Alexander Gordon-Brown asked this question on the Facebook group:
Not-so-hypothetical question*: If you acquired a large sum of money**, what would you do with it?
In the name of epistemic modesty, I want to start getting opinions on this. There is a boring 'donate it to the best place' option, closely followed by an equally-boring 'save it and donate it later' option. It may well be the case that the boring options win, as I think they do for smaller amounts. However, it seems plausible that some ideas have increasing returns as the amount grows.
For instance, one idea I've floated to myself is effectively running a public giving game of some kind. There are lots and lots of ways this could be structured, with different upsides and downsides. I have some thoughts on this specifically, but I'm really just canvassing for others' thoughts.
*I almost feel bad for spamming the main forum with this. I'm doing it anyway because I'm not going to be the only one with this decision, and it's recurring (for instance, this is the approximately the situation for every finance earning-to-give EA once a year).
**I want to put exact amounts to one side, but lets say between $20,000 and $200,000 for the sake of grounding the discussion.
This question sounded like it would be easier to answer with threading and upvotes! Post your ideas for what a large EA funder might want to do below.
Note: Please post one suggestion per comment so that upvotes can be used as precisely as possible. Thanks!
I basically believe the efficient market hypothesis, but the inference/implication here doesn't seem right to me.
The risk from investing in individual stocks rather than broad indices is pretty minor (and for philanthropic capital I think it is completely negligible), and if you accept the EMH the returns are the same. There are a number of other considerations (tax issues, small amounts of domain expertise or insight, hedging) that might lead one to purchase individual stocks instead. The amounts of money involved don't have to be too large before it starts to look worthwhile to be thinking about these issues.
This depends a lot on how many stocks you're buying, right? Or would you still make this claim if someone were buying < 10 stocks? < 5?