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Investors ‘subscribe’ to an IPO. A company offers a certain amount of shares for sale at a certain price. Then the underwriting banks go out and sell the shares.

If your broker allocates you shares, you pay the IPO price as does everyone else who was allocated shares. The shares are all allocated before the IPO happens and once it opens for trading, price discovery happens.

How the price is set is another matter, one I’m not familiar with as an amateur.


Refinance the loan with another loan or just use a revolving credit account with no fixed term.

If your stock holdings are growing faster than inflation and the interest rate at which you are borrowing, it’s an easy way to monetize unrealized gains without a taxable event. If you have a huge stock portfolio, brokers will lend you money against your stock at very low rates, a few bps above what Treasuries yield. If you have $4B of stock they might let you borrow $1B for what would be ~4-4.5% using that stock as collateral. You can theoretically take out a margin loan for up to 100% of the stock held in an account, but that’s risky due to margin calls.

The idea is to let the cost basis step up to the price of the asset at your death which will eliminate the capital gains that would’ve been owed. Then your heirs sell a portion of the stock to pay off the loan and keep the rest.


You know, every time this is brought up, a small part of me dies.

People bring up a loophole that does exist, and assume that everyone uses it. Welp, like most of these "1%" discourse, its pretty damn rare.

https://taxprofblog.aals.org/2026/06/16/fox-and-liscow-the-r...

> If buy-borrow-die were the dominant playbook, the rich would be leveraging aggressively against their ballooning portfolios. They aren’t. Borrowing against unrealized gains is, if anything, more of a middle-class habit than a billionaire one.


Here's a different quote from the same article:

> Buy-borrow-die is a real loophole, and in absolute terms the rich borrow a lot...


What about a trillionaire habit?

Your anecdote about getting lucky doesn’t answer the question, sorry. Rich people have money to buy cheap assets when shit hits the fan, unemployed people do not.

Housing someone for the rest of their natural life is cheaper than the two decades or more of mandatory court appeals and processes that need to be completed before an execution can happen. Death penalty cases have a lot of these to try and prevent executing innocent people.

The state is usually paying for the prosecution and defense as well as the court staff in these hearings.


A low-voltage photocell uses like 5mA @ 24VAC these days, it’s nowhere near a watt. You can buy a wireless battery powered photocell or occupancy sensor that will last a decade.

This Acuity occ sensor/photocell combo draws 4mA @ 24VDC: https://pdmassets.azureedge.net/library/SS/documents/specshe...


You don’t eat the output of most US farms either unless you subsist on field corn, soybeans, and hay.

I do, however, eat the things that eat those. Or byproducts (milk, cheese, etc) from them.

The point is that something tangible is produced.


Ooo, this is exciting, I so rarely get to be the random dumbass crawling out of the woodwork to provide a statistically-unlikely counterexample to an otherwise sound point!

I've been really enjoying eating soybeans. Absurdly good source of protein (yes, even for a bean), dirt cheap, decent source of fiber and a bunch of minerals, and pretty easy to just drop in a pressure cooker and eat however you like once it comes out.

Can't say I eat a lot of field corn or hay though.


Field corn is made into chips and tortillas, not to mention also processed into corn syrup. Cornbread, polenta...

Hay is the stalk of a grain plant. We take the grain off the stalk and make it into flour. A main ingredient in bread and pasta/noodle.


I also believe they’re inevitable. Capital will find places without opposition and build them. There are thousands of jurisdictions in the US and capital usually wins.

I’ll take data centers over pig farms pulp mills any day of the week.


1) You can exercise a in-the-money futures option to (call) buy or (put) sell a futures contract.

2) The CME copper futures contract (/HG) is also physically settled.


To fall under the purview of the CFTC does a contract need to be physically settled or be a derivative of a contract that is physically settled?

/ES futures are cash settled.

/ES futures are used to hedge an SPX position or speculate on SPX. SPX options are also cash settled.

I’m not going to allow you to depose me, if you want to know more about futures contracts, CME and CBOE publish information on all of their futures contracts.


> I’m not going to allow you to depose me

Then I won't ask you what the difference is between speculation and gambling. Instead I'll just declare myself the winner of this debate.


Being rude an accusatory doesn't make you correct when someone doesn't want to participate in the charade.

I’m not sure what you mean.

A pyramid scheme uses new investor money to pay fake returns to those who have already invested.

A casino provides games to bet on where expected value for the player is negative. A sportsbook balances their book by modifying the odds to remain as neutral as possible and capture the spread (see ‘vig’).

There’s not a whole lot of similarity there.


Probably referring to online gambling specifically. And I would frame it as the folks who promote pyramid schemes are the same as those who promote online gambling.

NVidia had $96B in revenue and $60B of profit in Q2 2026, both of which doubled or more from Q2 2025.

Intel in Q3 2026 had $16.5B in revenue and $3.3B of profit, and $13.7B and $4.4B in Q3 2025.

NVidia is doing much better than Intel, people are selling bonds and junk bonds to buy billions of dollars of NVidia cards that NVidia is making 75% gross margins on. They’re making the kind of profits that would make a drug dealer blush.

I used Q3 earnings for Intel because Nvidia hasn’t reported their Q3 earnings yet and Intel’s Q2 earnings showed losses in both 2026 and 2025.


The hardware company wit software margins.

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