They are not free, they are paid for by taxes. And in pretty much all countries, irrespective of funding model, these services have increased in price much faster than general inflation. This is the Baumol effect in action.

> indicies that usually do not perform that well

MSCI EM has outperformed MSCI US since it's inception in 2001 if you look at total return.

Small caps and emerging markets in the long run should outpace advanced high cap markets as they have more room to grow.

There's also some other interesting aspects of emerging markets specifically: they never went more than 4.5 years before recovering from a crash to ath, whereas it took the SP500 12 years and EU 600 index 14 to recover from the 2000 one.

Google etc may be a US based company, but they can leverage emerging markets just fine.

There’s a stronger argument to be made for small caps, but stock buybacks allow any company’s stock to effectively experience exponential growth even with flat earnings. IE there’s little long term difference between buying back 2% a stock every year and ~2% actual growth every year assuming you never hold the majority of shares. (as in 1/0.98 ~= 1.02)

> Google etc may be a US based company, but they can leverage emerging markets just fine.

Not sure what are you trying to say.

You’re buying stock in a company not a market, and a company doesn’t need to be based in a country to profit from that country.

Plenty of companies listed on foreign exchanges make the majority of their money from the US market etc.

You can buy "into a market" by investing in a ETF following the MSCI EM or SP500. In any case not sure what's your point about single stock companies in a discussion about market indexes.

> You can buy "into a market" by investing in a ETF following the MSCI EM or SP500.

Nope. A more accurate description is saying you’re buying into a specific subset of a Market by buying shares of specific companies. Hand waving them as if they are the same thing doesn’t actually make them the same thing.

The MSCI EM, SP500, etc etc are simply a collection of public companies not the market of a given country. Which is why index funds all behave in fundamentally different ways than the actual markets we’re talking about.

Now if you do want more exposure to the upsides of a growing economy there are options, it’s just not a simple as buying an index fund.

You keep being out of topic.

This thread is about indexes and it started by a user stating that emerging markets indexes have been in line or outpaced global and even most of the advanced economies ones.

What these indexes are and how they behave is definitely on topic. Some of the indexes we can point to have in the past seen outsized returns, but many haven’t especially over specific timeframes. Currency fluctuations play a huge role, as does perception of risk etc.

Your previous statement about why in general they would have an advantage was inaccurate. As you have seemingly realized.

> You’re buying stock in a company not a market

I mean, we're talking about index funds, where you essentially are buying a market.

A set of Stocks != a market.

For one thing you’re only buying public companies, that in and of itself is a significant difference.

When you take depreciation into account, it's probably less profitable than a government bond.

I wish I could use Mullvad. But their IPs are banned from many streaming services and they don't change them often enough so I am stuck with Nord.

I would just pirate at that point. You're paying for the streaming service anyways. Use mullvad to download the torrent :). I'm pretty sure they ignore dmca requests. Not that they even know their customer's names if you pay with Mullvad amazon card.

Most investors have more money invested in their house than stocks.

...and a decade later they were close to bankruptcy.

Ok? Because of their brand recognition?

Despite

All chat apps look exactly the same and have exactly the same features. The friction is basically non-existent compared to email services, social media, web browsers, &c.

I think it matters to more than you might think. A significant portion of the non-technical ChatGPT userbase get really attached to the model flavor.

The GPT-4o controversy is a good example. People got attached to 4o's emotional and enthusiastic response style. When GPT-5--which was much more terse and practical--rolled out, people got really upset because they were treating ChatGPT as a confident and friend, and were upset when it's personality changed.

In my experience, Gemini and Claude are much more helpful and terse than ChatGPT with less conversational padding. I can imagine that the people who value that conversational padding would have a similar reaction to Gemini or Claude as they did to GPT-5.

Yet, somehow I've been paying $20/month to ChatGPT for years now and I don't use Claude or Gemini even when they're free or have slightly better models.

Many more people see “AI overviews” everyday with Google being the default search engine on almost every mobile phone outside of China.

I saw it too

Oh well if YOU do something then that's that

1 billion users and growing says there are more people like me than not.

weird flex

Browsers made it easy to import/export bookmarks and history.

You don't see Instagram willingly giving up all their data on users to Tiktok right?

What are you talking about? It's trading at 55x EPS and 41x forward EPS.

Consensus EPS for FY27 (~CY26) is $6.40. Buy side is higher!

That's 30x for earnings that will be known Jan 2027 (1 year and 3 months away). It's 40x earnings for Jan 2026 (3 months away).

For reference Enron was 40x earnings for current year forward estimates early in the year of the crash.

Might have been the case before. But these days, kids are brought up on locked-down content-focused machines (e.g. ipads). They struggle with anything harder than restarting an app.