Again, I never used the card in person, not even an ATM or handed to a bank teller. It literally never left my file cabinet after I got it in the mail. And somehow it was still compromised.
Card numbers have been stolen by workers in the manufacturing facilities where the cards are made. And the numbers don't have that much entropy so anyone with enough time and resources can guess the 15/16 + CVV2.
It really shouldn't be difficult to prevent your CC # from being stolen unless you are an idiot.
Explain how one of my debit cards, never used online or in person, buried inside financial documents in a filing cabinet, got stolen not too long ago...
It kind of reminds me of when I was working in a restaurant back in college and a lady gave me a card with no signature. I asked for ID (technically I was supposed to not accept it but managers would just tell us to ask for ID). The lady said "I don't sign it so if it's stolen, it won't have a signature and they will ask for ID". I asked her "What if they sign the card with your name?" The look on her face was amazing.
I had heard that "trick" too (of not signing the card or writing "See ID"), and when I worked in retail I researched this...was surprised to learn that it's actually against the cardholder agreement to not sign your card. Also it's against the merchant agreement to accept a card that isn't signed. Which of course leads to the scenario you described...
This. PayPal is historically terrible for sellers when it comes to disputes, but it is also terrible for buyers for disputes.
Credit card issuers tend to have better consumer protections, and some give higher protections with higher-tier cards: e.g. return protection (issuer will refund you if the merchant refuses your return), purchase protection (issuer will refund you if the goods aren't of quality, break, or are lost/stolen), warranty protection (issuer will extend the good's warranty at no cost).
Example: My hosting provider disappeared into the night last year. I had paid for annual service and cPanel was no longer accessible. Put in support tickets, crickets. Finally I disputed the service fee -- charged three months prior -- with my credit card company. The merchant didn't respond, so I got the entire hosting fee refunded. Presumably my bank or Visa ate the hosting fee because they couldn't charge back the merchant. Good luck getting PayPal to do that for you...
I recently had a debit card number stolen. The card was never used, online or in person. Your suggestion is great but it will only go so far.
The correct answer to OP's question: you can't. Best you can do is spread your risk across multiple cards. It's the reason I carry multiple cards with different banks and different payment networks: If bank A shuts my cards down for suspected fraud, I can turn to bank B; if payment network A is down or a merchant has connectivity issues with them, I can turn to payment network B. Also, use mobile payment (Apple Pay/Google Pay) everywhere I can, because it uses a virtual card number.
If you don't like dealing with the hassle of a compromised card...don't get a credit card. (Debit cards are a distinct issue; as I mentioned in another comment, many US institutions force you to take one with a checking account. But many also let you freeze a debit card now, which helps mitigate some fraud.)
More US banks nowadays require you to have a debit card if you open a checking account. I used to decline getting a bank/debit card but the last five years or so it hasn't been an option, both big and small institutions (including credit unions).
On the other hand, many US institutions today let you freeze both credit and debit cards online, with the click of a button.
I had a debit card compromised recently, despite it never being used anywhere (online or in person) in three years. The bank wouldn't let me decline getting a card, and at the time they didn't have the freeze option. When they issued my new debit card, I activated it and then immediately froze it.
I was also a target of their spam...kept flagging their emails as such until one day they stopped appearing even in my spam folder. I had no idea who they were, didn't bother to read the emails, and just assumed there was malware hiding in the links.
Light bulb turned on after NYT's reporting. No wonder they reported having millions of email "subscribers."
And then there's options. Buffet would probably say that's irrelevant to buy-and-hold, but he's a hypocrite. The man had no qualms using them to acquire companies during the '08 down-turn. Options for me, not for thee and here's where the share price really becomes crazy, because standard options swing 100 shares. You have to be sitting on an awful lot of Grey Poupon to write a cash-secured put on Berkshire.
Average daily volume on BRK.A only recently crossed into the double digits. You'd have to be crazy to try making a market in BRK.A options. Just hedging against one contract would be enough to move the underlying...
Their only true mistake here may have been failing to get the system limitation appropriately codified to prevent the exception - For example, the stock exchange could have passed a policy rule that "No share can trade through this exchange at a price above $X per share."; Similar to the rules exchanges have where stocks trading at less than $5 will get delisted from the exchanges --- they could simply have had a rule to keep their system constraints from being violated.
The exchanges are already in the business of bounds-checking -- see NYSE rule 128, Clearly Erroneous Execution. As an example NYSE just busted trades in NVR a few weeks ago that executed 3% above the opening price. If the buy/sell orders support the price, then that's called price discovery, not an invalid trade.
The delisting rule for NYSE and NASDAQ is $1 and it's primarily about prestige. They want to be known as the leading stock exchanges in the world, not a place for penny stocks.
Berkshire shares are listed on NYSE. The problem exists on other exchanges -- NASDAQ and IEX -- that also allow trading of NYSE listed stocks and apparently coded themselves into a corner.
Most stock trades today occur off the primary exchanges (NYSE and NASDAQ) and at places like IEX or dark pools run by firms like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. It's something like 80% of the volume today. And the only reason the 20% is still on the primary exchanges is because of the opening and closing auctions, which by rule only happen on the primary exchanges.
BRK.B did split, back in 2010. It was a big deal at the time because it was the first real opportunity for retail investors to get in to Berkshire. Brokers don't have an incentive to offer BRK.A fractionals when BRK.B exists and liquidity for BRK.A is thin -- just look at the bid/ask spreads or Level II data.
Who knew that Fauci would become the new Dr. Kevorkian.
FWIW, the decision came from CDC and FDA. Fauci isn't in charge of either of those. (I do agree that this wasn't the right decision for the reasons you cited.)
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.
