EPTOn February 26 2026 00:16 oBlade wrote:
The parts before a question mark must print in invisible ink on your screen. You want to respond, you name a good nice virtuous successful billionaire businessman you respect, especially who outperformed S&P500 over some period.
It's not an argument. There is no argument. "Paper trading outperforms Trump." Who all-ined the S&P500 in 1980 or whatever and didn't take a single cent out until today? For $100 or $200 or $400 million or however much people exactly think Trump inherited? Nobody. Paper trading. What is the point? The S&P1 outperformed the S&P500. The S&P600 underperformed the S&P500. Elon Musk outperformed everything. So did Bitcoin. The goal of investing could very well be to wait 40 years to have a fund of questionable liquidity which is a tax liability if you want to do something else with it. That is not strictly the same goal of business. Nor of life. In the real world you do actually have to sell sometimes. Whereas in a stock, knowing the past, you can say the "index" performed such and such even though in an economic downturn when people (of whom Trump is one) need liquidity they will definitely be selling at points and not being a psychopathic 40 year HODL whose trades would be the indistinguishable from someone in a 40 year coma.
If you put $1000 into the S&P500 and next year your net worth goes from $30k to $100k because you banked income from a cushy new job you didn't massively outperform the S&P500. When your savings is cut in half for medical bills you didn't underperform the S&P500. Someone's total net worth is different than the part of their net worth of the funds they invest into public stock.
Comparing an entire business to investing is apples to oranges.
If someone wanted to compare Trump's public stock action vs the S&P 500, that might be apples to apples. I mean the S&P500 outperforms mutual funds that doesn't mean everyone who puts a dollar in a mutual fund is a fucking orange idiot failure. Anyone whose net worth increases more than inflation is afloat.
My argument is unless you can name an unridiculed businessman, the source can be ignored. My prediction is it's a triple Morton's fork.
Trump net worth < S&P index -> "He can't even outperform the S&P500"
Trump net worth = S&P index -> "All that work he did just to equal the S&P500? Casinos going under and selling airlines? What an idiot he should have..."
Trump's net worth > S&P index -> "Trump is a corrupt crony exploitative agent of capitalism who won't pay his fair share in taxes and spread the wealth"
That is a prediction. It's not meant to be a strawman since Trump didn't equal or outperform the S&P500. It's a "What-if" question. But we don't have that experiment. We can't go to those alternate universes. By all means explain to me that prediction is wrong. The only lateral question to answer is name someone else whose net worth outperformed the index calculations of the S&P500 who you don't think is a steaming pile of exploitative capitalist shit, and if there's no answer that tells me just how seriously to take the first "argument."
The parts before a question mark must print in invisible ink on your screen. You want to respond, you name a good nice virtuous successful billionaire businessman you respect, especially who outperformed S&P500 over some period.
It's not an argument. There is no argument. "Paper trading outperforms Trump." Who all-ined the S&P500 in 1980 or whatever and didn't take a single cent out until today? For $100 or $200 or $400 million or however much people exactly think Trump inherited? Nobody. Paper trading. What is the point? The S&P1 outperformed the S&P500. The S&P600 underperformed the S&P500. Elon Musk outperformed everything. So did Bitcoin. The goal of investing could very well be to wait 40 years to have a fund of questionable liquidity which is a tax liability if you want to do something else with it. That is not strictly the same goal of business. Nor of life. In the real world you do actually have to sell sometimes. Whereas in a stock, knowing the past, you can say the "index" performed such and such even though in an economic downturn when people (of whom Trump is one) need liquidity they will definitely be selling at points and not being a psychopathic 40 year HODL whose trades would be the indistinguishable from someone in a 40 year coma.
If you put $1000 into the S&P500 and next year your net worth goes from $30k to $100k because you banked income from a cushy new job you didn't massively outperform the S&P500. When your savings is cut in half for medical bills you didn't underperform the S&P500. Someone's total net worth is different than the part of their net worth of the funds they invest into public stock.
Comparing an entire business to investing is apples to oranges.
If someone wanted to compare Trump's public stock action vs the S&P 500, that might be apples to apples. I mean the S&P500 outperforms mutual funds that doesn't mean everyone who puts a dollar in a mutual fund is a fucking orange idiot failure. Anyone whose net worth increases more than inflation is afloat.
My argument is unless you can name an unridiculed businessman, the source can be ignored. My prediction is it's a triple Morton's fork.
Trump net worth < S&P index -> "He can't even outperform the S&P500"
Trump net worth = S&P index -> "All that work he did just to equal the S&P500? Casinos going under and selling airlines? What an idiot he should have..."
Trump's net worth > S&P index -> "Trump is a corrupt crony exploitative agent of capitalism who won't pay his fair share in taxes and spread the wealth"
That is a prediction. It's not meant to be a strawman since Trump didn't equal or outperform the S&P500. It's a "What-if" question. But we don't have that experiment. We can't go to those alternate universes. By all means explain to me that prediction is wrong. The only lateral question to answer is name someone else whose net worth outperformed the index calculations of the S&P500 who you don't think is a steaming pile of exploitative capitalist shit, and if there's no answer that tells me just how seriously to take the first "argument."
Dude, when you're a multimillionaire, 99% of your net worth is invested somewhere. Money in a bank account only exists for poor people. So you're either invested in the SP500, other stocks, in real estate, in bitcoin, your own business or whatever other investment you think is smart to make you the most money.
If over the course of your life of investing, you're severely under performing the SP500, that means you either took too much risk and got very unlucky, or you're just bad at investing.
Now me personally I don't care that Trump is bad at investing. No one here hates Trump because he's not a good businessman, we don't like him because he's an extremist, a megalomaniac, and at minimum someone of questionable morals.
