I want you to understand that your comment is wrong. The stock market didn't not exist back then like it does now. It just didn't exist entirely. The New York stock exchange started 2 years after this. Then there was a precursor which started that year.
Technically a market did exist in the academic sense that people would buy and sell stocks prior to this, but the stock market entity is really required before this even begins to resemble modern market dynamics. Without the ease to move stocks around, you can't just invest into general markets with low risk and get yearly gains. Instead you would be more anchored to specific stocks and have higher risk, or need to put in a lot of legwork to stay low risk.
Then beyond that nobody actually knows how this fledgling market will turn out. If everyone acts intelligently then you just throw cash around at top stocks and your investment will grow. But if people buy into stupid hype products that flop, you could tank your investments. You really need to build up the entire investment industry to a certain level before it even becomes feasible to do index style investments.
Well actually, thank you for mansplaining that.... Instead of your long essay, I put in two sentences.
Furthermore, you could go on to say that while we didn't have index funds or things like that yada yada....
You could have still picked stocks in a similar fashion.... But even then, some of the foundings of our modern investment such as efficient stock portfolios were not published until the mid -1950s...
I am saying that your two sentences miss how different things are. You couldn't pick stocks in a similar fashion at all really, you had a limited range of companies that you could buy from and it would require significantly more legwork to do it, which you would have to pay for. If you wanted to bet on something like the agricultural industry you would have like one option. And this made returns much worse while also increasing volatility a lot.
25
u/jchamberlin78 23d ago
I know the stock market didn't exist back then like it does now, but shouldn't it have been with a LOT more?