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Re:The Long-Term Stock Exchange Comes to Life by nostrademons on Saturday December 30, 2017 @03:18PM (#16037275)
It makes me wonder if we'll see a Gresham's Law effect as well. A financial services company creates a new fund ABC which exists solely to hold shares of LTSE company XYZ. Its fundamentals should be completely coupled with XYZ, except for the voting rights and restrictions on trading. ABC is then listed as an ETF, with no restrictions on trading, and weights votes on XYZ based on number of shares with no tenure restriction. Because new holders of ABC have more rights than holders of XYZ, all new trading would occur in ABC.

The LTSE serves its purpose of incentivizing long-term ownership of XYZ, but it's a pyrrhic victory: whenever an XYZ shareholder wants liquidity, rather than sell, they could borrow shares of ABC with their XYZ shares held as collateral (by definition, they have the same fundamentals) and short-sell the ABC. Or if they truly want out, they sell their XYZ shares to ABC (no other buyer would be interested, if they can get the same ownership claim with fewer restrictions by buying ABC directly), which then issues new shares on the normal public markets to maintain the peg. Either way, owners of XYZ are still incentivized to care about the short-term price movements of XYZ (through its ABC proxy) on the public markets, because they can achieve liquidity by proxy.

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