What Business is Wall Street In?
<i>It is getting increasingly difficult to just invest in companies you believe in.</i><p>Like how twenty years ago you could buy a stock you believed in for like $4 by using a computer system, paying a fraction-of-a-penny spread on average, to have a trade executed in milliseconds to seconds, but now you have to talk to a human on the phone and pay a $400 commission to pay a fraction-of-an-eighth spread and have the trade execute in minutes or hours?  That fact pattern would make this critique make sense.<p>No, it is fantastically easier to trade the stocks of companies you believe in.  If there is a problem with the market, the "problem", and one uses that term loosely, is that people are talking about macroeconomic trends more than individual companies because the observable evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of a conclusion we've pretty much known for decades: seeking alpha is a sucker's bet.