{"id":348879,"date":"2018-02-19T03:26:59","date_gmt":"2018-02-19T02:26:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/a-stock-market-primer-in-six-easy-steps\/"},"modified":"2018-02-19T03:26:59","modified_gmt":"2018-02-19T02:26:59","slug":"a-stock-market-primer-in-six-easy-steps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/a-stock-market-primer-in-six-easy-steps\/","title":{"rendered":"A Stock Market Primer in Six Easy Steps"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>What is the stock market?<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><em>It\u2019s not real economic activity<\/em>\u2014it\u2019s a form of mass hysteria or mass psychosis.<\/li>\n<li><em>Stock prices reflect a mass-hysteria impression of the worth of a piece of paper you hold\u2014a stock certificate.<\/em> The worth of that piece of paper is sometimes tethered to some economic reality of some corporation\u2014at least partially\u2014but sometimes not. Often a stock price bears little relation to the economic health of a company, as illustrated in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.macrotrends.net\/2577\/sp-500-pe-ratio-price-to-earnings-chart\">wildly gyrating stock price-to-earnings ratios through the decades<\/a>. Hence the stock price is often a matter of caprice, covert manipulation, and\/or unfathomable crowd psychology, not necessarily real economic \u201chealth\u201d or productivity.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>If, say, you are fortunate enough to own a stock that has doubled or tripled in price, this does not mean that you have accrued new wealth\u2014that stock valuation is meaningless as long as you still own the piece of paper (the stock certificate); you realize that wealth only by selling the stock. And if you do cash out\u2014sell the piece of paper\u2014to someone else, you are transferring to another person the hazard of seeing that valuation drop or evaporate\u2014an opportune fobbing off of risk to someone else, a transfer of cash to you, but no real creation of wealth\u2014just the passing on of a piece of paper in exchange for currency. Eventually, down the road, your gain will be someone else\u2019s loss when the music stops playing and the last holder of the piece of paper finds&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/2018\/02\/a-stock-market-primer-in-six-easy-steps\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What is the stock market? It\u2019s not real economic activity\u2014it\u2019s a form of mass hysteria or mass psychosis. Stock prices reflect a mass-hysteria impression of the worth of a piece of paper you hold\u2014a stock certificate. The worth of that piece of paper is sometimes tethered to some economic reality of some corporation\u2014at least partially\u2014but [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2525,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-348879","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2525"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=348879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348879\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}