Quote from bbqbbq:
you're absolutely right. daytrading gives only liquidity.
but if you think about it, they also give alot of taxes. think about it. daytrading is basically a zero sum game, except for dividends, and most people lose their money. price appreciation comes solely from dumping shares at the larger fool who is willing to pay more for them.
the people who make money in daytrading, pay income taxes. but that exact money comes only out the pockets of other people who lost money, and that money has already been income taxed. so basically money won is double taxed. if the money comes from dividend, you have dividend tax. and i believe there is also company profit tax already on the money that is used for dividends.
so basically daytrading provides a platform that creates more taxes for the government, if i'm correct about this. so if they kill daytrading, it wont necesarily create more taxes in absolute dollar value. what would change is less newbies losing money and less jobs in the financial industry and less liquidity. the first thing is probably a good thing, don't know about the second two.
actually, the biggest enemy of the government is the buy and hold investor. they only hold, thus never pay taxes.
I'd say you're correct, but not taking it far enough.
Say you're a moderately sucessful, pro trader, made $200k this year. So 200k is gonna be taxed.
On the other side, there's 20 losing traders, playing around, that lost 10k each, so the guv lost 200k in taxable income, right?
Wrong. You can only claim a 3k loss, so taxable income was reduced by only 60k.
