gwern comments on Investing for the Long Slump - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 January 2009 08:56AM

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Comment author: gwern 26 January 2013 03:46:39AM 4 points [-]

In this case, a good investment strategy might be to buy shares in companies with lots of intellectual capital like Intel and Pharmaceutical makers...those kinds of companies could provide a nice income each year from exploiting their existing intellectual capital, simply selling the same old stuff at the same prices.

I don't think your second example is very good; in fact, I think investing in pharmacorps would be implicitly a bet against a long stagnation, simply because drug patents have very specific expiration dates, and a stagnation implies that existing and near-future drug patents will not be replaced with new patents, and their lunches will be eaten by commoditizing generic-makers (who themselves will profit little). The ultimate "patent cliff".