Re:Ask HN: What is the actual cost basis of the stock market?
by whatever1 on Monday March 10, 2025 @06:18PM
(#43326752)
My fear in such calculations is that we leave the big whales that do not move, outside. For example the CEO of Nvidia has 4% Nvidia that in today's value is 160B, but the basis is from the IPO, so more like $40M. So now our back-of-the envelope calculation is 160B off.
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Re:Ask HN: What is the actual cost basis of the stock market?
by EmpireoftheSun on Monday March 10, 2025 @08:58PM
(#43328056)
In my humble opinion,It would be 0 as there is no transaction taking place. The original question is about stock buyers not stock holders which is often related but not always.
Re:Ask HN: What is the actual cost basis of the stock market?
by jklein11 on Tuesday March 11, 2025 @08:17AM
(#43331699)
How is there no transaction taking place? The CEO is exchanging their labor for shares
Re:Ask HN: What is the actual cost basis of the stock market?
by Kon-Peki on Wednesday March 12, 2025 @11:38PM
(#43350177)
People with large holdings are required to file with the SEC and you can search those records online going back to the mid 1980s.
Someone could download a dump of the whole thing (the SEC has a link and updates it every night) and assemble all of the various documents in a way to get a decent estimate.
An example Form 4 (which will show cost basis of acquisitions):
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000104581025...
An example Form 144 (which would give you a pretty good guess as to which shares are being sold; you can then correlate with a known Form 4):
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000192109425...