What does that mean concretely? Will earnings reports still be quarterly? I guess I'm trying to figure out why the exchange has to do anything here. There's plenty of investors and companies that think long term with BRK and its investors being the most prominent.
Digging a bit more, on the investor side, there are value investors who look for solid, if unspectacular businesses at a price point and buy and hold over long periods of time.
On the company side, there are exceptional founder run businesses like Amazon, FB etc. that don't care very much what things look like in the short term (Bezos claims he's willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time for example).
I noticed there doesn't appear to be tangible answers to this anywhere (including in the reply you got to your comment). Curious to pitch a supposed long-term stock exchange without anything meaningful to lure listings to it other than vapor statements.
I'd bet it's because they can't set any strict upfront requirements. They won't be able to get the listings they need if they do it, the interest won't be there. So most of what they're going to try to do is espouse the mission goals, hoping over time they can gradually implement those controls.
I see this criticism a lot in the various threads, but I don't really understand it. As a stock exchange, we are strictly regulated. We aren't allowed to make vague claims that are not backed up by regulatory filings, all of which are publicly available both on our website and at the SEC. For example (from least to most detailed):
Agreed. Just like everything else, the ideas hold more power based on who they are coming from. Eric is a stellar individual with a trail of success behind him - and I'm not taking anything away from him with this comment, but if I were to go to a set of worthy investors and corporations pitching this idea - I'd be laughed out of the room as naive.
I don't know if this is as true as you think. First of all, I've been laughed out of a lot of rooms for pitching this idea. Hundreds, by now.
Further, although many VC's are indeed herd animals as you seem to suggest, there are a few bold ones who genuinely hunt for new and radical ideas and would be willing to back a first-time founder - if you're willing to do the work.
Thanks for the response Eric. My point is about the audacity of the idea. Specifically, to open a new financial market place of the magnitude it would take to be viable, one would need - 1. significant experience in the space to understand the nuances, what's working, what's broken, etc. 2. Sizable investments and talent for operations (scale, uptime, compliance, etc.), 3. A well thought through G2M strategy (including derivatives, indices, options, day trading, HFT, etc.), 4. A broker network, 5. A true, unambiguous differentiator that is viable, measurable, enforceable, and timely.
I’m not quite sure how to answer your question. Clearly there are long-term investors and companies in today’s markets. I think there would be more of them if they had a platform conducive to their philosophy.
>Clearly there are long-term investors and companies in today’s markets.
That's not really an answer to the question - so how do you define long-term, and how do you take reports? Are they still quarterly reports? Or are the reports longer-term? How do companies prove they're long-term to interact with your platform?
You haven't really talked about the concrete definitions or parameters around 'long-term' in this thread. Please do, it would be nice.
Quarterly reporting is an SEC requirement, so we don't affect that. We do require certain additional reports be filed on an annual basis.
Companies prove their long term by adopting policies responsible to our long-term principles. The way this works is spelled out in a lot of detail both on our website and in our regulatory filings. Here's more of a layman's overview: https://longtermstockexchange.com/static/principals_for_lt_s...
It seems that perhaps you have some idea of what these perverse outcomes look like.
D) seems to be "a company reinvests in its employees (training, etc)
and
E) is someethign like "a Company rewards employees and stakeholders for long-term company success."
What does the perverse scenario look like for you?
I legitimately don't have any in mind. I just have zero faith in humanity, and assume loopholes will be exploited to follow the letter of the law, but not the intent. I was wondering if they've thought about that and what his thoughts were about it.
Edit; The only one I can think of, when it comes to rewarding employees is what if a company uses contractors (or gig workers if you use those words), and therefore not defined as employees?
You don't even need to say it like that: you have zero faith in humanity. You should have some faith, we've performed reasonably okay over time. The problem is thus: over a long enough time period, given any individual's inert desire to benefit from something, it will be attempted if not by one individual, then by another. Wanting to define, in law, through enforcement, terms of ethical conduct and its breach is reasonable and necessary herein where capital is involved.
I'd like to see a market for solely worker-owned cooperatives, in which stock dissolves over a fixed time-period, 5 years(restaurant)-500 years(asteroid mining). "Dissolve" being essentially buybacks that occur, bending based on performance. Then again, I'd like to see capital dissolving, normalizing, over 100 years, giving capital the property of entropy, redistributing it all, but very slowly over the span of a bit more than a human lifetime. This capital would be more valuable than any world currency.
In the SEC filing they say that companies will be required to issue long term policy documents and that their progress should be measured in Years or Decades and with long term compensation plans. The compensation piece seems like the most concrete requirement given that most companies will say they have long term plans. But those companies also reward executives based on stock price and earnings in a quarterly/yearly intervals, not decades.
We don't allow companies to list if all they have are vague plans. Each policy requires companies to make structural, externally-verifiable commitments.
Digging a bit more, on the investor side, there are value investors who look for solid, if unspectacular businesses at a price point and buy and hold over long periods of time.
On the company side, there are exceptional founder run businesses like Amazon, FB etc. that don't care very much what things look like in the short term (Bezos claims he's willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time for example).