Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Have you ever rigorously compared your own picks, against having bought a comparable index fund instead, making sure to account for e.g. expense ratios and other fees, and taking the long view as you're describing? I would imagine your picks look successful in isolation, as in your positions improved, but it's very unlikely you did better than picking an index fund that minimizes costs and decision-making over that time instead. That's one of the big tricks - active management, even if magically chosen well, suffers from higher fees (no matter the performance, lmao) - you get stable (fixed) higher costs to overcome before profit, with a less stable potential for profit. Additionally, we can talk about order prioritization, e.g. where your broker (and then theirs) reorder transactions, using info you lack, to maximize their own profit, literally at your expense - another fun trick. There's more, but lo and behold, consumer tends to lose over time while brokerages mathematically can't - casino shit.

Aside from that, the idea of offsetting or paying for a product's price increase - by buying stock in the company - felt deliberately misleading, hence the initial hostility / severity of response. The average consumer of investments has zero hope of trading profitably in that kind of timescale, and were you to say "well I mean over the long-term it's like it paid for the price increase" - that's just hand-wavy to the point of disingenuous nonsense. Okay I guess the slice of dairy in my own portfolio's index fund is paying for milk getting more expensive and everything's just fine over the long term then? No one would accept that, it's a bad premise, no matter how I try to consider it.

One of the more egregious parts though is the way the suggestion seems to reward a company for abusing its own consumers, in a self-reinforcing loop. In an era where we suuuure need less self-reinforcing loops of abuse! You see that right? "It's okay if they keep raising their price, I'll just keep buying their stock, that way when they win, I win!" - you can imagine the signal that gives the company, right, should others do so? Ya know, the big publicly traded company, where the decision makers notably care about nothing, not even basic human decency, more than the stock price and leap at anything that promises to make line go up? Why would you advocate to be fucked like that lmao?!

And finally, how exactly do all of us manage to benefit from the fruits of capitalism in the way you're describing elsewhere? If you're selling your stock someday at a profit (Netflix price increase defeated, huzzah), someone is either getting a bad deal (your buyer will be unable to do the same later, they will take a loss) - or prices just go up forever. The first is not what you described as all enjoying fruits, the second is...obviously impossible (though not far from how the system actually behaves / pretends!).

I didn't even start on the way the current administration / crime family has dropped the mask and openly manipulates markets, through large and frequent crimes like well-timed lying up through some of the biggest crimes available, literally triggering gigantic global events, as well as having established multiple income streams for open bribery. I didn't talk about the clear bubble that is present valuations and what always happens IF the invisible stress limit for the bubble is breached [edit: well, you kind of did, I guess indicating that in your view good picks recover]. I didn't talk about how the petrodollar has a real risk of unraveling altogether, which would entirely reshape all US economic everything. I didn't talk about the ethics of it all, what it means for all American high earners to have their savings and futures locked into this hideous machine that merely exploits them, while ruining and killing the rest of the world.

I'm trying to choose where to stop ranting, but again, what ya said struck me as severely, disastrously wrong. And just extremely dated, it's advice from the same era that produced the "single income of almost any kind buying a life of ease for an entire (specific kind of) family" anomaly. As in, before monsters like Jack Welch came in and "innovated" techniques by which he discovered you can make a stock's value go up by actually closing a profitable manufacturing plant, even one that happens to form the economic engine of an entire small town. If it's not profitable enough, compared with others, well maybe that's a bad sign and the shrewd business exec is better off cutting it loose before it becomes a drain!

And other such pearls of wisdom and value, fruits of capitalism I guess, from the slavering wolves. Your simplistic take just functions as bait to have others financially raped and abused yet further.