As somebody who really appreciates being able to own a ton of different companies in small amounts in my retirement account, I'm not sure if this is the right way to solve the problem.

Requiring full disclosure of all ownership stakes, traceable back to individuals, is probably a better route for this.

And it seems that there's a trend towards that, last company I registered had a new process for listing beneficial ownership of all significant amounts. Just need to push that legislation further.

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onraglanroad 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not sure what you see as a difficulty here. You own a bit of those companies. You're a person.

What do you see as the problem?

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epistasis 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I want a third party to manage the buying and selling of shares as I incrementally put in small amounts of money every week into the fund.

Technically I own the fund, and the fund owns the companies. As I understand your comment, this would be disallowed.

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shimman 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

You can do this but you should also relinquish all voting rights of said companies. When companies like Blackrock, State Street, Fidelity, Vanguard, etc all sit on the same boards, you're going to get decisions being forced that may not be good for the company, workers, customers, or country. Doubly so when they're sitting on two competing companies boards.

You can allow mutual funds or ETFs or whatever similar instrument, but they should not be allowed to have a vote or say in the company.

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onraglanroad 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You could either make an exception for funds, or simply make them owned directly. Probably impossible before computerisation but fairly straightforward now.

These don't seem difficult problems to me.

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epistasis an hour ago | parent [-]

The difficult problem is how you distinguish a fund for consumers versus the types of funds you want to disallow. Start trying to codify that in law and it will quickly bring people finding the edges for their own purposes.

Full public disclosure of all beneficial ownership in entities would go a lot further, IMHO.

	▲	onraglanroad an hour ago \| parent [-]
		All funds are for consumers, because companies can't own funds. I think your full disclosure is actually fundamentally the same as my proposal.