own name using the Direct Registration System which legally must be processed when requested. If they are held in a broker, they are NOT in your name, but in what's known as "street name," which laces loopholes and dubious legality and illegality all throughout and makes it possible to screw you over in numerous derivative-based ways and otherwise.

>Stocks held in street name may be loaned to short-sellers and resold to others. So, it is possible for more than one person to own shares held in street name.

^source

>In a little-known quirk of Wall Street bookkeeping, when brokerages loan out a customer’s stock to short sellers and those traders sell the stock to someone else, both investors are often able to vote in corporate elections. With the growth of short sales, which involve the resale of borrowed securities, stocks can be lent repeatedly, allowing three or four owners to cast votes based on holdings of the same shares.

>^source

>The Hazlet, New Jersey–based Securities Transfer Association, a trade group for stock transfer agents, reviewed 341 shareholder votes in corporate contests in 2005. It found evidence of overvoting—the submission of too many ballots—in all 341 cases.

Those shares, if not in your own name, are are, very, very, very, very likely, being used against you in convoluted schemes similar to 2008 Housing Derivative Meltdown - same sorta deal, different financial instruments - andor in actual non-delivery (FTDs) made possible through aforementioned Wall Street lobbying and associated loopholes.

Importantly, combine not actually owning shares with something called Payment-for-Order-Flow (see: "How Redditors Exposed the Stock Market" | The Problem with Jon Stewart - timestamped to relevant portion) and, subsequently, with stock lending and a Failure-to-Deliver, it's truly not an exaggeration to say that there's a network of drunk, coked out Wall Street psychopaths skimming off the top billions and billions of dollars that should be going to the middle and lower classes.

>Payment-for-Order-Flow is illegal in Canada, the U.K, Australia, and Europe - because it's exceedingly easy to commit fraud under such a system. Singapore recently announced they'll be banning it, as well, in early 2023.

Big surprise - it's legal in the U.S. Furthermore, almost comically... it was heavily endorsed and made popular by Bernie fucking Madoff.

For a form of defense, this video (~5 minutes) is well worth it - it's done well and summarizes some of the broader issues - and this website provides clear direction and guidance on what you/we can do to hold some of these practices, if not people, accountable.

Edit: spelling

I see it in your profile/history. Ha, wow! Ok, then. Thank you!

Do you have some more information on this?

Edit: looks like it is NOT actually a real K.V. quote. See glootech's post history for a removed post linking to the books subreddit.

Yes, yes, definitely. :)

Yeah it does. <smh>

I haven't read it yet and that makes me embarrassed and sad. ;( For as big of a supporter/fan/talker-upper of Vonnegut, I really "should" have already!