What's your hangup about traders? No one is saying you shouldn't invest long term if you want to. Different strategies work for different people according to their preferences and circumstances. Personally I do a mix. With AGY specifically I started buying up after the CR assured funding, obviously as we now know, that was good timing. I've also traded along the way and have done well there, go me, yay.
If someone sees a short term trading opportunity where they can make 50% on their money within a few days or weeks, why not go for it? It's not mutually exclusive with long term investing.
Comparing trading and long term investing is to compare apples and broccoli. To suggest that they are somehow mutually exclusive or bring in the same or comparable returns over time is just plain incorrect.
If I see an obvious short term trading opportunity I'm not going to say "Oh, no, I'd better not take that easy money, because long term investing would be more favourable in respect to tax if I managed to make the same amount of return in the same amount of time", I'm just going to jump on it, and that's not going to do me any harm. Sure, if you lose money trading (or investing or on real estate or in business etc) it's bad, but... so what?
You seem to have some sort of insecurity or hangup about traders and work on the assumption that they won't make more money than investors. The only relevant thing you've said in your strange attack on trading is that you need to make higher returns to offset the higher taxes. To do that you've given an unrealistic expectation of 20% per year over 10 years, which is extremely rare - generally when a company goes through that sort of growth it is not constant over 10 years, it is highly erratic, mostly occurring over a small part of that 10 years, so you would do much better to time your entries and exits to coincide with that time of explosive growth.
But, of course, this all comes down to how disciplined you are, how good your analysis is, how much time you want to spend and what suits you personally. It's like you feel traders are hurting you and you're having a tantrum trying to get them to stop, which of course they're not going to.
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