GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic can be very effective for rapid weight loss but I think (hope?) that consumers will eventually become disillusioned with them. There are significant side effects in many patients, the weight tends to come back when the drug is stopped, and much of the weight lost is lean muscle rather than adipose tissue. There is a growing body of evidence that having a large amount of skeletal muscle is crucial for maintaining metabolic health (glucose sink) and preventing disabling falls later in life (sarcopenia).
It's been a wild ride watching this happen. A whole world I didn't know existed, and lots and lots of people getting scammed out of tons of money (there's a whole Reddit ecosystem discussing this stuff, it's both fascinating and horrifying)
What seems constant is how many people dislike being employees.
https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes/coaches-coaching-co...
- use your own tools (laptop, phone, vehicle)
- set your own schedule (work hours/days)
- get paid for tasks, not hourly
- have the ability to decline jobs without losing the customer (within reason)
To me it seems like gig work is in the clear. Why is it not?
If the path to happiness is material success, and the path to material success is entrepreneurship, anything that looks like a shortcut to entrepreneurial success must be Good.
I mean, even here on HN there are plenty of people who put money into startups that predictably died - often not very different from thinly-veiled scams to provide founders with income. And let's not even get into cryptocurrencies...
Your new life is waiting to begin at Milo Janus, Get in shape will see you through thick and thin. Everybody! Start your day, shed pounds away.
It's all for your common wealth.
The only thing you have to gain is your health!
At the same time, though, the franchisees had plenty of greed of their own. The article states "They also say it promised them the ability to run businesses as investors rather than as hands-on managers." If your only contribution to a business is giving it money, you are essentially always better sticking that money in the stock market. If you have some special talent, skill, connections, etc. that you can leverage, sure, go for it. But the idea that you can beat the market with no special benefit that you bring to the table is a fantasy as old as capitalism.
I feel like EMH is increasingly becoming a strange & unfalsifiable quasi-religion for some people. I believe even the strongest forms of EMH cover publicly traded stocks, and not investments in privately held companies. Are you saying that it's literally impossible for me to invest in a local gym, real estate development, plumbing company, landscaper etc. and not beat the US equity market's average return of 9% a year? Because that's obviously ridiculously untrue. The main reason why I can't price say Apple better than the stock market can is the absolutely staggering amount of global competition to do so. But there's exponentially less competition to invest in a smaller, privately-held local business- I'm not competing with hedge funds and so on.
I'm a Boglehead, and the good parts of EMH have a lot of wise things to say about the impossibility of pricing individual publicly traded companies better than the broader stock market. But super-strong EMH has become a bit of an intellectual cult, and I see people way over-extending it into domains that it was never supposed to cover. It's becoming like a learned helplessness 'it's impossible for anything to be profitable because EMH'
I'm with the GP poster: if you're thinking about running a business in passive mode as an investment, as it seems it was pitched to those franchisees, you're highly likely better off keeping it in boring investment products. That's not even saying that sane (ie positive risk-adjusted return) passive income opportunities don't exist, but they almost certainly won't look like what's described in the article, with no strategic freedom (you're not allowed to close an unprofitable shop, wth?); apparently coupled with personal liability and massive fixed and upfront costs, that's an absolutely deadly mix. More generally, they will almost never come to you as a pitch, which should be self-evident.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/2526/sp-500-historical-annual-re...
1. Obviously some people with zero unique insight or skill in a business will make out big (i.e. "beat the market"), just like some people will win the lottery. But drastically increasing your risk/volatility and then saying "some people beat the market average!" is not actually a counterpoint to EMH, which primarily says something about risk-adjusted returns.
2. More importantly, though, if you do have some special insight into why a private business may outcompete its competitors, by all means, go for it. But TFA is basically highlighting that the vast majority of these people had no special skills in business, marketing, etc. beyond "I like fitness and once took one of their classes!" If you're in that boat, on average, you're better putting that money in the stock market. If you're a gambler and think you can, literally, beat the odds with nothing but luck, again, go for it, but I'm not going to have sympathy for you if you decided to, essentially, put your life savings on double-0.
Yes, without taking additional risk. SP500 is risk free, everything else, you need to be pricing in additional risk OR you need to have an edge other than providing money (which you can do buy buying VOO). hn_throwaway_99’s second paragraph explains it well.
One common arbitrage opportunity is to be part of an immigrant diaspora. They won’t have access to credit, but will be willing to work 100 hours per week. You can take advantage of that and basically use the fact that you are getting under minimum wage labor that is very invested in the business to get better than public equity returns.
