The Long Term Stock Exchange

The stock exchange. What? You’re sleeping already? Give us a chance. For most people, statistically, stocks don't affect your life. Or maybe they do? Well, they definitely do. The great depression anybody? So, maybe you watch the market everyday or it’s just some place to park some of your savings or you don’t know anything about it. Well you should. 

Here’s stocks 101 and what it’s meant to be. For the punter on the street : The stock exchange is a place to invest in a company where you believe in their product over a long period of time (5-10+years). For the companies: The stock exchange is a place to generate capital in order to continue to build and innovate in the company and generate value thus increasing your ‘stock’ price. 

Problem is, stocks are heavily influenced by the quarterly report. Value is heavily tied to these,  reports and therefore everything happens in a 3 month cycle. Simply put, companies are not looking so much at the long term innovations, social issues or environmental issues but rather the money maker for the short term and are incentivised to do so by the existing stock market framework. 

Growth companies are pulling out of the existing exchanges. Other than amazon, there aren’t really many of the big growth companies in the stock exchange anymore, opting for private funding or other sources of investment. That means for you and me and everybody else, there’s less options to actually make money using the established stock exchanges. 

Take the US. The NasDaq and NYSE are the 2 main exchanges (14 in total operate in the US are owned by 2 companies at the time of this article). Hold up hold up. We’re right on the edge of getting deep in the weeds and we really should leave this to the expert and founder of the Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE) - Newest kid on the little block and the 3rd company to enter the US realm. Meet Eric. Ahem, super geek, Eric Ries. 

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