American notions of profit and loss are fucked up.
It doesn’t matter if you’re profitable. Let me say that again. It does not matter if you’re profitable.
You have to be making MORE profit than you did same time last year, last quarter, last month.
If you don’t keep making more profit, you are somehow “losing money”. Money that’s “rightfully owed” to you. Money that should and would have otherwise been yours.
And if you’re a publicly held company and you miss that profit goal, the stock market will PUNISH you.
Hell, you could make more profit and STILL get punished if you didn’t “beat expectations”.
That’s because investors only make money when the value goes up. The pressure to always make more money than before is baked into the public ownership system we created. I think we should make all companies employee owned instead of investor owned and then you’d fix the broken incentive structure.
American notions of profit and loss are fucked up.
It doesn’t matter if you’re profitable. Let me say that again. It does not matter if you’re profitable.
You have to be making MORE profit than you did same time last year, last quarter, last month.
If you don’t keep making more profit, you are somehow “losing money”. Money that’s “rightfully owed” to you. Money that should and would have otherwise been yours.
And if you’re a publicly held company and you miss that profit goal, the stock market will PUNISH you.
Hell, you could make more profit and STILL get punished if you didn’t “beat expectations”.
That’s because investors only make money when the value goes up. The pressure to always make more money than before is baked into the public ownership system we created. I think we should make all companies employee owned instead of investor owned and then you’d fix the broken incentive structure.