Palantir CEO Alex Karp is sick and tired of his critics. That much is clear. But during the Yahoo Finance Invest Conference Thursday, he escalated his counteroffensive, aimed squarely at analysts, journalists, and political commentators who have long attacked the company as a symbol of an encroaching surveillance state, or as overvalued.
I have a colleague who invested in Palantir. I mentioned to him of the controversy with the company but he just shrugged it since he made some money before selling the shares. I don’t really pass judgement on many those who invest in unethical companies simply because the old fashioned way of working and saving simply doesn’t cut it anymore. The older generations could party and travel in their twenty’s, and buy a house and have family in their thirty’s. The younger generation can’t really do that anymore.
I also do investing and I realised that it’s hard to be ethical under a capitalist system. There are index funds I want to invest in because of lower initial investment requirement, but I don’t like the companies listed in those funds. And thus I have to individually invest in companies I like, but I have little gains because my capital is spread out across various equities.
It’s honestly kept me from investing at all. I know index funds are the way to go, but I can’t in good conscience invest in these evil companies. I’d rather end up living in the street than sell my soul.
There is a workaround to the moral problem like hedging with CFD, because you don’t technically own shares and thus not funding companies you dislike, you are simply betting on whether the company’s share price will either go up or down. But as mentioned, it is leveraged and therefore betting and gambling. There is also holding fees which eats away at the profits in CFD.
Yeah the more complicated and “gamble-y” it gets the less interested I am.
Depending how one looks at it, even normal investing can be considered gambling. But at the very least, investing is not leveraged, and it is surer and more calculated risk than sports or race gambling. The latter is fixed because of behind the scenes corruption; but with investing, it’s more regulated and so long as you invest in trustworthy companies, it’ll be fine.
Sure, but for people like me who don’t have the time/desire to research individual companies, index funds are the common suggestion. Which brings me to my original comment.