Anyway the conventional finance answer to why there are fewer public companies around these days is just that private markets are so much bigger. PE and debt financing (both public and private) are probably responsible for a much bigger share of companies' financing than they used to be.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720810

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But you don't know exactly what would happen. You know what you will do, but not how it will affect the company's stock price. Maybe it will go down a little, maybe it will go down a lot. Maybe you kill the CEO on the same day as good news is published about the company, which offsets the drop. Or maybe the market just decides the guy wasn't that good a CEO anyway. So you bought a bunch of cheap puts with a strike price of 100, but the stock only drops to 101, and you lose everything. You can buy puts with a higher strike but they will be more expensive.

> Leverage gives them a larger incentive, but there are plenty of wages to place a leveraged bet in the stock market.

Yes, but they are expensive, is my point.

Generally, the disincentive outweighs the incentive. You can increase the incentive through leverage. But that also increases the costs, which increases the disincentive.

There may well be situations where the incentive outweighs the disincentive. But in the context of traditional financial markets I think those situations are likely very rare due to the risks and costs, whereas with a predictions market the risks and costs could be reduced, so it is more likely to happen.

This is true in theory, but in practice the impact of any regular individual's actions on a company is probably going to be small and uncertain enough that it's difficult to make a healthy and reliable profit from. Even the very extreme example of murdering the United Healthcare CEO seems to have caused the stock to drop ~16.5% (assuming the drop is entirely due to the murder). That's like placing a bet with ~1/6 odds. You'd need to short a lot of stock to make that worth the risk of murdering someone (leaving aside any moral issues obviously). You could use leverage to juice those returns but that is expensive and risky, too. If you can afford to deploy enough leverage to make it worth it, you can probably find ways to make money that don't carry a risk of the death penalty.

I guess viewed in this way a bet on a prediction market is like a very cheap, highly leveraged bet on a specific outcome. So the incentives are much stronger as the potential reward for the risk taken is greater.

It was semi cama and we were told there would be a meal served as part of the ticket, only to be told on board that the meal wasn't available for whatever reason. After much complaining (not just me but all of the passengers) we eventually got them to let us stop for half an hour at a service station in the middle of nowhere to get some food.

It was over 13 years ago now, but I still have so many great memories of that trip.