moral responsibility [LWN.net]

moral responsibility

Posted Mar 1, 2011 11:54 UTC (Tue) by dbruce (guest, #57948)
In reply to: moral responsibility by allesfresser
Parent article: Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

"And therein lies the problem: most investors are not it in for the long run-They are looking for essentially pump-and-dump results."

Do you have any data on that? My understanding is that the largest chunk of money in the stock market gets there via mutual funds. I don't think the typical fund manager has a "pump-and-dump" strategy. I know there is a popular image of the stock market as a place for wheeler-dealer day traders, and a lot of that activity certainly exists, but I thought that the bulk of stock investment actually is long-term buy-and-hold.

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moral responsibility

Posted Mar 1, 2011 13:34 UTC (Tue) by nivola (guest, #5662) [Link] (1 responses)

Average stock hold time: 22 seconds.

Stock markets have changed pretty radically in the last 30 years, and not for the better. Hudson is talking about US markets here, but it's a similar story in Europe and elsewhere.

fishy statistics warning

Posted Mar 1, 2011 17:18 UTC (Tue) by jku (subscriber, #42379) [Link]

That figure is probably bogus and in any case not necessarily relevant: High frequency traders may do massive amounts of trades per day but large amounts of stock is still owned by long term investors. Trading the same stock thousands of times per day doesn't magically move the long term investments into the market.

It seems that the real mean duration of holding is still measured in months.