[HN Gopher] More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the ...
___________________________________________________________________
More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market
Author : marban
Score : 265 points
Date : 2024-12-20 04:21 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| jshpool wrote:
| Lot of people are becoming more knowledgable and skillful. But
| purpose is the missing ingredient.
|
| Without purpose or a motivator in life people end up getting
| trapped in mindless rituals. It keeps the reward circuitry in the
| brain from decaying.
| jaco6 wrote:
| Child rearing is a possible solution--it is our evolutionary
| "purpose" to reproduce, after all, and most people in the
| developed world today aren't doing it.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >Child rearing is a possible solution--it is our evolutionary
| "purpose" to reproduce, after all, and most people in the
| developed world today aren't doing it.
|
| I doubt it, that's because to most people it does not feel
| purposeful, it's a chore. Most people who say it's purposeful
| are generally the most vocal ones, and I suspect the
| minority.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Whatever purpose you decide you have, do you think it will
| come without chores?
| chowchowchow wrote:
| Beg the question that a purpose can't involve chores or
| unpleasantries much?
| dismalaf wrote:
| As someone with a young child, it definitely feels
| purposeful. Also the opposite of a chore, it's lots of fun
| and what I look forward to after a day of work.
|
| And I'm someone who, for most of my adult life, thought I'd
| be childfree...
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| Well I've heard people say this. What about the ones that
| regret it? I know of one personal acquaintance of mine
| who confided that he regrets having his kid. He would
| under normal social circumstances not mention it, for
| obvious reasons.
|
| The problem is that it's a one-way street if you decide
| to have a child. Now if only one had an option to 'trial-
| run-before-one-commits' that would be ideal. I suspect
| (but not sure) that most people will still opt not to
| have them.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| You can always give away the kid, the whole adoption
| industry is here to help. In some countries you can even
| sell your kids, but it is frowned upon in many Western
| societies. Finally, fostering is the trial run you are
| looking for.
| h4ch1 wrote:
| Wish I had the rep to downvote a comment,
|
| > you can always give away the kid
|
| a child is not a goddamn pet or a commodity that you can
| just give away
|
| > In some countries you can even sell your kids, but it
| is frowned upon in many Western societies
|
| A common country where that happens is
| Pakistan/Afghanistan where young boys are sold to be
| prostitutes. I am GLAD it's frowned upon as it should be
| everywhere in the modern world.
|
| > fostering is the trial run you are looking for
|
| Again, children are not pets, fostering is the same as
| raising a biological child, if you're doing it any
| different and treating the child differently, in my
| opinion, it's tantamount to child abuse.
|
| Frankly this comment lacks any humanity, and hopefully
| you choose not to have or foster children.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| The other thing that happens is that they (both genders)
| are sold into begging rings
| dismalaf wrote:
| Well, I do think children is maybe idealized a little.
| I'm probably pretty happy because I went into it having
| heard _all_ of the negatives, decided I was ok with it
| and came out pleasantly surprised. Also too many people
| do it because of societal or family pressure.
|
| Also some people will just always be unhappy. The grass
| is always greener syndrome.
| nradov wrote:
| Traditionally people would get a trial run by babysitting
| for relatives. Now that's becoming less common because
| families are smaller and more geographically distributed.
| beowulfey wrote:
| I would guess the only ones who do not feel it is their
| purpose are those for whom it happened accidentally.
|
| Anyone who _chose_ to have kids most likely did so with
| purposeful intent.
| Aunche wrote:
| Chores are a great way to make you feel a sense of purpose.
| You can directly observe the fruits of your labor. Your
| kitchen is shinier after a deep clean. Your baby is no
| longer crying of hunger after a feeding. The same can't be
| said for scrolling through TikTok for hours or even a lot
| of employment. Sure your livelihood may depend on moving
| items from big boxes into little boxes, but it's hard to
| feel any sort of accomplishment for that.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| There is a difference between considering a task a chore
| i.e a drudgerous task and 2) doing a chore (a mundane
| task, which may/may not be drudgerous). Same word but
| different connotations.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Dogs are a chore. Cats too. Oh well.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| A bit off-topic, but it's interesting how this became the de-
| facto answer to any question related to "meaning of life" in
| the last 2-3 years in HN/tech circles. I'm not saying you're
| wrong, but it's a bit weird. Like I'm sure everyone knows
| that? If a person isn't having a child in their 30s, they
| either can't because of multitude of different reasons, or
| they decided they don't want to.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm as pro-kid as you can get, just haven't met a
| partner who would be on the same page as me yet.
|
| When I was talking about it with my friends, our guess is,
| people with kids are getting worried. If others aren't having
| kids, then their kids might suffer big time in a long run,
| thus the renewed pressure to keep suggesting the idea to
| others. Obviously this doesn't relate to you, just weird how
| it started in the last few years.
| nullstyle wrote:
| Yes, I've noticed it too. The most blaring example was DHH
| going on a "Just have some kids you'll be happier than
| you've ever been!" rant in some zoom talk ostensibly about
| coding that he gave in the past year. it's gross and
| condescending and not someone speaking as a public figure
| should be advocating for. IMO, We need better parents, not
| necessarily more parents, and if you're having kids because
| you're sad with life then IMO you should reconsider the
| ramifications of having a kid and then fucking up the
| parenting process. It's incredibly selfish
| JasserInicide wrote:
| Like many online sentiments I think it's reactionary,
| specifically to the stereotype of the liberal atheist DINK
| milliennial couple.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| In my case this is probably partly true, but more because
| I think many people are actively deluding themselves and
| trying to reject their own mortality with fantasies of
| digitally transferring ones conscience, bio/medical
| immortality a la Kurzweil, singularity stuff, and so on
| endlessly.
|
| But if people look at these things objectively, there is
| essentially 0% chance of any of this happening, let alone
| in our lifetimes or anytime remotely near it.
|
| And when you look at the people spreading/making such
| predictions the timelines always coincidentally come just
| before their expected end of life.
|
| When you accept the fact that you, and near to every
| other person alive today, will be dead in 80 years (and
| mostly _far_ sooner) it rather significantly changes your
| perspective on life. Want to transfer your consciousness?
| Not gonna happen, but having a few children is at least a
| reasonable second.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| I don't think people who don't have kids are thinking
| about sci-fi stuff. Other than my dad, I genuinely have
| never met a person who ever thinks about it, and well, he
| had me and my siblings.
|
| Some people just believe in (and sometimes achieve!)
| fulfilment through other means. Problem is, that is
| objectively bad for economical and cultural growth of the
| humanity. No single country has been able to resolve that
| problem without religious beliefs or kinda forcing women
| to have children (by either taking all their
| opportunities away or them not having any by default).
| jaco6 wrote:
| I agree it's becoming a common sentiment among the online
| pseudo-intelligentsia, but it's still rare on a population
| level, so I will keep spreading the sentiment. I think it's
| important, mainly on an economic level (I believe economic
| growth is impossible without population growth), but I
| speculate the decline of family-having is at the root of
| some of our other social-psychological malaises:
| loneliness, substance abuse, mental illness, increasing
| interest in extreme politics. Tech people should be most
| interested in family as an answer to social woes because
| currently people are blaming either social media and tech
| for social dysfunction,or the collapse in family-having, or
| both. If family is the answer then lots of tech will be
| exonerated.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Frankly, I don't buy the malaises argument. It obviously
| has some effect, but even the countries that are known
| for not being lonely has dropping fertility rates. And
| there's almost no good argument for having more than 2
| kids, which is basically a requirement for increasing
| population.
|
| People just have more stuff to do, and convincing a woman
| they should sacrifice at the bare minimum 6 years to give
| birth to 3 kids is just... yeah, good luck. The only
| argument is "do it for the greater good!", and as a
| society, we have shown that most people don't care about
| the greater good the second times become a bit hard.
|
| Some tech circles have been entertaining the whole "trad
| life" idea, but it's pretty laughable the second you
| start talking to real people. Not all women want to be
| depended on others if they have a choice.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| Every single woman needs to, on average, have a bit more
| than 2 children to have a _stable_ population. Fewer than
| that and your population (once it shares the same
| fertility rate across generations) will begin changing at
| a scalar of fertility_rate /2 each ~20 years. So a
| fertility rate of 1 = 50% decline every 20 years. And
| it's exponential - that decline never stops or slows
| until you go extinct or start having children again.
|
| But in this case one frustrating thing is people don't
| know what they don't know. My wife was quite lukewarm on
| having children but shortly after our first she wanted at
| least two more. They really change you in ways that are
| impossible to describe without cliche, and I think this
| is, by nature, even more true for the mother.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| I agree with you, and you're probably right! My parents
| said the same thing. Both my siblings have children as
| well.
|
| But if the argument starts with "you'll understand when
| you have kids!" to convince people to have kids... well,
| it's like blindly trusting people. And again, it is
| coming from a person who will have children when the time
| comes. And relatively speaking, I'm doing ok financially,
| and it's one of the problems I can take care of for the
| future of my children.
|
| For every good parental story, there are quite a few
| unfortunate ones as well. The problem with the
| information access is, people tend to realize that
| chances of it happening is not 0. So you have all the
| opportunity loss, combined with the potential regrets and
| problems that add up for every new child... the math
| doesn't add up for having multiple children. Also,
| doesn't help that the average age of having the first
| child is already at 30s.
|
| Anyways, I think I'm just generally angry that pseudo-
| intellectuals (including ourselves) are scared to propose
| other solutions. Because they will always be very
| unethical (lab babies, taking rights away and etc.) or
| very uneconomical.
| beacon294 wrote:
| Why would lab babies be unethical? Or do you mean some
| more specific scenario?
| bombcar wrote:
| We could end up with a sustainable population where few
| women have children, but those that do have five or more.
|
| Division of labor, as it were.
| silverquiet wrote:
| I'd have to guess the demographics of HN lean rather
| Millennial, and I don't have to guess that they lean
| _heavily_ male. I think it 's probably just a collective
| biological clock thing; it's something I've started to feel
| myself. Intellectually, I want kids less than ever (so it's
| for the best I never had any), but emotionally, I do sort
| of understand the urge.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Could be! I share the same emotional feeling as well, but
| the ones telling others to have kids, already have them.
| They keep going above and beyond trying to portray the
| idea of "everything is amazing when you have a kid!",
| when it's objectively not true. It's just a bit off-
| putting when you have all the information readily
| available and try to push an ideology to a circle that's
| commonly known as skeptics. Anyone who has close girl
| friends in their late 20s/30s have heard the issues
| they're facing and why they're not having kids either.
| But then, bunch of seemingly smart people, just keep
| yelling "just have children!!!" looks a bit dumb. And
| from the guy's side we have different sets of problems.
|
| A bit personal, but throughout my life, I've met more
| dead-beat fathers than caring ones. So, I'm incredibly
| jaded when it comes to giving advice. Statistically, I
| wouldn't try to change one's mind to have a child,
| because I'd feel bad for the kid if things go south.
|
| Once again, I'm still pro-having kids, but I don't get
| why it became such a major discourse compared to 2010s.
| olau wrote:
| Perhaps it is becoming more clear that the current
| reproduction rates are unsustainable if they persist.
|
| Anyway, I have a bunch of kids, and I think from a
| motivational perspective, yes, kids give you meaning for
| some years.
|
| But they can also help you with something else due to the
| necessary self-sacrifices, which is getting a out of
| egocentric thoughts, such as what you're going to do with
| your life. Read a book on biology. You are a bunch of
| cells put in the world to cooperate to feed and reproduce
| before they self-terminate to leave space for the
| offspring. That's it. Stop fretting. :)
|
| (Helping society and thereby the offspring of other
| bunches of cells is pretty noble too, by the way.)
| ANewFormation wrote:
| Because it's not only extremely fulfilling (well beyond
| what one might expect) on a personal level but also
| required on a social level for a culture to persist.
|
| And this is in the context of ever more people complaining
| of loneliness, lack of fulfillment/meaning, and more. These
| issues are almost certainly causally related.
|
| Help yourself, help society, and even have a voice (of
| sorts) in the future of humanity.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| There are literal hundreds (thousands?) of philosophical
| schools for "meaning of life". It's really not a new
| question, and there won't be a right answer, ever. Trying
| to convince someone that it is the only route to find a
| meaning just sounds a bit funny for anyone who watches it
| from the sidelines.
|
| My question, once again, is why tech circles started
| focusing on this and pushing it as ideology just
| recently? Wasn't a thing in 2010s, people more or less
| respected personal choices as long as it doesn't harm
| others directly.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| Interesting point in the timing. In general I think it's
| probably just growing awareness of the issue, also
| combined with a growing number of people in tech starting
| families (often quite late) and being like 'zomg why
| didn't I do this earlier.' Many people in tech are also
| fascinated with countries like Japan which are acting
| like a living warning to the rest of the world about
| fertility.
|
| In general though I think cultural shifts often lack any
| clear reason. People like Musk or Gates chiming in on the
| issue are almost certainly effects rather than causes.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| I guess that makes sense. Someone else commented how
| "maybe HN demographics just happened to be people who
| just had kids, thus the echo-chamber". Which, would
| explain a lot.
|
| Re: Musk -- no real opinions about him wrt other
| ventures, but surely no sane person can look at him as a
| decent father figure, no? It just sounds like a "populate
| Earth for populating reasons!" completely disregarding
| the well being of the kids part. Which, I find, fairly
| sad.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| I think it's more about concern for society and Western
| civilization in particular. Low fertility will cause
| nations, and cultures, to contract and eventually
| collapse. 'Eventually' not being some excessively distant
| reference - South Korea may well become a failed state
| within our lifetimes if nothing radically changes, seouly
| due to fertility. And most other nations will be right
| behind them.
|
| As for anybody's parenting - I have certainly raised my
| children in ways that would offend the sensibilities of
| this group or that. But it's what I think is right. So
| under this mindset, and a bit of the Golden Rule, I do
| not criticize other's parenting outside of obvious
| extremes.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >My question, once again, is why _tech circles_ started
| focusing (emphasis mine)
|
| One answer nobody else is willing to broach is that Elon
| Musk and friends are hyper-breeder crazies who think the
| white race will die out if white men don't all pump out
| as many babies with as many women as possible, and they
| literally own multiple tech and social media companies to
| push such a narrative.
|
| HN is more influenced by chud ideology than it should be.
| CoryAlexMartin wrote:
| I think it's a pushback against the emphasis on
| individualism in our culture, which many find does not lead
| to real fulfillment. When you start a family, you're giving
| up your own glory, but in doing so you become deeply
| integrated into something greater than yourself, which
| makes you greater by extension.
|
| And I say this as someone who doesn't have kids either, and
| as someone who used to not be so excited by the prospect,
| but I've witnessed how it's transformed my friends and
| family members.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| But why now, and not like 5 years ago? That's the
| weirdness I don't understand. Is it just very loud people
| had a bunch of kids and trying to push the same on
| others? Trying to change the culture from the start?
| "Meaning of life" is like the oldest question that has
| ever existed. Both people with and without children have
| pondered about it for eternity. It just looks funny when
| you see a sudden shift in the discourse.
| swamp_donkey wrote:
| Maybe the demographics of HN are such that a bunch of
| people just had kids.
| CoryAlexMartin wrote:
| I've seen the sentiment building over the last several
| years. Though I think part of why it's such a prevalent
| sentiment now as opposed to a few years ago, is very
| obvious signs of cultural breakdown started to show
| strongly in maybe 2017 or so, and people started
| questioning the prominent messages in our culture and
| seeking answers, and for many, finding those answers
| takes time.
|
| There are probably other related factors too, like
| increased awareness of population decline, but I think
| both reasons are intertwined.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| 2017 is actually a great reference point wrt cultural
| changes! I think that is the year when bubble and echo-
| chamber creations accelerated to the T, so people who
| ponder about the same things just talk to each other. And
| they never really get to talk to the outsider groups or
| hear their opinions as often. 2020s was probably the only
| couple of years when everyone got to talk about the same
| topic, but that was for unfortunate reasons. I think
| "have lots of kids!" idea pushers are just screaming into
| the void right now, because they offer no solutions to
| people in other chambers.
| CoryAlexMartin wrote:
| There may be some screaming into the void, but at least
| some of it breaks through. I was someone who, for years,
| bought into the idea that being idiosyncratic and self-
| expressive and following my passions and self-interested
| dreams would lead to fulfillment. I was the last person
| you would have expected to have been receptive to the
| idea that starting a family could be a means to a
| meaningful life. Nonetheless, I started to see the cracks
| in my worldview, and that made me more open to listen,
| and here we are.
|
| Also there is a biological urge, so it's probably not
| that much of an uphill battle. Though unfortunately
| people also contend with biological clocks and realize
| that they want kids when it's already too late. I feel
| very bad for those people, and so if you can re-normalize
| the idea of starting a family, then maybe you can reach
| those sorts of people while they still have time.
| speakfreely wrote:
| I think there's two shifts that play a major role in
| explaining the timing that you're referencing:
|
| - The 2010s represented a progressivist left-ward shift
| in America and the excesses of that movement are
| provoking a reactionary conservative shift in the
| populace in the 2020s:
| https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/seven-reasons-america-is-
| heade.... This is cyclical is the same thing happened
| from 1960s to 1970s.
|
| - The concept of population collapse entered mainstream
| discourse in the early 2020s and is now being accepted as
| the major concern for humanity moving forward, a
| 180-degree turn from the previous concern of
| overpopulation. This is something unprecedented in human
| history as no human has ever existed in an economy or
| society where the population was decreasing so all the
| "rules" we know about life are suddenly subject to change
| unless birth patterns change significantly.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But why now, and not like 5 years ago?
|
| It's a product of the rise in white
| nationalist/supremacist movements and white replacement
| theory. Pro-natalism with the explicitly racial content
| omitted (though even their often tied to overt appeals to
| eugenics and/or framing it as intra-societal/cultural
| competition, which is itself only a shade different from
| racial/ethnic competition, but for some reason doesn't
| produce nearly as strong a negative reaction) is a face
| that can be shown to audiences that aren't ready for the
| full-strength message.
|
| I'm not saying every vocal pro-natalist is a white
| supremacist (most of the high profile ones are, though),
| but that the rise in white supremacy and the prominence
| of white replacement theory within the rising white
| supremacy is a big part of the explanation of why pro-
| natalism is a lot more prominent right now than in the
| recent past.
| izacus wrote:
| By far most likely is that the loudest cohort of HN users
| (or people in your social circle) has aged to the point
| where they want families. Younger people are on other
| social networks.
| mezzie2 wrote:
| I find this interesting as one of the individualist
| characteristics of our society is 'my children > everyone
| else'. I don't see the emphasis on having children as
| anti-individualist at all.
|
| Many parents are completely unwilling to hold their
| children to account/tell them no/let them fail/etc. The
| experience of the people around their children means
| nothing to them. Teaching their children to be a part of
| society does not matter: All that matters is their
| children get what they want because their children are
| extensions of themselves.
| mbrumlow wrote:
| A thought.
|
| What if we have judged the healthiest of a society on the
| wrong metrics. And the right one is birth rate?
|
| We might say things are bad for a society if it's too
| dangerous or not enough food so the birth rate goes to near
| zero and as a result it dies.
|
| How is a society that has people being too busy or occupied
| with other task that neglects reproducing a better society
| than the latter?
|
| Obvious too much of a birth rate is bad, but too little could
| also be a sign of an unhealthy environment.
| cj wrote:
| Basically what you're saying is that the healthiest society
| is the one whose population is growing the fastest?
|
| I would think life expectancy would be a better measure of
| a healthy vs unhealthy environment.
| kaashif wrote:
| You're talking about individual health. Regardless of
| what specifically makes a society healthy, a necessary
| condition is that it doesn't die out.
|
| A society with a 120 year life expectancy and 0 birth
| rate isn't healthy.
|
| A society with 20 life expectancy and 6 birth rate is
| unhealthy but for different reasons.
| cj wrote:
| It's pretty easy to find high birth rate countries with
| low life expectancy.
|
| While it's much more difficult to find countries with
| high life expectancy with low birth rates (assuming we
| define "low" as any birth rate lower than necessary for
| the society to not die out)
|
| I agree with you the 2 need to be balanced, but I assume
| any society with high life expectancy would also have a
| sustainable birth rate.
| mbrumlow wrote:
| Are Japan and Korea not both high life expectancy but low
| birth rate. Along with a by other developed countries
| birth rates dropping while life expectancy is increasing?
| marcusverus wrote:
| This is the best answer. From a strictly rational
| perspective, parenthood makes little sense. The negatives are
| obvious and intimidating, while the benefits (which are not
| rational but instinctual) are less clear. Happily, oxytocin
| is a helluva drug. It will rearrange your universe in the
| course of an hour, such that all of its substance revolves
| around a splotchy, squinty little ape.
|
| I highly recommend it.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| And then the sleepless nights of screaming will twist it up
| again. Postpartum depression can affect any gender when it
| comes to sleep deprivation.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| > jaco6 : Maybe the minority who want to reproduce will be
| paid to reproduce for everyone else in the future?
|
| This latter comment of yours was down voted by idiots to the
| point where it's dead, so I could not respond to it directly.
|
| Anyway, specifics aside, it is actually a good idea - for a
| variety of reasons.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I like the converse: pay certain people to NOT reproduce.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| That's also great.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Child rearing
|
| For what purpose?
|
| > it is our evolutionary "purpose" to reproduce
|
| Yes evolution selects for having children survive to
| reproduce, but that's not a purpose, that's just "that which
| continues, continues".
|
| > and most people in the developed world today aren't doing
| it.
|
| Plenty of species have evolved such that when they
| sufficiently saturafe their environment and resource carrying
| capacity, reproduction rates drop through behavior changes
| based on various signals.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Doesn't this seem like a tautological purpose? Our purpose is
| to create a new generation of beings who question their own
| purpose?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It's not tautological because it's objectively wrong.
|
| There is no biological purpose. We are just a multitude of
| chemical reactions falling down the entropy slope in a
| slightly odd way.
|
| "Purpose" is a concept entirely made up out of whole cloth
| for hairless apes who accidentally invented language and
| that allowed them to do a lot of thinking outside the
| confines of their biological processes.
|
| We are perfectly free to CHOOSE reproduction as a
| "purpose", but nothing about biology actually cares. If you
| don't reproduce, oh well, something else will take that
| spot in the ecosystem.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| That's the most plausible gloss I've heard. The new
| generation must be capable of framing a question at least
| as sophisticated as its parents can if there's to be hope
| of progress in the world. Otherwise we're on the way to
| "Idiocracy".
| hollerith wrote:
| >most people in the developed world today aren't doing it.
|
| Untrue: e.g., in the US, "Among women and men aged 40-49 in
| 2015-2019, 84.3% of women had given birth and 76.5% of men
| had fathered a child."
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr179.pdf
| mancerayder wrote:
| The replies are bit harsh. It _is_ a solution to meaningless
| of life. I am reminded constantly by some of my friends.
|
| But it's also a problem for some. For example, it means
| moving out of expensive cities, it means worrying about
| making lots of money (if you live in the U.S.), it means
| child care is thousands a month, it means health care is
| thousands a month. It means you have to be responsible and
| not drink every day. It means potentially not sleeping for a
| year.
|
| Personally, seeing the stress of my workmates, and how they
| became more _dependent_ on their jobs, on the shit of the
| jobs, and how now they 're more competitive on the job, and
| worried... I'd personally choose to write that off.
|
| But I know people who found meaning through child-rearing, as
| you say!
| inopinatus wrote:
| I once asked my wife, "what is my purpose in life?", and she
| has been cracking dolphin jokes at my expense ever since.
| kristianp wrote:
| Is that a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy reference?
| karason wrote:
| It's from Rick & Morty
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| The original joke I think is a play on porpoise and
| purpose.
|
| There is another great skit from Rick and Morty on the
| topic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs).
| jocaal wrote:
| Norm Mcdonald also has a horrible joke about it
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3LMSflEN54
| codr7 wrote:
| Well, you have a choice there. Ask others, and get dolphins;
| or follow your heart.
| stavros wrote:
| That's good, at least. She could have said "you pass butter".
| nixosbestos wrote:
| This is such an odd answer. "People are bored so they become
| degens", is ... not the full picture, I don't think.
|
| But who needs hobbies, or friendship, or nature, when you have
| TikTok!
| impish9208 wrote:
| Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/stock-market-
| trading-apps...
| CliveBloomers wrote:
| The regular 9-to-5 is seen as a last resort now--it's almost like
| you've failed if you don't have a side hustle. That's the vibe.
| With AI and machine learning platforms making waves, especially
| for traders, the game has completely changed. The barrier to
| entry? Practically gone. These platforms have made it so easy to
| get started that anyone with a bit of curiosity can jump in.
|
| It's not the exclusive playground of the Wall Street elite
| anymore. What used to be this tightly guarded world of algorithms
| and insider knowledge is now available to anyone willing to dive
| in. People are out here making bank, and they're getting good at
| it. Trading isn't just something "some people" do--it's turning
| into a thriving industry where regular folks are learning the
| ropes and doing well for themselves.
|
| This whole shift has made the traditional career path feel
| outdated. Why settle for clocking in and out when you can
| leverage tools and tech to build something for yourself? The idea
| of just sticking to the 9-to-5 feels like giving up when the
| opportunities to create and grow are right there, waiting.
| pieterhg wrote:
| Blocked for AI reply
| whateveracct wrote:
| It's funny because 9-5 is still a great way to actually enrich
| yourself. The best way to grow your wealth is to increase your
| income, and a salary+benefits is the juiciest way to do that.
|
| Sadly, I've seen many male friends of mine obsess with the
| stock market but not have anything going career-wise. They just
| hope they hit big and "make it." Better to just stack salary
| for years the boring way and save yourself the time it takes to
| micromanage investments.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Also, the second best way to enrich yourself in America is
| probably buying a home. But you need a down payment and the
| ability to afford it over the 30y mortgage.
|
| Gambling on stocks may give you a windfall that amounts to a
| down payment, but good luck convincing the bank you can pay
| that new mortgage for 30y off your stock market wizardry.
| mancerayder wrote:
| 9-5 is definitely not the way to enrich yourself, that's an
| unfortunate message. Have you noticed how housing costs have
| consistently beat inflation for decades? At least if you live
| in a VHCOL area. It's easy - check the FRED report on the
| median salary and compare that with a graph showing the
| median housing price.
|
| OK so the most important thing is out of reach with 9-5,
| independence from rent. The next set of factors like health
| care, and if you have a kid child care and health care, are
| also up compared to wages (9-5 wages).
|
| That leaves just food and entertainment. I _suppose_ you
| could live with roommates, eat frugally and not go out. And
| then maybe the 9-5 is the way to become rich.
|
| For most of us the way to build wealth is through asset
| appreciation - housing , stocks. The 9-5 is the 'not so
| passive income' that you use day-to-day while you either SAVE
| up for the 'assets' (if you're lucky), or you gamble /
| inherit / get lucky with these assets.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Most of the country does not live in very high cost of
| living areas, so what you said isn't true in most places.
| And at some point, if your location is so bad that you just
| can't make it work financially, _move_. Yes, moving sucks
| for many reasons. But people are not powerless victims who
| just get stuck somewhere and can 't do anything else, they
| have the ability to take themselves to another place where
| the opportunities are better.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Seattle is a high COL area and even there with a tech job
| you can accumulate a lot of cash..
| whateveracct wrote:
| idk man I graduated a decade ago and switched jobs every
| 2ish years and now my income dwarfs my expenses and I saved
| $100k+ for a down payment years ago. It's those raises from
| changing jobs, promotions, career development that paid off
| more than which ETF I stuffed my money into.
|
| I don't live frugally or have roommates (except my wife who
| hasn't worked for years).
|
| I've literally never had expenses so high I couldn't max my
| 401k, HSA, and go to restaurants, travel, buy fun stuff,
| keep an good emergency fund. And I lived in Seattle most of
| that decade. Also my job is super easy for me.
|
| Crazy how much a degree from a midwest state school can
| do...
| jdefr89 wrote:
| Dunno about everyone but my 9-5 salary is awesome. I do
| Vulnerability Research at an MIT lab. Working there is
| amazing. Much rather my situation than one where I am
| forced to "trade" and make it big in order to eat and or
| anything else in life. Great 9-5 jobs are out there and
| it's funny because I used to think of them as "awful slave"
| jobs. Used to think having to do a 9-5 was something to
| avoid at all costs. Came to realize I enjoy guaranteed
| income and job security over anything else. Sorry for bad
| grammar; typing on phone..
| mancerayder wrote:
| That particular job sounds amazing, I'd love a 9-5 doing
| research!
|
| I've been working in the dreaded evil industry (non tech
| but I am in tech) for decades and gave up trying to find
| a job I loved. Corporate politics sucks that away.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| You can still look for a 9-5 in a solid startup or scale-
| up.
| rchaud wrote:
| > Trading isn't just something "some people" do--it's turning
| into a thriving industry where regular folks are learning the
| ropes and doing well for themselves.
|
| Said every forex / options / crypto course seller ever.
|
| Anybody remember the "Day Trade your way out of Debt" late
| night infomercials in the '90s?
| raincole wrote:
| > Said every forex / options / crypto course seller ever.
|
| And they're correct on this. The only catch is that you don't
| need to buy their courses to know it.
| bormaj wrote:
| Anyone selling the retail investor an "edge" via ML platforms
| or AI is selling snake oil. Sure the barrier to entry is low,
| but profits are never guaranteed.
| jajko wrote:
| Jeez, I've heard all this and much about online trading portals
| 2 decades ago. They weren't incorrect, anybody could trade,
| even alghoritmically. AI isnt bringing anything added for
| regular users that others dont have, so nothing.
|
| You make your own priorities and risks, as do we. Your comment
| anyway reads like some cheap marketing for clueless folks on
| the back of a bus just before bubble bursts.
| brudgers wrote:
| https://archive.ph/ObYDN
| epolanski wrote:
| I remember a controversial scamming figure in Italy that made
| millions by selling lucky numbers for lotteries or exploiting
| people's stupidity to part them with their life savings.
|
| Her motto was "idiots _have_ to be scammed".
|
| While this figure was morally and ethically deplorable, it always
| made me think how her motto essentially implied that there was an
| element of pure natural selection happening and she saw herself
| as the executor of the oldest survival of the fittest balancing
| act.
|
| At the same time, as someone who follows places like WSB seeing
| people getting in life-ruining leverage just for the adrenaline
| of it, or even worse, just for internet karma always made me
| think of that scammer's words: this is just natural selection
| doing it's thing as it has been for billions of years. And
| there's no third party scamming them. They know what they risk,
| and will do it anyway.
|
| The world is full of physical and non physical dangers, we are
| naturally programmed to push for self preservation and yet there
| are people that willingly and consciously decide to put it all on
| risk, how can it be anything but natural selection doing it's
| thing?
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> how can it be anything but natural selection doing it 's
| thing?_
|
| Does it affect their reproductive chances? If not, then natural
| selection has nothing to do with it.
| dleary wrote:
| It's overly simplistic to say that if a person has
| reproduced, then they have 'succeeded' in the natural
| selection game.
|
| There is a whole (potential) downstream genealogical tree
| branching off from each individual
|
| Certainly, any person who reproduces has done "better" at the
| game than someone who has not reproduced at all. But that is
| still not quite enough.
|
| If a parent reproduces, but none of their children themselves
| reproduce, then the parent has not actually succeeded in the
| game.
|
| A gambling addict who can't hold onto any money absolutely
| affects their downstream tree.
| throwup238 wrote:
| In theory yes, but given the birth rate demographics I
| don't think it's actually true. The families giving birth
| to the most children in the developed world are mostly
| either hyper-religious or poor, whether that's because it's
| generational or because they just immigrated from a
| developing country.
|
| I think the kind of men (probably in their late 20s/early
| 30s onwards) that can afford to gamble on stock market apps
| aren't in the running to begin with.
| jammus wrote:
| In that case it's just another symptom of the thing that
| is naturally selecting them
| imtringued wrote:
| By this logic nobody wins, because humanity will go extinct
| eventually.
|
| In reality the winners of natural selection are those who
| were born and are still alive. If life is a game, they are
| winners in the most literal sense.
|
| We struggle for existence against entropy, not against
| other humans or animals.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| The purpose of sneering about "idiots" and inventing
| pseudoscientific gibberish about natural selection is to wash
| one's hands of moral responsibility for scamming naive young
| people, the elderly, or adults with psychiatric or cognitive
| disabilities. "It wasn't me robbing your college-age son out
| of a new car, that was just natural selection doing its
| thing! So long, losers!"
|
| My mom was a very crappy person who strongly believed in the
| "sucker born every minute, separate a fool from his money"
| mantra. I think it's become a core American ideology.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I've adopted the sucker born ever minute attitude since
| it's all I can do. These fools have the tenacity to be
| scammed at a rate faster than we can ever hope to do
| anything about and it's depressing otherwise. Society ends
| up bearing the cost.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I mean you can also not scam these people
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I don't.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| There's a difference between a grandma losing money to a
| phone scam and this kind of "hustle economy" gambling.
|
| I've talked to a lot of people who participate in this
| stuff, they always _know the odds exactly_. They 're fully
| aware. It's a combination of greed, thrill and attention
| seeking that doesn't deserve sympathy. Everybody who
| participates in hawk tuah coin crypto rug pulls knows how
| stupid it is, they just think they're the smart ones
| fleecing everybody else. Those people deserve the "sucker
| born every minute" treatment. That is their worldview, they
| just think they're the exception.
| thefounder wrote:
| Addiction takes over rationale. Everyone knows crack
| cocaine is bad. They know "the odds" too, yet they can't
| stop.
| sneak wrote:
| I would prefer clever people have resources instead of any
| of those groups you listed.
|
| I have this preference even if I am not the one being
| clever (so, via the veil of ignorance).
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| I would prefer kind, honorable, useful, people have them.
| roenxi wrote:
| Take a wider view - the people with economic power are
| generally the people who use it for economically sensible
| things. Someone who spends irrationally is going to end up
| with no money. This is a similar process to natural selection
| - because the unviable strategies are removed, everything
| that is around is using a viable strategy. This woman was
| forcing people with unviable financial beliefs (that led to
| them being easily scammed) to give up their ability to exert
| economic pressure. In that sense, the same processes as
| natural selection are at play and we can call it the same
| thing.
|
| Although I don't buy the logic in a lot of edge cases, it is
| somewhat necessary that these tactics are legal. Diverting
| resources to people who waste them is ruinous.
| blargey wrote:
| No, the resources diverted to people with "unviable
| financial beliefs" were done so in a proper market-
| efficient way, and would have been spent in perfectly
| ordinary ways no different from the average person of
| modest means, if it weren't for the scams.
|
| Diverting people's resources to unproductive, antisocial
| scammers based on arbitrary educational criteria is the
| only "ruinous" thing in this picture. _They_ are the
| economic inefficiency.
| roenxi wrote:
| Well sure but you could make similar complaints about a
| bacterial infection killing a human. It is still natural
| selection even if it is arbitrary, pointless or
| destructive.
| dleary wrote:
| > _and would have been spent in perfectly ordinary ways
| no different from the average person of modest means, if
| it weren 't for the scams._
|
| That is a pretty big leap.
|
| There are plenty of ways, plenty of "unviable financial
| beliefs", that can lead one to unwisely fritter away
| their resources without being exploited by a scammer.
|
| You are basically asserting that most people who get
| scammed are otherwise Rational Agents who would invest
| their capital wisely, if not for the scammers deceiving
| them.
|
| I would argue that, on the contrary, this set of people
| is very small.
|
| Think of how many stories there are of people pursuing
| "investments", or just directing their resources, into
| flat-out bullshit.
|
| To pick some examples off the top of my head:
|
| How much time, money, thought, effort (e.g. capital) has
| been wasted by people pursuing the Flat Earth theory? I
| would guess that there aren't very many scammers involved
| in the Flat Earth movement. Most of the people involved
| are crackpot true believers.
|
| As opposed to, say, homeopathy. Which certainly has a
| not-insignificant number of exploiters/scammers, people
| who know that it is bullshit but gladly exploit the
| uneducated.
|
| Both of these movements involve a significant number of
| "uneducated" people spending their resources on a
| fantasy.
|
| But, most of the resources poured into the Flat Earth
| movement are pure waste, with very little benefit
| whatsoever to the "Body Economic". There are not very
| many "trickle down" benefits from the resources being
| spent.
|
| When the "uneducated" people give their resources to a
| scammer, it is usually ending up in the hands of someone
| who is at least somewhat economically rational. And those
| resources will be spent in more rational ways.
|
| Even if the scammer buys a bunch of gold chains and
| sports cars that they don't really use, those resources
| are "participating" in the economy in a way that the
| wasted investments that don't involve a scammer are not.
|
| I'm not on the scammers' side. I'm not saying they are
| good people. But it is not clear that " _they_ are the
| economic inefficiency".
| acdha wrote:
| > But, most of the resources poured into the Flat Earth
| movement are pure waste, with very little benefit
| whatsoever to the "Body Economic". There are not very
| many "trickle down" benefits from the resources being
| spent.
|
| > Even if the scammer buys a bunch of gold chains and
| sports cars that they don't really use, those resources
| are "participating" in the economy in a way that the
| wasted investments that don't involve a scammer are not.
|
| Are you saying that people in the first case are taking
| their money and burning it? Because if not I don't see
| how you could make that statement without more research -
| if the flat earthers are printing books, selling videos,
| hosting conferences, going on "fact finding" missions,
| etc. then they're generating economic value as well. Much
| less of it in absolute terms given the relative
| population sizes but you can't just assume everyone is
| Scrooge McDuck sitting on a huge pile of money.
| mouse_ wrote:
| It absolutely does
| User23 wrote:
| This is a position commonly referred to as "Social Darwinism."
| The same logic can get you to "drunk women out by themselves
| _have_ to be sexually assaulted" and so on. No, it's not OK to
| victimize people just because they're vulnerable. It's an
| absolutely odious caricature of moral reasoning.
| sneak wrote:
| Not at all. Money represents resources, and it's objectively
| better for society for resources to be in the hands of people
| who are not fools, instead of those who are.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| You sound foolish, I'm gonna need to take all your money.
| Don't worry, I'm being objective.
| wisty wrote:
| The argument is that the objective test is whether you
| can actually convince anyone to hand over money.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| No, they are making a moral argument, and claiming their
| view is the objectively moral position. It's "better for
| society" was the phrase.
| tedunangst wrote:
| We don't need to take money from the fools. They'll give
| it away.
| Yizahi wrote:
| You can get like minded people and go roleplay feudalism
| with guns somewhere else, please leave people with empathy
| out of it.
|
| PS: don't forget to document your inevitable failure, just
| like every libertarian "non-fools" community previously.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| I disagree with the comparison. A "drunk woman out by
| themselves" is, at the end of the day, just a person
| exercising their right to exist. A stock-market gambler, on
| the other hand, is literally betting on the bad decisions of
| whoever is on the other side of their trades. It's a
| predatory position to be in, and deserves a whole lot less
| sympathy.
| bluGill wrote:
| That same logic says the rapist is betting on stupid women.
| epolanski wrote:
| No, how?
|
| WSB users are doing that to themselves. You can't
| possibly compare them to a raped person.
| bluGill wrote:
| most rapes are not stranges in dark allies they are
| people who know each other. Thus a not choosing better
| friends can be argued to do it to yourself.
| ta988 wrote:
| Horrible example of victim blaming here.
| bluGill wrote:
| like I said this logic is victum blaming. Doesn't matter
| if it is stocks or rape there is a victum that some are
| not acknoweleging
| nradov wrote:
| Don't believe what you read on WSB. Most of those clowns are
| getting Internet karma points by making up stories, not by
| losing real money.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| I can assure you that many of the posts there are real. If
| you have market data you can verify the transactions
| yourself.
| malux85 wrote:
| One of the justifications that psycopaths and sociopaths use is
| exactly this - If their victims weren't so stupid, they wouldnt
| be victims. (Often mixed with the "if I didnt exploit them,
| someone else would"). Its an excuse to rationalise and try to
| justify their bad behaviour.
|
| NATURAL selection is built to deal with NATURAL problems, and
| they move and change and evolve at the same speed, natual
| selection changes at the speed of genetic mutations of large
| populations, we didnt have smartphones even 1 generation ago -
| so how the hell is natural selection supposed to adapt to that?
|
| When you have an electronic device thats beaming in risky
| behaviour at millisecond latency, what's the difference than
| having a big pile of cocaine in the kitchen and then blaming
| the addicted person saying "Its just natural selection, that
| enourmous pile of drugs thats just sitting there - you took it
| willingly", this is hyperbole but its illustrating my point -
| immediate availabity of dangerous risky addictive behaviour is
| a problem that will seduce a lot of people that otherwise would
| not have had the problem.
|
| Im definitly someone in favor of personal responsibility but
| "ne quid nimis" and this must be balanced by a strong culture
| with good leadership to help the people who cant do it by
| willpower alone, so saying "Its just natural selection" is pure
| sociopathic / empathy-less answer and is unacceptable in a
| world where we should be helping and guiding each other and not
| saying "sounds like a you problem" while cranking up the
| exploitation dial.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >One of the justifications that psycopaths and sociopaths use
| is exactly this
|
| >NATURAL selection is built to deal with NATURAL problems,
|
| Human psychopaths essentially evolved (meaning they are
| generally hardwired) to exploit the niche of stupid/gullible
| people. You will see this in various species, i.e a
| parasite/host behavior. ( eg cookoo laying eggs in the nest
| of other birds).
|
| No saying that it's a justification for psychopathy, but just
| stating the way things are.
| jdefr89 wrote:
| Yup. It's just an excuse for their awful behavior.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Humans are slow, weak, eminently munchable.
|
| Lions, tigers, bears, etc., can really chow down on humans.
|
| The issue with humans, though, is they gang up, real good. Eat
| one (that others care about), and twenty come after you with
| belt-fed machine guns.
|
| Psycopaths may consider themselves to be predators, and
| "suckers," prey, but they tend to suffer the same fate as
| maneater lions, if they eat the wrong prey.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Descriptively not obvious at all.
| codr7 wrote:
| There are hunters even for predators...
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > And there's no third party scamming them.
|
| Sure there is. Retail investors are prey for more sophisticated
| investors. Getting people on WSB to make bad financial
| decisions is cheap and easy. I would be astonished if it isn't
| thoroughly astroturfed by hedge funds and other financial
| professionals.
| caminante wrote:
| I can think of one such example where the populace
| emphatically said retail investors were getting screwed, and
| AFAIK, conclusive proof was never found.
|
| The claim was that Citadel was frontrunning Robinhood's
| retail investor order flow, which Citadel's market making arm
| paid for. The masses claimed that this was an extreme
| conflict of interest, and Citadel "must" be scalping the
| retail investors. However, the suspected reality is that
| Citadel was merely providing a market making service that (a)
| Robinhood couldn't do as well as a non-core activity and (b)
| for cheaper. Here's a Matt Levine overview [0] from 2021.
|
| [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-08-31/wha
| t-h...
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| Shitty people always have ways to justify their behavior to
| themselves. One of the benefits of the market is it launders
| this justification so nobody has to feel guilty for the
| destruction it wreaks on human society.
|
| Edit: Social Darwinism and justification of the private market
| economy are inextricably linked. I do think there is some merit
| to, well, divvying resources by merit, but our current world
| sees such an exacerbation of resource division the idea it
| reflects _actual_ merit is absurd.
| delichon wrote:
| The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly
| is to fill the world with fools. -- Herbert Spencer
| username135 wrote:
| I like this
| holtkam2 wrote:
| Does anyone have evidence that these so called "idiots" have
| fewer grandchildren as a result of being scammed? If not, this
| "natural selection" mechanism isn't working
| spoonfeeder006 wrote:
| Whats the difference between "idiots have to be scammed" vs
| "people who can't fend off a knife fighter while en route to
| the grocery store have to be stabbed"?
|
| Some people are gullible, or trusting. This doesn't mean they
| don't have other gifts, or most of all good intentions.
| Applying an evolutionary pressure against people who can't fend
| off knife attackers is ultimately useless for human wellbeing
|
| The real issue in the world isn't people not being smart enough
| to fend off attacks, but greed and ego
|
| And besides, what is the root of such a 'idiot' person's
| deficiencies in the first place? Is it genetics? Or is it
| education, upbringing, early life traumas that stunt
| development?
|
| Besides, the whole point of having fit genes in the first place
| is to bring about human happiness. If we use this to make
| people miserable it then shows that there is no substance to
| our perspective
|
| > O CHILDREN OF MEN! Know ye not why We created you all from
| the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other.
| Ponder at all times in your hearts how ye were created. Since
| We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent
| on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat
| with the same mouth and dwell in the same land, that from your
| inmost being, by your deeds and actions, the signs of oneness
| and the essence of detachment may be made manifest. Such is My
| counsel to you, O concourse of light! Heed ye this counsel that
| ye may obtain the fruit of holiness from the tree of wondrous
| glory.
|
| > ~ Baha'u'llah
| in-pursuit wrote:
| There's obviously a huge difference between a scam and a
| violent attack. The person being scammed doesn't ever lose
| their agency and willingly participates. That's very
| different from a knife attack, where the victim would leave
| at every moment if possible.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Scammers target people who can be easily manipulated so
| that they can mostly remove targets' agency. The victim
| doesn't know that it's a scam, so why would they run?
| gcanyon wrote:
| _Informed_ consent is missing in both cases.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| The person in the knife fight also doesn't lose their
| agency. The choices they made just led to an outcome they
| didn't expect.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| It's always easy to think that until you will be the one
| being manipulated and scammed.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| This all ultimately boils down to "the attacks that I
| believe I'm immune to are _okay_ , the attacks that I'm not
| immune to are _not okay._ "
|
| The victim in your knife attack had the opportunity to
| leave by never going to the grocery store. The fact they
| couldn't foresee that attack is solely because they lacked
| the information or cognitive ability to foresee it, just
| like an 80 IQ gambler with a Draftkings account lacks the
| information/cognitive ability to foresee the attack on him.
|
| So many people walk around with the implicit ethical system
| that 80 IQers don't deserve to have a decent life in the
| modern world. That is obviously despicable once it's stated
| explicitly.
| in-pursuit wrote:
| No, your argument is basically "all bad things are
| equivalent to knife attacks." Look, I'm not saying
| deception and scamming are "ok", I'm just saying
| comparing them to knife attacks is stupid.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| When it comes to suitability of blaming the victim for
| said crime, they are equivalent.
| spoonfeeder006 wrote:
| True, but I think the main issue is that neither is
| beneficial to society, genetically or otherwise. The main
| purpose of the knife attack analogy is to demonstrate
| that protecting against that involves skills that are
| useless if we can just eliminate the threat in the first
| place
|
| Many of us experience that knife attacks are not part of
| life, but perhaps we take for granted the existence of
| scammers?
|
| Granted, being able to protect against one self against a
| scam may include talents that carry over to other useful
| aspects of society building, but same with being able to
| fight off knife attacks
|
| And again the point is that, 1: those aren't the only
| beneficial aspects to society. someone without those
| talents may be brilliant in other ways, thus evolutionary
| pressure on that is not helpful. And even if someone
| isn't brilliant in other ways, we are all still valuable.
| Just ask a parent who raises a highly disabled kid, they
| will know this far more deeply than you or I do
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| > There's obviously a huge difference between a scam and a
| violent attack.
|
| I do not agree with that statement. You're just justifying
| anti-social behavior.
| in-pursuit wrote:
| Would you rather be scammed or stabbed? According to you,
| you should be indifferent. Personally, I'd prefer to be
| scammed.
| spoonfeeder006 wrote:
| I'd rather be mildly stabbed rather than scammed into an
| inescapable human trafficking pipeline
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >Whats the difference between "idiots have to be scammed" vs
| "people who can't fend off a knife fighter while en route to
| the grocery store have to be stabbed"?
|
| Consent.
| gcanyon wrote:
| You're missing a key word: _informed_ consent. Both are
| lacking that.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The gap between consent and informed consent is narrow.
|
| The gap between consent and threat of violence may as
| well be the grand canyon.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Interesting. For me, while I don't love the idea of being
| forced into something I don't want, psychologically I
| understand that my choice is being taken away. In the
| case of deception or fraud, I would feel complicit and
| stupid, and that would stick with me and burn a long
| time.
|
| I'm thinking about how people who are raped by force
| often feel ashamed, but also that people who are
| defrauded out of their money are also often too ashamed
| to come forward.
|
| Of course neither should be the case, but I don't think
| there's that much difference between the two, at least
| for me.
| orwin wrote:
| Social Darwinism is the cornerstone of protofascists, their
| main moral justification, so I'm not surprised to see it
| comeback tbh.
| kentrado wrote:
| That's where you make your fundamental mistake. We are not
| programmed for self preservation.
|
| Inside us, there are different drives that shape our behaviour.
| dlkf wrote:
| Now do drug-development.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| Is the person from Naples, perchance?
| epolanski wrote:
| No, her name is Wanna Marchi.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| > Her motto was "idiots _have_ to be scammed".
|
| So all Americans in context of health insurance? All Italians
| in context of their byzantine bureaucracy and taxation system?
| All Europeans in context of social and retirement systems? All
| developed world in context of housing market? It turned into
| dog eat dog "eat the sucker" attitude. On top of the hierarchy
| we got really nasty predators, they look at YOU and see an
| idiot sucker.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| > All Europeans in context of social and retirement systems?
|
| Can you please explain? You probably know something I don't
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| First demography of native populations, second the
| population from last decade's migration crisis don't seem
| to be contributing into the systems. Employed suckers think
| that 40% deduction from monthly paycheck is waiting there
| to help and save them in case of any troubles in the future
| or in the old age.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| Yeah, you probably into something. Very possible the
| social systems collapse at some point
| codr7 wrote:
| I don't know of a single case where a person actually got
| the retirement money they were promised along the way.
| rchaud wrote:
| Most of the social protections and regulations underpinning
| life in the 'developed world' came about due to the horrors
| of the Great Depression and World War II. States knew that
| without a social safety net, availability of jobs and
| housing, national unity would be impossible to have,
| especially with an expansionist Soviet Union next door.
|
| All of these lessons are being rapidly forgotten. Casino
| capitalism wrecked people's retirements in 2008. Almost 2
| decades on, housing costs are out of control for millions of
| working people, because private equity can buy homes with
| cash at 0%, while families have to show all sorts of
| creditworthiness for the privilege of paying 6%.
|
| On top of that, businesses that are already profitable
| (Google/FB, oil and gas, banks) are now charging even more
| because they can get away with it.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| Moreover, when this kind of attitude prevails, there are
| costs to the society at large. In a low-trust society,
| everyone needs to invest in walls around their house-
| compounds, and to avoid going out at night. You need to keep
| your wits about you to avoid scams and pickpockets -- mental
| energy that might otherwise go to other purposes. These small
| costs then compound across the whole of the society: There is
| less economic growth, there is less technological
| development. More individual wealth is required to maintain
| the same overall quality of life. Would you rather be a
| middle class person in 2024 or a medieval king? In those
| societies you're, at best, more like the medieval king. It's
| not as good.
|
| The solution to these kinds of game theoretic issues is
| strong social norms, and punishment for violation. If this
| woman is scamming people, she needs to face consequences --
| ideally within the official legal system, but perhaps also
| informally.
| jollyllama wrote:
| https://www.paulgraham.com/cornpone.html
| thrance wrote:
| I fail to notice anything natural about this selection.
| atulatul wrote:
| Exactly. We seem to refer to these ideas somewhat casually,
| don't we? For example, selfish gene, natural selection,
| entropy, etc.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| If you have the math chops, you should really try to get into it
| just so you can realize you are not going to make a money making
| algorithm. I got knee deep into it out of boredom during Covid
| and was able to have the "aha" moment where you realize the best
| you can do is buy index funds or just long hold companies you
| believe in that are in your area of expertise.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Isn't that how RenTech got started?
|
| From what I understand, that fund still does _huge_ gains, and
| can 't get too big.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| There's a lot of firms like that.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| If the gains are huge, it's either temporary luck or they're
| cheating. You cannot have long term high alpha without
| either. If you meet a person who can constantly flip a coin
| heads side up, ask them to keep going and they'll either fail
| or you'll find the coin is rigged.
| anon7725 wrote:
| "It's impossible for me to beat the market consistently"
| does not imply "nobody can beat the market consistently" or
| "nobody can beat the market consistently for a long enough
| time to become filthy rich".
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I didn't say it's impossible for just me, it's impossible
| for anyone.
| caminante wrote:
| RenTech's magic comes from their tax attorneys and
| creative accounting like their ploy to get long term
| capital gains treatment on daily trades! They've had to
| pay at least 7 billion in fines, which is an astronomical
| fine [0] and probably means they were doing even worse.
|
| [0] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/renaissance-
| executi...
| caminante wrote:
| The N=1 or handful of people that are your exception kind
| of prove the rule.
|
| Here's the thing...if you want to be pedantic, you need
| to explain how someone persists such alpha over time with
| examples. Not easy.
|
| edit: See my note below on RenTech.
| anon7725 wrote:
| I would think that the ways that people generate
| consistent alpha would include scale advantages,
| information asymmetry, execution advantages, geographical
| advantages and a strategic edge. Usually some combination
| of those factors.
|
| Someone like Warren Buffet has a once in a generation
| skill combined with massive scale and information
| advantage (he sees deals in publicly-traded stocks before
| anyone else). You may claim that it's not fair to cite
| Buffet here, but he's just the most public example of
| market actors with a durable advantage.
| caminante wrote:
| I fully agree Buffett is a one of a kind investor who's
| outperformed. I would love to have owned BRK shares, and
| still think you can't really go wrong owning them. That
| said, his performance v. S&P 500, a simple index, hasn't
| persisted. Basically, Buffett lost his advantages and
| even started making public bets that index funds would
| outperform actively managed funds.
|
| _> I did the math and starting from 1965 to 2002, a
| period of 38 years, the compounded annual return of the S
| &P 500 was 10.02% while that of Berkshire was 25.66%. But
| --and here's the kicker--from 2003 to 2022, a period of
| 20 years, the S&P 500 delivered a 9.80% compounded annual
| return while Berkshire came in lower at 9.75%._ [0]
|
| He's gotten fined for insider dealing by the SEC. And I
| figure that a lot of his "alpha" came in the earlier days
| of the markets when there was less regulation.
|
| FWIW, here's an interesting article on Buffett's alpha.
| [1]
|
| _> Previous researchers analyzing Buffett's returns
| using conventional size, value, and momentum factors
| haven't been able to adequately explain his
| outperformance, the authors say, leaving admirers to
| conclude that Buffett's magic is pure alpha. So they
| extend the analysis by testing Buffett's impressive
| returns -- as measured by Berkshire's stock -- against
| two factors that better reflect his folksy investing
| wisdom: One called "Betting Against Beta," which
| represents safe, low-beta stocks, and another called
| "Quality Minus Junk," which represents the stocks of
| high-quality companies that are profitable, growing, and
| paying dividends.
|
| The results? "Controlling for these factors," the authors
| write, "drives the alpha of Berkshire's public stock
| portfolio down to a statistically insignificant
| annualized 0.1%, meaning that these factors almost
| completely explain the performance of Buffett's public
| portfolio." The factors also explain "a large part" of
| Berkshire's overall stock return, the authors add, as
| well as Berkshire's private portfolio, insofar as their
| alphas also become statistically insignificant._
|
| [0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/warren-buffett-has-
| underperfo...
|
| [1] https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2012/09/11/ch
| asing-w...
| mdorazio wrote:
| RenTech was founded by legit signals processing guys who cut
| their teeth breaking codes for the NSA and basically invented
| ML for the stock market. They also built the best dataset in
| the world (at the time) for stock info as a competitive
| advantage. There's no real way to duplicate what they did
| today when everyone else is already doing quant trades to
| take advantage of suckers.
|
| Note: There's a great podcast on RenTech by Acquired:
| https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/renaissance-technologies
| matwood wrote:
| There's also a great book: https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-
| Solved-Market-Revolution/dp/0...
|
| They lost money for a long time, and it was not easy
| building what they built. I really enjoyed the early parts
| where they were solving problems in creative ways like any
| startup. For example, they needed data so had people
| calling them each day reading off numbers and someone
| writing them to down to enter them later.
|
| How the later part of the story ties to today's politics is
| also interesting.
| SavageBeast wrote:
| I tried for a long time with stocks, then I tried stock
| options. I eventually moved off to index and treasury futures.
| No money to be made in stocks, shitty leverage, high fees,
| LOUSY TAX TREATMENT and to complicate matters further shorting
| can be problematic. Also no "real" market is open 24h so you
| really just get to trade open-to-close standard hours. Stocks
| just have too many things going against you to make any money
| and thats before you figure your broker is front running you in
| the first place.
|
| My basic strategy is that the signal/news/data contains no real
| information beyond whether or not people are buying or selling.
| When they stop selling I start buying and vice versa. Use your
| data skills to identify "things that work with regularity" and
| "things that rarely ever work" while at the same time
| understanding "literally any strategy works SOMETIMES".
|
| Develop a roughly asymmetric strategy where your average gain
| is greater than your average loss per trade. The biggest thing
| you need is to pick some BIG WIN trades and ride them for a
| large profit. A small percentage of big wins pay for the losers
| and make the whole thing profitable. Remember that you "Make
| more money" by trading larger quantities, not by seeking larger
| moves. You don't "make money" so much as you harvest what the
| market gives you and if its not giving you close the trade.
| Your chosen trading system should reflect this.
|
| Size your trades such that if you're betting N shares with $Y
| dollars now and you take a loss, you're coming back to the
| table with at least N shares and $Y dollars. Never loose $100
| and find yourself in the position of recovering that loss with
| only $50 to play with. Read about "money management" in
| gambling for some ideas heres.
|
| Don't be afraid of the short side either as you will make about
| half your money there. Don't be afraid to bet agains the trend
| and "call bullshit" on a move - your system should be designed
| to detect the success rates of these calls and should be
| looking for those situations.
|
| For me its about using data to make bets where, in the event I
| win, I win pretty big and in the event I lose, I lose
| minimally.
|
| USE BRACKET ORDERS FOR ALL POSITIONS OR PERISH. AUTOMATE YOUR
| STRATEGY OR PERISH. ALWAYS TAKE YOUR TRADES OR PERISH.
|
| Making profitable trades here and there is EASY - keeping the
| money you made on those is the hard part.
|
| EDIT: If you're concerned about "slippage" you have a bad
| strategy. If the strategy can be undone by a .75pt slip then
| you need to consider something else.
|
| EDIT: Don't be seduced by the High Frequency Trading bullshit.
| You don't have the infrastructure for this and the fastest
| safest Rust code you can write is still connected to some slow
| retail trading infra here. Plenty of money to be made in Low
| Freq mode. 20 trades a month per instrument is a lot of trades
| a month!
| the__alchemist wrote:
| > No money to be made in stocks, shitty leverage, high fees,
| LOUSY TAX TREATMENT and to complicate matters further
| shorting can be problematic.
|
| Historic evidence does not support this statement in the
| strong sense. Whether it is true, in a weak sense, into the
| future, is debatable.
| SavageBeast wrote:
| There is only one truth: Monthly account statements.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Gambling addiction is so unrelateable to me. Likely real drugs
| sure, obsessive gaming, done that too. I think I'm to anxious to
| enjoy gambling with like that or something.
| jdefr89 wrote:
| Likewise! I can understand drugs and such... But gambling? At
| least with drugs you have a guaranteed reward. You purchase
| heroin and you use it, you're high. Task accomplished gambling
| it like "here's money so I might possibly get high if I'm
| lucky."
| matt3210 wrote:
| At one point I knew I could beat the market with l33t software
| skills. I was wrong and only realized it after donating about 3k
| to Wall Street.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Luckily you learned the lesson when you were young and only
| lost $3k instead of $3M when you were old.
| herval wrote:
| That's peanuts! Congrats for realizing it early
| freehorse wrote:
| I don't know OP but 3k can be a significant amount of money
| for some people esp when younger. I realise people often lose
| more, but that can also be because they have more money
| padding to lose.
| herval wrote:
| The stock market is an expensive addiction. If you read
| subreddits like r/wsb, you'll frequently see people losing
| hundreds of thousands of dollars, mortgaging houses,
| gambling their future on another 0dt option bet. It's a
| good thing he only lost 3k!
| btrettel wrote:
| Some folks' elementary or middle schools had stock picking
| lessons with fake money:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21642395
|
| From mine, all I remember was getting the impression that
| putting money in particular stocks without knowing what
| you're doing is a bad idea. Pretty valuable lesson, I guess,
| as I've never bought individual stocks since then...
| herval wrote:
| You might have learned the wrong lesson there, if your goal
| is to build wealth. But it's a good idea to prevent losses
| beacon294 wrote:
| Not really, indexing beats hedge fund managers over
| something like a 12 year stretch.
| herval wrote:
| hedge funds are not the same thing as picking individual
| stocks. Not even close. Index funds are an averaging
| mechanism to reduce risk, not to maximize return (you can
| easily beat the average by allocating on the p75 instead
| for instance)
| beacon294 wrote:
| The problem isn't allocating, it's reallocating
| correctly. That problem space is much more complex for an
| entrenched account.
| herval wrote:
| Fair, etfs do help with that
| jhghikvhu wrote:
| I'd be interested in something a little (but not a lot)
| higher risk reward than index, so I'd appreciate if you
| expand on this. What is the p75?
| herval wrote:
| Balancing your portfolio to include the top 25 or so best
| performing companies of the index
|
| Therefore ETFs that track that - eg $XLG is the s&p top
| 50. Unsurprisingly, consistently beats the s&p500. Same
| for $QQQ - in this case the skew is for more tech stocks
| (which were the best asset class in a decade)
| keyle wrote:
| We've all been there. The house always wins.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| Actually, we haven't _all_ been there. Some of us took to
| heart the lesson from _War Games_ (1983), and apply it
| liberally:
|
| "An interesting game Dr Falkon: The only way to win is not to
| play."
| keyle wrote:
| okay.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| I don't know if the stock market is really the same as
| Global Thermonuclear Warfare
| MrVandemar wrote:
| The principle can be broadly applied. The stock market
| and our society as a whole, the money never trickles
| down, it floods upwards, and the few people at the top
| will never be me, and it will never be you. Don't play
| the game.
|
| Reminds me of an _Andy Capp_ comic:
|
| Andy: I need to borrow a fiver to put on "Flighty Horse"
| at 5pm. It's a certainty! I can't lose!
|
| Flo: Where did we go on holiday?
|
| Andy: Yer mum's.
|
| Flo: Where did your bookmaker go on holiday?
|
| Andy: Jamaica.
|
| Flo: Think about it.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| But that's not true in the world of stocks. If all the stocks
| go up, all of the owners are richer. And they do tend to go
| up, at least on average.. in recent history.
|
| The futures and options markets are zero-sum. For every
| winner, there's an equal and opposite loser.
| WA wrote:
| Zero-sum is true for stocks, too, if your goal is to
| generate alpha. For every alpha-generating stock
| participant, another one must lose.
| User23 wrote:
| A 3k bankroll isn't remotely close to enough working capital to
| employ any kind of useful risk management strategy and get any
| kind of return worth the bother.
| bluGill wrote:
| Right but if you are wrong you are only out 3k. Many people
| with more money think they have a good strategy and lose a
| lot before they realize it wasn't bad luck and risk
| management but a bad idea.
| User23 wrote:
| Well it's true, you do need an idea. But good ideas aren't
| hard to come by when you understand basic risk management.
| Take for example recent events. Say your idea is if this
| election goes one way, it's neutral/slightly bearish for
| TSLA, if it goes the other way it's wildly bullish for
| TSLA. Since one possibility isn't going to result in much
| movement you ignore it. For the other one you structure
| some options trades to go long where gamma will runaway in
| your favor. Assuming polls are to be believed, you have a
| roughly 40% chance of that bet paying off, and you can
| structure it to pay off a heck of a lot better than 150%.
| And if you're wrong? Well them's the breaks, but your risk
| management strategy means you're still in the game to give
| it a shot at the next good idea. And even then you won't
| lose your whole bet unless you picked an extremely
| aggressive expiry.
|
| This is, incidentally, basically how VC works too.
| sokoloff wrote:
| You also need an idea that's somehow different from the
| rest of the market. (It's the difference of opinion/point
| of view that makes a market.)
|
| If everyone has the exact same expectations as you, no
| one is going to offer you the options trade structure at
| a price that would be profitable for you.
| User23 wrote:
| Of course, but at the scale of a responsible retail
| options gambler (think a high six to low seven figure
| bankroll, properly managed), you can pretty reliably find
| people willing to take the other side of your seeming
| long shot. The temptation to pick up pennies on the train
| tracks is ever present.
| bluGill wrote:
| Need for a different idea depends on the full size. If
| there are 10 shared available for $10, then nearly anyone
| could buy them all up and so all ideas are saturated at
| just one poor person. However if the idea is for a large
| company there are thousands of shared traded every day,
| and so if your idea is the company will go up in value
| almost nobody could buy enough shares to make a
| difference - even rich would struggle to find enough free
| money to move the value of the company by $1.
|
| In the market there are ideas on all levels, some really
| are the $100 trade that will make money but that is the
| most possible to trade. However many ideas are on the
| large end where there is plenty of room for more people.
| If you think a fortune 100 company is under valued by
| $10/share you can make a ton of money (assuming you are
| right of course) and safely tell all your friends without
| affecting your ability to make money.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > If you think a fortune 100 company is under valued by
| $10/share you can make a ton of money (assuming you are
| right of course)
|
| Inherent in this $10/share profit opportunity is that not
| everyone agrees with you. (If everyone did agree with
| you, the discrepancy/opportunity would collapse from $10
| to under a penny.)
| bluGill wrote:
| There is the risk. Those who don't agree might be right.
| However we can see at larger changes in price over a year
| all the time so sometimes the others are wrong.
|
| telling which is an evercise I can't help you with. I
| invest in index funds.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Eh, I started with not much more than that (PS5k) about ten
| years ago, and now have an eight figure equities portfolio,
| built entirely from that seed capital.
|
| All buy & hold forever, layered sell-off, buy the next thing,
| take some profit for me and the taxman. Enough moved into
| stable instruments (bonds, real estate) that I can afford to
| lose the whole shebang.
|
| So yeah, $3k is plenty, if you buy inevitable winners.
| Just... look at the broad sweep of the future and buy supply
| chains. Shovels in a gold rush and all that.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| I too don't understand why technical analysis isn't classified
| as a genre of fiction...
| thefounder wrote:
| I think some make money trading just that or am I wrong? I'm
| not talking about youtubers
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Some people win the lottery.
|
| You should still be skeptical if they try and sell you on
| their patented lottery number picking strategy.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| The market is a mind game. If enough market participants care
| about it, then it defacto becomes a signal to be aware of.
|
| In fact if you're a trader (not a long term investor) that
| manages to make money in the markets you will by definition
| use some form of technical analysis.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Ugh. I vividly remember when my stepfather tried to get me
| involved. He was retired, and had a nice nest egg built up
| from a small business. He was a smart man.
|
| But he was paying thousands of dollars per year for a monthly
| newsletter that contained <some brand of analysis>. And he
| patiently showed me how he started with a row in the table
| that met <his criteria> then followed to the column that met
| <other criteria> and that was the choice he made in the
| market.
|
| And I'm thinking, whatever information he's getting in that
| newsletter is _at least_ a month old by the time he gets it.
| And he 's not doing anything a program couldn't do, with the
| information in digital form. And he should know that -- he
| was a computer programmer earlier in life. As far as I could
| see, there was _zero_ chance he was beating anyone or
| anything with that technique, and starting in a several
| thousand dollar hole.
|
| Maybe I was wrong, but I don't think so.
| exe34 wrote:
| sounds like he had a hobby.
| n144q wrote:
| An expensive one.
|
| I'd spend that money on piano/drawing lessons or
| something. Or take a few trips around the world.
|
| Better return on investment.
| exe34 wrote:
| could have been worse - video games, prostitutes, etc.
| dgacmu wrote:
| I have net managed to beat the market.
|
| My estimate is that I've earned approximately $3/hour for the
| time I've spent doing so. And I was trading in such thinly
| traded options that it wasn't a matter of "scaling up" - I was
| literally only able to make money because I was picking up the
| pennies nobody else cared about.
|
| (And/or trading on events that were were rare, obvious, and in
| an area I understood, which also doesn't scale)
|
| Good fun and educational. Not quitting my day job. Because, of
| course, if you do the math on it, I've lost money playing the
| market relative to almost any other use of my time unless you
| consider it an investment in education and entertainment.
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| Did you consider writing a bot?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Automation carries... risks.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Folks have an unhealthy mentality about beating the market,
| imo. You don't need to beat the market if you're not a fund
| manager trying to advertise your record. You just need to do
| well.
|
| The market is up 27% YTD. Most global trends suggest, to me,
| a greater centralization of wealth into the US. Just dumping
| everything into the SP500 is likely more than great for 99%
| of people for the near future.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| You are correct. You just need to beat inflation. (So 27%
| vs. 2.7%? Pretty sure anyone can be a Wall Street wolf
| these days.)
| dgacmu wrote:
| I completely agree. Diversified low cost index funds are
| amazing. Matching "the market" has been a spectacular
| risk/return for a long time now.
|
| (And to be clear, I keep approximately all of our
| investments there. But I have a small puddle I play with to
| remind myself not to play with real money. :-)
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Just because the SP500 did +27% this year does not mean it
| will continue to do so.
|
| Historical data shows a more nuanced picture.
| iamthemonster wrote:
| Every so often I receive commercially sensitive information
| about my company which I'm not allowed to disclose before it's
| formally communicated to the stock market. For fun, I try to
| predict what impact it'll have on the share price (though of
| course I can't actually trade!)
|
| I can successfully predict the direction of the share price
| movement 50% of the time and successfully predict the magnitude
| of the share price movement 0% of the time.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| But in what time frame, can you predict that?
| iamthemonster wrote:
| None.
| foldr wrote:
| >I can successfully predict the direction of the share price
| movement 50% of the time
|
| 50% performance when there are two options is chance, no? So
| that just means that you can't predict it at all.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Technically there is a third possibility that the price
| will remain exactly the same. But the odds of that are even
| lower.
| peterdsharpe wrote:
| ...that's the joke.
| n144q wrote:
| Maybe consider using a stock market simulator, make trades
| based on inside information, and see where you end up in one
| year? That would be interesting.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| > only realized it after donating about 3k to Wall Street.
|
| An education in finance is expensive, not matter where you get
| it from.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| 3k is much, much cheaper than many college degrees, even from
| state schools with in-state tuition.
| dismalaf wrote:
| In the beginning, I donated about $10k to Wall Street. Got
| smarter, went to university for first finance, then economics.
| Learned to actually trade. Crushed the market, made nearly
| $100k annually with starting capital of only $30k. Then
| realized my life expenses were a significant part of that, I
| didn't have enough capital to grow it fast enough to both live
| life and accumulate capital to make trading more worthwhile
| than simply getting a job with that education. Getting a job +
| having easy passive investments (like a market fund) was less
| hours, less stress and more profitable than being a full time
| trader starting with a middling amount of capital. Also trading
| is less fulfilling than things like building, entrepreneurship,
| having a normal job plus hobbies, etc... Lots of traditional
| entrepreneurial paths also beat the market pretty handily.
| mancerayder wrote:
| It's good story but entrepreneurialism is a lot more than
| just a chosen career path, like teacher, software developer,
| product manager. It requires ideas, networking or
| connections, and usually capital.
|
| And then that leaves working the 9-5 (or if you're in IT it's
| more like 8 to 6), and maybe getting 10-20% of your salary in
| bonus at the end of the year.
|
| Rinse-repeat.
|
| Trading is at least exciting.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I've taken comfort in the thought that there are millions of
| people much more clever than me. If they have not figured out
| how to game the market there's no chance I will.
|
| So I don't even try.
| inopinatus wrote:
| TV adverts for day trading apps specifically target middle-aged
| men who think they know better than everyone else.
|
| Surprise! You do not
| smolder wrote:
| This title is stupid. Comparisons to crack cocaine should have
| stopped in the 90's or early 00's at the latest. They're never
| made by people who have the slightest idea about what idea crack
| was, and whoever wrote that is extremely out of touch.
|
| About crack: The public discourse was racist, the CIA had a lot
| to do with creating the problem, and in general it's no worse
| than the cocaine my fellow white people seem to think is so much
| cooler.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| You have to see real compulsive gambling in action. The
| comparison is not so far off (but still over the top).
| smolder wrote:
| I know what kind of havok a gambling addiction can cause, and
| it's no joke. It's powerful enough (for some people, at
| least) that a comparison to addictive drugs generally is apt,
| yet the traps are everywhere and usually legal. Exploiting
| the psychological weakness that underpins gambling addiction
| is something sought after and optimized for outside of overt
| gambling, like modern video game mechanics, social media,
| cryptocurrency, retail stock investment, and so on.
|
| In reflecting on _why_ it 's so addictive, I've come to
| believe there's a sort of feeling of adventure in random
| outcomes --that people like the entropy as well as the wins.
|
| That said, going back to what I said before, my issue with
| the title of the article is with invoking crack specifically
| as some _especially scary_ super-addictive thing, which is an
| idea that was over-hyped at one time. They could have just
| said cocaine, or better yet, made a comparison to opiates,
| but they 're playing to an old and incorrect bias.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| You have to see real crack addiction in action. It's not
| over-hyped at all. It's just that not everyone gets
| addicted to it.
|
| People get hung up on physical addiction, but the mental
| obsession is the real destroyer. Most folks aren't wired
| for that kind of obsession. They can get physically
| addicted to opiates, quit, and never go back. I've seen
| exactly that. I've also seen folks become so obsessed with
| pot, that it makes your worst Central Casting street junkie
| look tame, by comparison.
|
| True addicts don't need physical addiction. It's a mental
| disorder that doesn't make sense to most people, but it's
| definitely there.
| smolder wrote:
| Well I can't say I've known any crack addicts really,
| only met a couple people who have tried it. I've known
| some people who got into cocaine and were never quite the
| same, though. Also some people who started out fairly
| respectable, got into opiates, may or may not have robbed
| people and betrayed friends and family in service of the
| addiction, and then died to it.
|
| But my criticism of the 'crack is scary' meme isn't
| coming from personal experience, really. From what I've
| read and from what I understand of the chemistry, and
| having lived through the era where crack was all over the
| news, and where possession of the drug got the harshest
| sentences... I do believe it was relatively over-hyped,
| and that a big part of what made crack scary is that it
| was something poor black people in cities did.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I lived in Downtown Baltimore, from 1980-83.
|
| It was always a fairly gritty, blue-collar town, but
| crack moved in around '83, and that's when it became _The
| Wire_. Before, I could walk through some of the toughest
| neighborhoods in town, and it would be OK (I was fairly
| scruffy, back then, but no Billy Badass). Nowadays, even
| the nice areas are a bit scary.
|
| Crack was focused on, a lot, and there was definitely a
| racial aspect to law enforcement and hysteria, but the
| drug is still quite nasty. It's more like the focus on
| cocaine was muted, as opposed to the focus on crack being
| overwrought.
|
| That said, gambling can have extremely similar outcomes.
| You don't want to stray too far from The Strip, in Vegas
| or Atlantic City.
|
| Desperate people can get fairly rapacious; regardless of
| the source of their desperation.
| ericyd wrote:
| Respectfully, it feels slightly rude to suggest that
| gambling addiction is due to psychological weakness.
| Perhaps that's your view, but I don't think it matches the
| modern medical perspective on addiction.
| smolder wrote:
| Well, I didn't mean it as an insult. More along the lines
| of our innate biases that take work to overcome, or maybe
| the optical illusions that the human visual system is
| prone to.
| prashp wrote:
| Hey look, it's Ryan from The Office
| smolder wrote:
| I had to google it, but I guess you're insinuating that I've
| done crack?
|
| Fact is, it's smoked cocaine, and the level of scaremongering
| about it was pretty absurd compared to powder cocaine,
| amphetamine, or opiates, all arguably just as bad.
| prashp wrote:
| That's not what I'm insinuating.
|
| https://youtu.be/eDiU2p2uzVI?feature=shared
| GuB-42 wrote:
| By someone who tried both cocaine (snorted) and crack (smoked),
| the craving is much stronger with crack. That's because it is
| much faster acting, it also wears off faster, and he said that
| part of him was ready to get violent for an other dose as it
| happened. Other than that, the effect was similar, it is the
| same molecule after all.
|
| It is common to smoked drugs in general. For what I know,
| smoking is the fastest route of administration. That instant
| gratification makes it more addictive than slower routes of
| administration, like snorting in this case.
|
| It doesn't mean the laws weren't racist, but crack cocaine _is_
| more addictive.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| It is worse than powder cocaine though, just as meth is worse
| than an extended release Adderall despite both being
| amphetamine variants. I believe meth (a "white people drug")
| carries harsher penalties than other forms of amphetamine?
| zahlman wrote:
| Powder cocaine cannot be smoked at all
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_base) and smoking anything
| naturally carries additional risks.
|
| If it didn't make a meaningful difference in the experience but
| only increased the legal penalties, there would be no good
| reason for dealers to prepare crack, yet they did.
|
| Nothing about a the race of a cocaine addict compels that
| addict to prefer one form or the other.
|
| The comparison is made as a metaphor for strong addiction
| exactly because of the old political connotation. Those don't
| just go away. There are almost certainly more addictive
| substances out there; that is completely irrelevant to how
| humans use language. I would argue, even the phrase "crack
| cocaine" has more sticking power because of the phonetics.
| dismalaf wrote:
| The most difficult part about the stock market is that stocks
| don't move for the reasons people think.
|
| People think fundamentals, news, financial performance, or chart
| patterns matter. But none of it does.
|
| Markets are driven purely by supply and demand. And in this case,
| supply and demand for the stock itself.
|
| Fundamentals are already priced in. Financial performance is
| already priced in. Expectations are priced in, and others
| probably have more information than you anyway. Other people also
| watch chart patterns and place their bets based on that.
|
| What you're betting on is whether the market is right, or wrong.
| Or whether other investors will think the market is right or
| wrong.
|
| Edit - the other part of it is that Wall Street firms hire tons
| of people who are incredibly smart, have math, economics and
| finance degrees or even PhDs, hire software engineers and spend
| hundreds of millions on infrastructure just to know the market
| better than you. You're not smarter than all those people put
| together.
| jfengel wrote:
| In the long term fundamentals will matter. But the market can
| remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
|
| Ordinarily I would say that an investment in a broad index for
| the long term (a decade or more) is always wise, and there's no
| point in trying to time it more specifically than that. However
| right now it's been irrationally exuberant for a long time.
| it's going to have to correct itself... Either tomorrow or
| another ten years.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Depends. If the fundamentals are already good, they're priced
| in, you probably have little upside, even long term. Maybe
| you'll just match the market. You have to think the
| fundamentals will improve over time more than the market
| expects to beat the market.
|
| Long term, I think economics has more to do with market
| performance. Stocks rise as the money supply expands and
| capital has no where else to go.
| jfengel wrote:
| You can't beat the market but you don't need to. The
| ordinary returns of GDP growth are pretty good.
|
| The free money has definitely been screwing with GDP as a
| base. I'm still unclear on why the Fed would lower interest
| rates when the market is fine, the GDP is fine, and
| inflation is still slightly above baseline 2%. I know
| everyone is yelling for the punch bowl to come back but now
| would be a good time to pay down some debts.
| dismalaf wrote:
| > You can't beat the market but you don't need to.
|
| You can, it's just difficult. Plenty of (mostly
| professional) traders and hedge funds do. The knowledge
| gap between amateurs and pros is just massive, as is the
| time they have to monitor their holdings.
| matwood wrote:
| > I'm still unclear on why the Fed would lower interest
| rates
|
| There's a lot of space between where they started (0%)
| and where they topped (5.5%) and where they are now
| (4.5%).
|
| As you approach a stop sign, do you wait to brake until
| you're at the sign or do you start slowing down as you
| approach?
|
| At 5.5% the Fed became concerned (and I think rightly so)
| that they could overshoot into deflation territory so
| they stated easing to what they consider a current
| neutral position - somewhere in the 2.5% - 3% range.
| bluGill wrote:
| The market is not efficent. The fundamentals are only partialy
| priced in. However finding the times when the difference is
| significant is not easy.
| dismalaf wrote:
| The market is definitely efficient. Try to find arbitrage
| opportunities (which is what actual market inefficiency is);
| they disappear in milliseconds.
|
| What you're saying is that it's not infallible as far as
| predictive power is concerned, which is true. But every
| current bit of knowledge is definitely priced in.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| Markets are efficient over long time spans but in short
| term are definitely inefficient. You can just look at
| volatility during earnings and lack of liquidity in small
| caps.
| Ologn wrote:
| > Expectations are priced in, and others probably have more
| information than you anyway.
|
| I have always made money on the stock market. I bought Nvidia
| in December 2022 and then again in April 2023. Yes the
| information was out there - anyone reading this board back then
| could see it. Or who saw Emad Mostaque's tweets that Stable
| Diffusion was trained on Nvidia, or who knew the semi-public
| information that OpenAI trained on Nvidia. I bought and it
| quadrupled in two years when averaging out. The expectations on
| this board were not priced in the market then.
|
| When FAANG and more b2b tech companies (Salesforce, Oracle)
| tanked in 2022 I poured money into tech indexes like IYW and
| IGV. Not as much as into Nvidia, but they were good companies
| and finally and unusually cheap. They went way up too.
|
| I was making money in the 1990s buying SGI, Sun Microsystems,
| Netscape, Cisco etc. No brainers for me.
|
| Only two losses I recall - Cascade, a router company whose
| stock dipped and was bought ny US Robotics on the dip (1990s?).
| Also some ad company which was crushed by competition with
| Google.
|
| I completely disagree with your premise. I don't even know how
| to make a neural network in Pytorch, nor can I do matrix math
| with NumPy. But in December 2022 Nvidia seemed worth the risk,
| and by April of last year a lot of that risk evaporated with a
| huge potential upside. I knew the stock was cheap and all the
| PhDs on Wall Street did not. Also, they are stuck in a
| bureaucracy - I used to work in IT for a major investment bank
| in Manhattan. Watch the Big Short on the pressure the people
| who were right got from their management and investors. I don't
| have that pressure, it is my money.
|
| We, the people here, do get insights which are not priced in.
| It's not that there is no risk, but the coin flip sometimes
| goes 51% in our favor. Sometimes even 52% (or 53%...or 60%).
| This is how Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch etc. made money.
|
| Read the Wall Street analyses from the middle of last year on
| AMD being a big Nvidia competitor, then read the posts here
| this week about how AMD engineers don't have boards to fix
| bugs. "We the customer had to mail the AMD engineer a spare
| board to fix the bug". The cobbler's children wear no shoes at
| AMD. Then go read some Wall Street report about the stiff
| competition Nvidia faces from AMD. The information is here, not
| in the Wall Street analysis report by people who know less than
| me about how transformers work.
| programmertote wrote:
| > Read the Wall Street analyses from the middle of last year
| on AMD being a big Nvidia competitor, then read the posts
| here this week about how AMD engineers don't have boards to
| fix bugs. "We the customer had to mail the AMD engineer a
| spare board to fix the bug". The cobbler's children wear no
| shoes at AMD. Then go read some Wall Street report about the
| stiff competition Nvidia faces from AMD. The information is
| here, not in the Wall Street analysis report by people who
| know less than me about how transformers work.
|
| Are you saying that AMD will not be a serious competitor to
| NVIDIA?
| tester756 wrote:
| The second company benefiting from AI Broadcom, not AMD.
| Ologn wrote:
| I am saying several different things. For your question,
| the farther out in the future, the more uncertain it is.
| The stock analyses from the middle of last year which
| talked about the threat of AMD in a more immediate tone
| were obviously wrong. Some of the analysis now that talks
| about the short-term threat of AMD does not jibe with what
| programmers here working with AMD have said in threads this
| week. Or what George Hotz or others are saying about buggy
| AMD chips.
|
| One point is we here know certain things here that stock
| analysts looking at the last quarterly report do not. The
| short-term threat of AMD was certainly overstated by Wall
| Street last year, and in my opinion still is.
|
| If we stop talking in terms of months and start talking in
| terms of years, it is harder to tell. Maybe AMD will get
| its act together and give Nvidia a run for its money. Maybe
| not. For 2025, I don't think AMD will have much effect on
| Nvidia though.
| Hercuros wrote:
| For every story like this, there's another story where
| everything moves in the opposite direction.
| Terr_ wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1827/
| soulofmischief wrote:
| This is known as the Efficient Market Hypothesis, and having an
| edge against this requires specialization and focus in specific
| industries in which you have significant knowledge. That, or
| learning to recognize when the market is surprised by an
| outcome, and acting fast.
| guybedo wrote:
| I don't think it's as easy as "supply / demand" and everything
| is priced in.
|
| There's many forces at play here, and many different ways to
| play the game.
|
| Markets are not that efficient, not everything is priced in.
| Earnings would have 0 effect on price if that was the case for
| example.
|
| Whether you play the market on higher timeframes or on lower
| timeframes, different factors come in to play.
|
| I think it's obvious that chart patterns are a thing,
| (shameless plug here: i'm building https://edgefound.xyz, an
| app to create and backtest complex trading setups). It's
| actually interesting how many patterns (or setups) repeat
| across markets and timeframes. Mostly because prices are set by
| traders and traders react in the same way to the same events /
| price movements.
| Animats wrote:
| Wait until the WSJ discovers memecoins.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Lots of luck involved, even if someone think skill was involved.
| You will see many hedge fund have down years and go bankrupt, all
| of these hedge funds have "skill" like every one else
| impish9208 wrote:
| Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42473081
| dang wrote:
| On HN a post only counts as a dupe if it got significant
| attention, which that one didn't (only 3 points and 2 comments
| - but we'll merge the comments hither)
|
| When an article hasn't had significant attention yet, we let
| reposts through (after 8 hours) - this is on purpose, to give
| good articles multiple chances at getting attention.
|
| Of course that leaves the submitters in a bit of a lottery
| situation, but it at least evens out in the long run if you
| keep submitting good articles!
| impish9208 wrote:
| Understood, thanks dang! I think sometimes I just get annoyed
| because I see something I posted earlier getting reposted.
| I'll try not to let it get to me going forward lol.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| The problem is, they are "trading" from smartphone apps. Remember
| this - no money will ever inflow into your bank account from
| scrolling and tapping.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| What's old is new again.
|
| If you worked in a tech office in the late 90's, every other guy
| had Ameritrade or similar up in a window. It was the gaming/porn
| you could get away with at work.
|
| Dot com roasted them all.
| ajross wrote:
| As did 2008. A bull market is a hell of a drug, as it were. And
| yes, we're probably headed for another big correction in the
| near to medium term future.
| matwood wrote:
| > If you worked in a tech office
|
| Office? ;)
|
| I was trading stocks in between my CS classes in the late 90s
| lol
| Bluestein wrote:
| Same. Good times.-
| rchaud wrote:
| Wasn't it still $10/trade back then? That adds user friction,
| which discourages the gambling aspect much more than "free"
| trades provided by Robinhood (free as in they'll sell your
| order flow data to third parties).
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Robinhood is an ironic name for the app that enables retail
| investors get cleaned out by the rich at scale.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I pay my brokerage about that, which is fine, as it works out
| as less than 0.1% of my average deal - and it's usually at
| least five years between a buy and a sell.
|
| When people complain about brokerage fees, or are pleased
| that their brokerage charge no fees, it usually means they
| will be losing their shirt at some point.
|
| Volatility trading is for masochists on _actual_ cocaine, and
| suckers.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| There are structural changes that make it much easier to
| convert trading into gambling. Feeless trades and easy access
| to margin accounts and more advanced vehicles means that you
| can easily make dozens of high risk trades in a single day.
| matsemann wrote:
| The other day at the store, in my smaaaall hometown, I overheard
| the cashier and an older man discuss crypto while I was waiting
| for my turn. They were discussing meme-coins they gambled on.
| Super weird to hear irl.
| davidw wrote:
| Sounds like shoeshine boy time.
| udev4096 wrote:
| The supposed "survey" or whatever the hell this is was taken from
| a bunch of amateur people who started trading out of boredom
| which depicts an entirely non-real picture of the people who have
| been doing this for a living since quite some time. Like with
| everything else, using your brain cells can quickly make you
| realize it's a lot more than "gambling"
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _a bunch of amateur people who started trading out of
| boredom_
|
| Former options market maker. The industry was dead for a decade
| until the pandemic. It's now more profitable than ever. Lots of
| negative-alpha orders that can be predictably sorted from the
| flow. Market makers are seeing casino-like margins on some
| subsets of flow; that signals a problem.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It's hilarious watching the r/Superstonks subreddit live in a
| pretend reality. Supposedly Citadel is their sworn enemy but
| they've spent the past 4 years purposely buying badly priced
| shares from them.
|
| How do you educate someone so confidently and consistently
| wrong in their world? Someone who INSISTS that "No, this
| letter from BBBY that says that we are going to see massive
| share dilution when 500k new shares are printed and sold to
| pay down debts before the company is shut down, is a lie
| because they actually are going to magically transform into a
| new competitor against Amazon because Ryan Cohen (a man who
| was only part of BBBY for like a month) is going to be the
| new CEO and make us all rich"
|
| When those shares dropped at an obviously stupid price with
| zero future value, they bought them by the hundreds and
| LITERALLY wrote "thank you for the tasty dip"
| bluepizza wrote:
| > Like with everything else, using your brain cells can quickly
| make you realize it's a lot more than "gambling"
|
| Which sounds similar to how gambling addicts report their
| thoughts on their addiction - that they are smart enough to
| learn poker, or they know enough basketball to be able to
| predict outcomes.
|
| Like with everything else, some research and data
| interpretation shows that with the remarkable exception of two
| or three highly specialized companies that employ some of the
| best mathematicians alive, most active investors underperform.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| This comment should not be greyed out. See the Buffett Bet
| [1] for the most famous example of this.
|
| Warren Buffet bet a million against Ted Seides (head of
| Protege at the time) that a simple index fund investment
| would outperform any handpicked selection of hedge funds over
| a decade. And critically this bet was made in 2008 just
| before the market crashed! That's when hedge funds should
| disproportionately shine, as per their name, by hedging. In
| the end it wasn't even close.
|
| [1] - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/030916/
| buffe...
| directevolve wrote:
| I think it would be much better if the comments here
| focused on the benefits of passive, long term investments
| in index funds. As it is, I worry people will "correct" by
| leaving money in a savings account instead.
| mancerayder wrote:
| >Which sounds similar to how gambling addicts report their
| thoughts on their addiction - that they are smart enough to
| learn poker, or they know enough basketball to be able to
| predict outcomes.
|
| Some people _are_ smart enough to learn poker, and build
| careers out of them. And there are many books on poker. You
| picked a poor example.
| bluepizza wrote:
| A gambling addict thinks they can learn to play poker
| because there is a small elite of professional poker
| players.
|
| Which is exactly what an amateur trader thinks - I will
| learn to beat the market, because Ray Dalio did.
|
| I used the poker example precisely because of this parallel
| between a very small elite and an overwhelming majority of
| loss makers.
| mancerayder wrote:
| You're right in that sense that people think they can
| learn to be the best, and fail at it, as only few
| succeed. The game wouldn't have tournaments if that were
| true no one could consistently win financially.
|
| You're also right that it triggers the addiction itch in
| some vulnerable individuals!
|
| I play poker and would never be stupid enough to put real
| money on it. It's great as a social game for me where 25
| dollars is the risk.
|
| Don't hate the game...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I play poker and would never be stupid enough to put
| real money on it_
|
| This whole thread is casinos arguing against regulation
| because casual poker players don't get addicted. We have
| billions of dollars targeting young people (mostly single
| young men) with gambling, from zero-day options trading
| to crypto and sports betting.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| There are plenty of people who are trading with a strategy.
| There are also oodles of people who are engaging with trading
| in precisely the same way that somebody engages with sports
| betting. And various platforms are using similar marketing and
| ux strategies as betting platforms to encourage this.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Note this article isn't about investing, it's about gambling.
|
| It doesn't mention Robinhood's role in promoting addictive
| gambling behaviors. How much has it changed since this 2020
| article? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/technology/robinhood-
| risk...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > After funding his account with $15,000 in credit card
| advances
|
| Wow. Stop right there.
| itake wrote:
| Young people can take risks that seem crazy to us older
| folks, because they have way more time to recover.
|
| If you leverage invest early in life, even if it completely
| wipes you out (once), you can leverage your way back into
| money.
| djsnoopy wrote:
| Well, it's harder then you're letting on if your leverage
| costs 20%+.
| itake wrote:
| Apple is up 40% this year, VOO is up 27%.
|
| 20% cost and you're still ahead
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| Yes if the market goes up a lot you win. That's generally
| how leverage works. The problem is when it goes down. Or,
| if you're borrowing at high interest, doesn't go up quite
| as much. (Which leads to many people selling, which
| drives the price down, which leads to selling, and so
| on).
| n144q wrote:
| And what if Apple is not up 40% this year?
|
| Apple was down 24% during Dec 2021-Dec 2022. It could
| have happened this year, could happen next year. Nobody
| knows.
|
| By comparison, VOO was down 18% during that period. If
| you put money in Treasury bonds, you come out positive.
|
| My point is that there is a reason behind many practical,
| reasonable financial advice instead of "cash advance at
| 20%, and if you are lucky, you could still be ahead".
| jondwillis wrote:
| At this point I'm just watching a slightly younger cohort of men
| repeat all of my worst digital addiction mistakes like getting
| inserted into the online video game -> toxic online behavior
| pipeline (or worse, fascism), ideologies (Musk), crypto and
| options gambling (thanks Reddit a la 2013 for all of the crypto
| communities and WSB) too much computer (ouch, my neck, arms and
| back.)
|
| I'm not doing particularly well, especially mentally, despite
| having tons of opportunity and successes. Worried about the
| younger cohorts, but I guess that is a tale as old as time.
| siltcakes wrote:
| Are they also drinking tons of soda? I can't believe how much I
| used to drink. I don't touch any drink with sugar (other than
| lactose/latte) nowadays. It's so disgusting, don't know how I
| ever did it in the first place.
| hashishen wrote:
| God my teeth wish i had just stopped drinking soda a decade
| ago. It wasnt even that hard to kick
| xattt wrote:
| How much of that was soda, and how much was it access to
| preventative care?
| mplewis wrote:
| If you're drinking soda daily, your teeth are coated in
| acidic liquid for hours a day. This is incredibly
| damaging to your enamel.
| jazz9k wrote:
| Dental care is cheap and insurace is usually sub
| $100/month (at least in the US)
| iknowSFR wrote:
| Broad brushstrokes incoming and pure speculation but I wrote
| it out anyway...
|
| Today's youth are more proactive with their identities these
| days than we were. We were and remain reactive with our
| identities. That preference influences what triggers the
| dopamine hits needed for life.
|
| The drugs of a reactive identity culture are sugar, alcohol,
| narcotics, work, anything that's a trope in movies made by
| boomers. These drugs have consequences that shape the user's
| identity. For example: weight gain or burnout.
|
| But the drugs of a proactive identity culture are those that
| drive the person's perception of their identity. The live
| ahead of the consequences. Things like digital social
| networks, status symbols like shoes, colleges, or jobs, and
| anything that drives success in those status symbols.
| Example: Adderall helps the user study, which helps the user
| get better grades, which opens the door to a better college,
| which allows the user to flaunt that college association as
| part of their identity. That doesn't mean there aren't
| consequences to those drugs but those consequences aren't
| tropes of modern life just yet because we're still
| normalizing their outcomes.
|
| All of this to say: sodas aren't their thing because soda is
| "unhealthy" and that drags on their identity.
| stonedge wrote:
| > Today's youth are more proactive with their identities
| these days than we were.
|
| I wanted to echo this and say that I believe younger people
| create a "symphony" with their identity; picking and
| choosing from various sub-cultures to create a unique
| combination. Flexible, morphing.
| rcpt wrote:
| Gen Z uses a lot more steroids which tracks with your
| analysis.
|
| But also I think you're falling for sample bias. The ones
| who don't have a billion followers are overweight and
| generally less healthy than previous generations.
| jajko wrote:
| And more depressed since massive quick/instant success is
| seemingly everywhere, apart from their own hands. Cancer
| if social media at its best, spreading depression like
| chemtrails.
|
| This breeds greed for status & perceived success and 0
| patience to get there. You see it here on HN all the time
| when talking economy and real estate - young people
| complaining how they they cant own some well located nice
| house right now, how everything is shit and their future
| stolen, despite stats saying exactly the opposite. Where
| the fuck is at least a bit of decency to wait a decade of
| hard effort for such a success? Thats shit for losers,
| nobody got time for that.
|
| How I feel sorry for them, all the added value of
| technology is nothing compared to what they 'lost' or
| more like never experienced. At least many of them, the
| vocal majority, the rest goes on just like we did
| rcpt wrote:
| Ok but housing is legit screwed up.
| b800h wrote:
| What a brilliant observation.
|
| Has anything else been written online about proactive vs.
| reactive identities, and particularly - how this has
| changed historically. Could it have been the case that
| prior to television, generations (for example "The Greatest
| Generation") grew up with a proactive identity culture, due
| to having a more proactively social culture?
| nntwozz wrote:
| "Our youth now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt
| for authority; they show disrespect for elders, and they
| love to chatter instead of exercise. Children are now
| tyrants not servants of their household. They no longer
| rise when elders enter the room."
|
| -- Socrates
| MndlshnDscpl wrote:
| This is a famous misattribution typically used to state
| generational views have always been the same.
| Unfortunately its not Socrates, but actually Kenneth
| Freeman, Cambridge, 1907.
| mckirk wrote:
| A very interesting observation. I wonder though if the
| difference is genuinely a different kind of self-
| understanding between the generations, or more a question
| of the prevalence of these two approaches to identity. I
| think in my generation there were also plenty of people
| that at least tried to be 'proactive' about their identity
| building (and greatly valued status symbols etc), but I
| believe it was not as common, because this meme of 'seeing
| yourself as your own brand and wanting/needing to market
| yourself' was not as prominent. Maybe there even were,
| relatively speaking, more people back then that actively
| tried to avoid the 'status games', because they were still
| easier to escape then -- but that's just speculation, and
| certainly influenced by my own aversion to these games and
| hence my own youth.
| intended wrote:
| Wsb was 2013??
| mminer237 wrote:
| It existed at least: https://web.archive.org/web/201212180253
| 12/http://www.reddit...
| alumic wrote:
| I remember the "community" having its own well-defined memes
| and culture by at least 2016
| lm28469 wrote:
| I feel like the patterns are more or less the same but the
| cycles are getting shorter and more pronounced.
|
| I met the son of a family friend today, he's 13, already has an
| opinion about the Israel/Palestine war and spent $500 in roblox
| so far, they're not wealthy at all. Back in my days I was stuck
| in the free to play parts of mmorpgs (or had to beg for months
| for a $5 monthly membership), playing tf2 (free) and had 0
| political ideas or even knew people who cared about politics
| onemoresoop wrote:
| $500 in Roblox? that's a lot of money for a 13 year old and
| that money could likely be spent elsewhere... As far as the
| opinion about Israel/Palestine it's likely that opinion is
| inherited from family or cohort and it's not fully their own.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I recall in grade school in the 80's lots of kids had
| opinions on Jews, Poles, black folks, gay folks, etc.
| Clearly, all acquired from relatives.
|
| Young people emulating the adults in their life is how it
| always has been.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Oh yea I was a big Republican when I was in high school
| because I went to a private school and all my friends
| were also Republicans (except the theater students). We
| were all Republicans because our parents were
| Republicans.
|
| Then I got several years in the workforce and realized I
| wanted nothing to do with the Republican party.
| guelo wrote:
| If you don't have decades of built up propaganda it's pretty
| easy to see that Israel is the bad guy. The condescending
| "it's complicated" line is part of the propaganda telling you
| that you're not allowed to come to the obvious conclusion for
| yourself. My 10 year has figured out that Russia is the bad
| guy in Ukraine and that Israel is the bad guy in Gaza.
| portaouflop wrote:
| Must be nice if politics is just good and bad guys for you.
|
| It should give you some pause that a 10 yo has the same
| level of understanding of global politics.
| speakfreely wrote:
| Yes, it's pretty scary that anyone sees things so black
| and white and would encourage their children to do the
| same. These are multi-decade conflicts where no one has
| clean hands.
| guelo wrote:
| 10 year olds can figure out that killing children for 14
| months is evil . That everyone can't see that is the
| power of propaganda.
| speakfreely wrote:
| I suspect most parents would be prepared to risk the
| lives of strangers' children if it stopped their own from
| being killed.
| blitzar wrote:
| Some of you may die, but it is a sacrifice I am willing
| to make.
| wruza wrote:
| People know it's evil, they are just unwilling to point
| it out because driving the conflict into some resolution
| is already hard without these simplistic views which
| helped no one before and continue to do so. Kid's naivety
| is just that, naivety. Put him into a rulers chair
| (either side), provide all the factual info with zero
| propaganda and see him trying to escape at all costs,
| because all decisions including doing nothing make people
| die or worse. At some point you just have to choose sides
| without much meaning attached to it.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > Must be nice if politics is just good and bad guys for
| you.
|
| Some politics are more complicated. Other politics are
| treated as more complicated because people get
| uncomfortable when you point out that they're casually
| endorsing-via-silence the mass murder of one group of
| people by another.
|
| There's nothing complicated there. If you as a nation
| state or standing army are obliterating an opponent that
| can't fight back in a meaningful way, with lethal force,
| along an ethnic or racial line, that's a genocide. That's
| just what that is. The past year of desperate attempts by
| the West to re-frame it as something else have not been
| successful for exactly that reason.
|
| And before you say it, no Palestine is not innocent. But
| unless I missed some pretty radical court proceedings in
| the UN, the punishment for their crimes as a state was
| not ruled to be "Israel gets to ethnically cleanse you"
| which is what is now happening.
|
| > It should give you some pause that a 10 yo has the same
| level of understanding of global politics.
|
| Kids aren't inherently stupid either. Kids have a lot of
| good questions to ask about our modern world and the fact
| that you don't have answers beyond "that's the way it
| always has been" both a) does not make that complete
| horseshit far more often than not, and b) does not make
| the question somehow lesser compared to you, irrespective
| of how many journey's around the sun they've taken.
| wruza wrote:
| Good, what's your plan of resolution?
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I answered you in the other comment, but my "resolution"
| would've been not carving out a chunk of a number of
| middle eastern former colonies and turning it into a
| Jewish ethnostate. But that's done now, and now Israelis
| have lived there for so long that simply "packing it up"
| and moving them elsewhere is now also, if not equally
| IMO, problematic as an action.
|
| Israel is itself a project of the latter end of
| colonialism, and like many projects and side-effects and
| consequences of colonialism, we will be feeling it for
| hundreds if not thousands of years into the future. I
| don't know how you fix it, apart from letting Israel
| demolish Palestine, and all the human horror that comes
| with that.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| > I answered you in the other comment, but my
| "resolution" would've been not carving out a chunk of a
| number of middle eastern former colonies and turning it
| into a Jewish ethnostate. But that's done now, and now
| Israelis have lived there for so long that simply
| "packing it up" and moving them elsewhere is now also, if
| not equally IMO, problematic as an action.
|
| That's a lot of words to say you have no resolution.
|
| > I don't know how you fix it, apart from letting Israel
| demolish Palestine, and all the human horror that comes
| with that.
|
| I see. Maybe you do have a resolution.
| SkipperCat wrote:
| Israel is not the product of "the latter end of
| colonialism". It was the product of the Holocaust, which
| occurred just three years before its founding.
|
| Should Europe have used Palestine for this purpose, that
| is debatable. But to lump it into the same colonial
| endeavors such as England's occupation of India or
| Belgium's occupation of the Congo just doesn't add up.
| pseudonamed wrote:
| Complex entities such as states can be the product of
| many things.
| xcv123 wrote:
| That is an oversimplification of history
|
| https://www.britannica.com/event/Balfour-Declaration
| SkipperCat wrote:
| Yes, there was a lot of factors, going back years before
| WWII, but I still believe that the aftermath of the
| Holocaust was major contributing factor to the creation
| of the State of Israel.
|
| https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/holocaust-
| factor...
|
| The Holocaust created hundreds of thousands of European
| Jewish refugees and international sympathy which had an
| effect on the UN vote for statehood.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I don't take issue with the creation of Israel as a means
| to put all the displaced Jews somewhere. I take issue
| with that the land provided for this project was taken
| without the consent of any of the nations from which it
| was taken, which _is colonialism_ and why it 's
| impossible to separate Israel from the colonialist roots
| that helped create it. Just as it's impossible to not see
| it as an act of Western dominance towards the middle east
| to whom it was done. Like, there's no reason at all
| (apart from latent, extremely quiet antisemitism on the
| part of the Allied powers post WWII that they didn't want
| to discuss) that all those refugees couldn't have been
| subsumed into any of these countries, especially America,
| who at the time was boasting not only the only economy
| not obliterated by WWII, but also shit tons of open land.
| We could've absolutely made room for all the Jews that
| would be sent to colonize Israel (yes I chose that word
| on purpose).
|
| However localizing it in an area none of them had any
| stake in was better politically, and yeah it meant
| pissing off basically every neighboring country to
| Israel, but that was also in line with the other
| priorities the West was holding: a strategic, permanent
| emplacement in the middle eastern region that would not
| ever oppose Western interests in any way, because it owed
| it's existence to the West.
|
| It's a brilliant strategy overall as long as you ignore
| how it treated entire swaths of humanity as beneath
| consideration for what their own futures looked like, as
| long as those swaths of humanity were darker in
| complexion than yourself.
| daseiner1 wrote:
| That is not at all the definition of genocide. Israel is
| not pursuing a strategy of indiscriminate killing. Hard
| to take anyone seriously making such good/evil
| distinctions, especially when the they are not reckoning
| with the evil of Hamas & co. beyond "well gee shucks
| Palestine ain't perfect either yall!"
|
| Only one side has the state md objective of "ethnic
| cleansing" and it's not the Israelis
| defrost wrote:
| There's no shortage of material in print calling for the
| destruction of Gaza, the non personhood of Palestinians,
| etc. from Israel ministers and commentators from before
| the October attacks by Hamas.
|
| You can, for example, look to the Journal of Genocide
| Research at articles that draw parallels between
| Holocaust scholar Eugene's Finkel's declaration of
| Ukraine as a genocidal event and his point by point
| justification and similar parallels with Israel and Gaza.
|
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.202
| 4.2...
|
| There's no shortage of evidence of extremists in power on
| both sides calling for the destruction of the other.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > Israel is not pursuing a strategy of indiscriminate
| killing.
|
| No they're pursuing a strategy of using intelligence and
| AI to strategically target "Hamas hideouts" which both
| conveniently for the state of Israel and in fact are
| often civilian structures, which result in tremendous
| "accidental" civilian casualties, which Israel is clearly
| _incredibly broken up about_ as they continue causing
| them week after week.
|
| In reply to both this and the other person who's asking
| for my solution: I don't know, because fighting insurgent
| forces in any area of the globe at virtually any time in
| human history has only rarely succeeded for the non-
| insurgent side, and universally that success came at the
| cost of numerous atrocities perpetrated against the
| insurgent forces and the civilians they hide amongst. The
| most powerful military on the planet tried this exact
| same thing in Iraq, and 2 decades and trillions of
| dollars later, we left the Taliban and ISIS billions of
| dollars in U.S. war materiel, and the state of Iraq such
| as it was was quickly overrun by those same forces which
| enjoyed at least some level of support among the
| civilians they were hiding with, probably because it's
| extremely easy, even if they don't think you give a shit
| about them, to explain to people that the other side
| shelling their cities to rubble every day are bad people
| that are trying to kill them. Shock of shocks, even
| civilians largely against the ideological positions of
| organizations like Hamas, end up more or less on their
| side, because again, the other side is Israel, who is
| actively killing them, accidentally or not making
| precious little difference to the people at the wrong end
| of their missile strikes.
|
| I would say, with a grain of salt as I am not even
| remotely in this line of work, but I would say: when your
| enemy combatants are sheltered by a civilian population,
| do not possess a standing traditional army that would
| otherwise meet you on a field of battle, and are prepared
| to carry this out as long as your state is: then there is
| no solution, apart from killing everyone. The problem is
| the more civilians you kill in your quest to kill the
| combatants simply makes your combatants job of recruiting
| people to their cause even easier, because you killed
| their family in the previous bombing run. Ergo, the
| logical endpoint of this cycle is either returning to the
| stalemate that has persisted for decades now, where Hamas
| takes pot shots at Israel from neighborhoods, or the
| Israeli's just finishing the job and turning Palestine
| and what remains of her people into dust and corpses.
| Simply openly declaring that one state, Israel, and her
| people, have a greater right to exist than Palestine and
| her people do, and let that play out.
|
| However, that is an ethnic cleansing, and IMO, still a
| heinous crime against humanity unless we're just going to
| plunk down some UN courts and say, once and for all, that
| a resistance movement fighting inside a besieged state is
| such an impossible strategic puzzle to solve, that it's
| okay to just obliterate the entire fucking thing. Which
| is an option, though I think it's a pretty horrific one.
| speakfreely wrote:
| > If you don't have decades of built up propaganda
|
| But how are you so sure that doesn't apply to you?
| guelo wrote:
| I'm saying it doesn't apply to my 10 year old
| speakfreely wrote:
| Properly propagandized parents have no issue letting
| their perspectives flow to their children.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Well he didn't have decades of propaganda but still roots
| for Israel... I didn't mention this subject there because I
| have better things to do with my time than ruin Christmas
| by talking politics with teenagers so I can't tell you
| where he got that from
| hipadev23 wrote:
| When I was 13 I had a paper route and mowed lawns, and with
| those earnings I spent about $75 per month on video games and
| comic books, easily exceeding $500 over a year.
| ghxst wrote:
| This to me on a surface level this seems totally fine,
| however I can't help to feel conflicted when that money is
| being spent on some of the more "predatory" games like
| gachas, however I'm not sure if it's really too different
| from kids spending their money on pokemon cards either. Do
| you feel different about those or would you say it's the
| same thing?
| hipadev23 wrote:
| There's nothing to say it was predatory games. Roblox is
| a platform with a vast number of games from unaffiliated
| developers.
| ghxst wrote:
| Oh yeah I should have clarified my post wasn't
| necessarily aimed at Roblox but rather generally
| speaking.
| rsanek wrote:
| i mean they're pretty affiliated, they develop games that
| only work on their platform and get paid by Roblox
| directly.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| The developers themselves are anyone who wants to make
| and publish games is my point, and unaffiliated with own
| another. And those developers are free to build and
| monetize games however they want. Just like other closed-
| ecosystem (e.g. iOS) game devs.
| daseiner1 wrote:
| It really is not beyond the reach of a motivated and curious
| 13 year old to have an informed opinion on (geo)politics.
| sangnoir wrote:
| You don't gave to be particularly motivated to get
| predigested opinions from influencers. There's too damn
| many boys and young men echoing how the "Matrix" keeping
| them down
| daseiner1 wrote:
| Sure, but that has little to do with age. To rephrase in
| terms of an older crowd, there's too many damn 60+ year
| old men parroting what they hear on conservative AM talk
| radio. But there are, nevertheless, 60+ year old men with
| well informed and well considered opinions.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Yes.
|
| As you noted, the first[1] batch of mass-media
| "influencers" were AM Radio hosts, then came cable
| infotainment , and now vloggers.
|
| 1. Perhaps preceded by syndicated newspaper columnists,
| but there was an editorial filter for those.
| Tade0 wrote:
| It's normal for 13 year olds to have strong opinions on such
| topics - they have plenty of time to refine them or even
| change their mind.
|
| I would be more worried about those who by this age didn't
| develop any interest in geopolitics - it affects them all the
| same but they typically don't understand why and pick
| whatever source tells a more compelling story.
| hollerith wrote:
| When I was 13 (in the US in the 1970s) none of my
| classmates or friends ever expressed any interest in
| geopolitics or international relations.
| xxpor wrote:
| No one had an opinion about Vietnam? I was 13 in 2003,
| plenty of people had an opinion about 9/11, civil
| liberties, and Iraq.
| hollerith wrote:
| I don't recall any opinions about Vietnam and would
| probably have remembered if someone had expressed an
| opinion to me.
|
| And the war or whatever we call the situation in Gaza
| would be something I'd want to shield my 13-year-old
| child from having any knowledge of if I were a parent --
| for basically the same reason I'd want to shield them
| from learning about sadomasochistic sex as long as
| possible.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I guess it's part of growing up when there's no longer
| any living memory of war on your soil.
|
| Anyway I need to ask the same question I always do in
| such conversations: what's the plan when this
| hypothetical child hits legal age and immediately
| receives the legal right to learn about all of this at
| once?
| Sam713 wrote:
| Just curious, why would you want to shield them from
| reality? At 13 they're only a few years from becoming a
| full fledged adult. Unsheltered life is coming at them
| fast. I don't have children yet, so maybe my perspective
| would change if I did, but (while I would not
| intentionally expose them to harsher realities) I would
| never shield my kids. Instead, I would want them to be
| curious and ask questions while I still had a large
| influence in their lives, so that I could help guide them
| and give them tools and strategies to navigate a complex
| world. I experienced a fairly sheltered
| (religious/conservative) upbringing socially, but we had
| a subscription to US News & World report during the
| height of the GWOT which I read cover to cover. I
| understood geopolitics before I understood how to make
| friends. My transition to adult life was tough socially,
| but I at least had a decent understanding of how the
| world worked on a macro scale. If children are not
| sheltered socially, then they're already encountering
| pretty much everything through their social circles. And
| with the internet, 10x+ that.
| netsharc wrote:
| That's probably the benefit of you not being 24/7 glued
| to the broadcast system called social media. I imagine in
| the 70s you spent your time mostly with friends in real
| life, and geopolitics was just 10 easily missable minutes
| on TV every evening.
|
| Sure maybe there's a minority of kids with social
| media/smartphone bans nowadays, but they're probably as
| plentiful as 13 year olds interested in geopolitics in
| the 1970s.
|
| I browse Instagram's TikTok clone ("Reels") when idle,
| it's rather dull, when that hurricane hit a few weeks
| ago, the stories were all about that, a few days later it
| was forgotten. Obviously, lately it's been about Luigi
| Mangione...
| Tade0 wrote:
| You don't need social media to be aware of what's going
| on in the world.
|
| At 13 (early 2000ish) I was reading the newspapers my
| parents brought home and debated a friend of mine who in
| turn read his parents' newspapers - mutually exclusive
| sets from opposite ends of the political spectrum.
|
| I need ask: when is the best moment to, as a parent,
| introduce a young person to the news cycle? You'll
| inevitably have to since they're on their way to become
| voters and taxpayers.
| mezzie2 wrote:
| You don't even need newspapers or debates, sometimes
| _existing_ leads children to politics. I 'm a similar age
| to you, and social media didn't exist yet but I had
| political opinions.
|
| My first independent political opinion (if we can expand
| politics to include techno/digital politics and not just
| national/state/local government politics) was formed at
| the age of 4/5. Just from reading discussions and
| arguments around me.
|
| And, as a girl and a lesbian, I was starting to read
| ideological theory in part to cope with my life situation
| pretty early: I followed news about gay issues because I
| knew I was gay at 6/7 and it was clear that some people
| were okay with that and some were very much not and I
| needed to know the difference. Likewise with being female
| - the switch up in how I was treated by men when I
| crossed the pubescent threshold led me to seeking out
| books/works/discussions on feminism (as well as arguments
| against it). Suddenly, people cared a lot more about my
| body than they ever had before, and as an intellectual
| child, I wanted to understand what was going on.
|
| I'd expect that's even more common now and extends to new
| groups of people. I know I've seen young men/teenage boys
| talk about how a lot of anti-male sentiment filters down
| and makes them feel terrible and also having to deal with
| their own switch in puberty where people go from feeling
| protective of them to scared of them.
|
| A lot of politics and the news cycle has to do with
| domestic cultural issues, and many children are very
| aware of those by the time they reach 9 or 10.
|
| International politics is something that a lot of
| _adults_ don 't engage with on any meaningful level, and
| conflating the news/political awareness solely with
| international military conflict would be an error, I
| think.
|
| I think the best time to introduce children to politics
| and the news cycle is when they start asking questions
| about why the world is the way it is, or why different
| families/places do things differently than their own
| family or culture. Or when something political touches
| their life in a very personal way: e.g. the Japanese-
| American children being interned during WWII would have
| to be introduced to politics. This is going to vary by
| child; I don't think there is a hard and fast rule.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| online games aren't the problem imo, it's disposable identities
| and ~zero repercussions for bad actors.
| portaouflop wrote:
| The remedy is far worse than the problem
| hipadev23 wrote:
| Yeah I don't know how you preserve much-needed anonymity,
| while also binding humans to their personas and holding
| them accountable for their actions.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Why do you believe anonymity is "much-needed"? Human
| society was built for tens of thousands of years on "stay
| away from Ben because he has a bad habit of not paying
| back what you loan him"
|
| Anonymity is _new_ and probably not something the human
| brain, which isn 't meant to handle more than a few
| hundred familiar faces, can manage reasonably.
|
| If you want anonymity 200 years ago, you had to print
| your own pamphlets and hand them out on the corner in a
| costume and hope nobody recognized you. Then you would go
| to church on sunday where the entire community would
| gossip about everyone's "sins" after the service.
|
| Human history was radically more transparent about who
| was doing what, and who was saying what.
|
| Nobody standing on a sop-box ever wore a mask, and while
| most used pseudonyms or pen names, there were only so
| many printing presses in the colonies, but that didn't
| stop the American rebels from spreading their claims.
| growse wrote:
| The need for anonymity is in the face of enormously
| concentrated organised mass surveillance and power.
|
| So, yes, it's relatively new. But it's not the only thing
| that's new.
| teddyh wrote:
| Anonymity is, in fact, quite crucial to a _surprisingly
| wide_ range of people: <https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/
| wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22R...>
| Manuel_D wrote:
| That page doesn't make a very compelling argument. Yes,
| bullying and harassment without an anonymous identity is
| potentially more damaging. But nowhere does it seem to
| consider that many of the bullies and harassers would
| only dare do so with an anonymous identity.
|
| Which has the better culture? 4chan, or professional
| settings and churches? Non-anonymous settings almost
| universally have better culture because people's behavior
| has an impact on their social standing in their
| community.
| portaouflop wrote:
| How do you define "better culture"?
|
| I wouldn't say you can compare churches and 4chan - one
| is an online activity with millions of people around the
| world joining; the other is a highly intimate affair
| conducted in a small community.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > They expect the problem to worsen. The stock market has climbed
| 23% this year...
|
| The problem will resolve itself if (when?) the market crashes.
|
| I remember the run up to the dot-com bust. I was too much of a
| bumpkin at the time to even know how I would trade stocks -- but
| I listened to an acquaintance go on and on about how much he was
| making on the market.
|
| At the time I guessed that he was much smarter than me -- that it
| would take me years to become as investment-savvy as this guy
| was.
|
| In time, especially after the next bubble in 2008 when I had
| become more savvy, I came to see this guy as having been in the
| market at a time when even a monkey throwing darts could look
| like Warren Buffet.
|
| So too I think are many of today's investors. (I would include
| myself but perhaps not: I have been won over by Boglism, a
| balanced portfolio, infrequent trading, etc.)
| Pooge wrote:
| I have to disagree with you. Comparing long-term, passive
| investors to short-term speculators seems unfair and simplistic
| to me.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I thought we were talking exclusively about short-term
| speculators.
| Pooge wrote:
| Oh? Perhaps I misunderstood when you said "infrequent
| trading".
|
| I'm also wondering why I'm getting downvoted but this is
| the Internet for me :)
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| > At the time I guessed that he was much smarter than me --
| that it would take me years to become as investment-savvy as
| this guy was.
|
| You lucked out by mistakingly believing he was intelligent. The
| classic scenario is when your neighbor is obviously an idiot,
| making tremendous amounts of money in the market, and you have
| to explain to your spouse why you can't/won't emulate them.
| That's when even bright, (normally) level-headed people start
| piling in before the bubble bursts.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Indeed, most frustrating is when someone (stupid) is proven
| right, even though they used completely wrong reasoning (in
| spirit of Gettier problem).
| sgerenser wrote:
| There's a common saying in the investing world that applies
| here: "confusing strategy with outcome." The outcome may be
| good, as it was in this case, even though the strategy was
| terrible. But most people get them confused and think it's
| the strategy (going all in on bitcoin or TSLA options or
| whatever) that was good and won them their riches.
| fullshark wrote:
| The Gov't / Federal Reserve has made it clear they will not let
| the value of assets drop significantly ever again. The entire
| planet's capital is now betting on US equities going up and to
| right forever, and all levers will be used and invented
| wholesale from nothing to keep that going.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| At some point though something will happen such that they
| can't keep their fist on the scale, and then the market can
| correct suddenly.
|
| Unfortunately government intervention makes it even more
| unpredictable when that will be.
| delfinom wrote:
| Yea, except the inflation we encountered in the last 3 years
| were directly from trying to keep asset values from dropping.
| They are at their ropes end. There really isn't that much
| room between mass inflation vs. the rich keeping their
| numbers infinity growing.
| selectodude wrote:
| That's a fundamental misunderstanding of asset prices vs
| interest rates.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Exactly. The "crash" can happen via exploding inflation, or
| falling markets. Either way results in the same thing.
| omnee wrote:
| This implies that a sustained crash will only happen if/when
| these two institutions are no longer capable of supporting
| the market. In effect, it's a bet against the US, which so
| far has been a losing one.
| kortilla wrote:
| The federal reserve literally just got through a monetary
| tightening policy that paid zero regard to the stock market.
|
| The fed will juice to keep employment up and tighten to keep
| inflation down. They will not support stocks at the expense
| of those mandates
| roenxi wrote:
| We're dealing with people who interpret the words "price
| stability" to mean "prices should increase exponentially,
| we'd consider it a serious problem if they stayed level".
| It seems a bit of a stretch to go from that to believing
| that their mandate constrains them somehow. Their mandate
| can be interpreted to mean whatever they want it to mean.
| They're a political beast, they're going to do whatever
| they can get away with politically while making life
| comfortable for the banks.
|
| And I'd imagine the stock market is still fairly confident
| that rates are going back down. If we look at a chart of
| fed interest rates [0] the statistical evidence suggests
| we're going to see low rates in the near future. It'd be
| nice to buck the trend and have the US stay focused on
| prosperity but there isn't much evidence of it yet. The
| basic plan of high debt then inflating the debt away hasn't
| changed.
|
| [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfunds
| snowwrestler wrote:
| It's impossible to keep prices perfectly steady, the Fed
| could not possibly be that precise. If they tried, we
| would bounce back and forth between inflation and
| deflation, which would be incredibly destabilizing to
| long-term investment... and therefore destabilizing to
| job growth and capital improvement, innovation, etc.
|
| So instead the Fed aims for a small amount of inflation.
| That way when they miss a bit, we still stay out of
| deflation. It is much better to bounce between 2% and 3%
| than between -1% and 1%.
|
| If the goal was actually to inflate the debt away, they
| would be aiming higher. Proof: the debt has been growing
| in real terms, not shrinking.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| The Fed has stated that one benefit of a small amount of
| inflation is that it provides employers with a mechanism
| to effectively revise wages downward without employees
| quitting (by denying them an annual raise), but yes -
| they have never stated that they are trying to inflate
| the debt away.
| nr378 wrote:
| The Federal Reserve targeting "price stability" literally
| does mean that they target prices increasing
| exponentially by an average of 2% per year[1]. The
| mathematical form is P(t) = P0(1.02), where P0 is the
| initial price level and t is time in years.
|
| [1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/economy-at-a-glance-
| inflation...
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| There's more to assets than US equities, the Fed would be far
| more concerned with serious weakness in the Treasury market,
| and Treasuries often move inverse of US equities.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| Certainly hope they'll keep going to the right...
| bilater wrote:
| This is easy to say but the reality is being a monkey and
| throwing money in the market over the last 15 years would have
| made you f u money. Yet most people never did it. So who is the
| genius: the guy who remains on the sidelines and eventually is
| proved right or the guy who remained in the market and did face
| a brutal correction. One thing I've learned about myself is
| that I'll never be the guy on the right end of that mid curve
| meme so I might as well lean in on being on the left.
| mordymoop wrote:
| The problem is that I have been seeing some version of the
| "crash imminent, sell everything" thesis for my entire life.
| Almost nobody who "saw the crash coming" in the case of the
| dotcom bubble, or covid, or the subprime crisis made any money,
| because almost nobody gets the timing or magnitude of the crash
| right. You can find YouTube channels that have been warning
| people that a crash is imminent for the last two years. If you
| had been out of the market for the last two years you would
| have missed historical gains, and for what? The magnitude of
| the crash you're protecting yourself from would now have to be
| impractically huge for you to come out ahead.
|
| Much better to just stay in the market, knowing that there will
| be crashes and you will have days where the numbers look awful,
| because they'll look great again in a few years.
| kortilla wrote:
| The risk of a crash is why you stay out of single stock
| concentration and why you avoid day trading. Its not an
| argument to stay out of the market.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| This is the reason dollar-cost-averaging works. You buy less
| (shares) when the market is high, and more when it is low,
| without thinking about it and without trying to "time" your
| transactions (which almost always fails unless you have
| inside info).
| regresscheck wrote:
| It works in a sense of not timing the market. Lump sum
| beats dollar-cost averaging - because you have more time in
| market.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Sure, if you have a lump sum to start with.
|
| But dollar-cost-averaging beats saving up a lump sum and
| then investing.
| dmoy wrote:
| I think the phrase you're looking for is "automatic
| investing" or something, not DCA. DCA is usually framed
| explicitly as a counterpart to lump sum of an existing
| pile of money
| SoftTalker wrote:
| DCA in my understanding is automatically investing a
| fixed amount at fixed intervals. E.g. $100/month, or
| whatever. The amount and interval aren't all that
| critical. The point is to do it automatically and not try
| to time the market.
|
| Yes I also have heard the advice to dollar cost average a
| lump sum, not so much in the scenario of a rollover of an
| existing investment, but when a large amount of cash has
| become available for some reason. I guess the theory
| there is you won't risk putting it all in at a market
| high point. If you average it in over a year in a
| declining market, you're better off. If you average it in
| to a rising market you're worse off than if you had
| invested it all up front. Trying to guess which of these
| scenarios is going to happen is trying to time the
| market. I'm sure people have done the research --
| intuitively, if you're investing for the long term,
| better to put it all in at once. But there are probably
| risk tolerance considerations.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| A year is pretty extreme. If you cut a lump sum into a
| series of transactions over a couple weeks or even days
| it is just about the least expensive way to exchange
| earning potential for reduced volatility. You miss out on
| like 2 weeks of earnings in exchange for a huge reduction
| in the chance that you buy in and are immediately down 2%
| or something.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| You can do both. You can invest the entire amount, but
| make it short/medium bond heavy on Day 1. As you go thru
| the year, you rotate more and more of your fixed income
| allocation towards equity until you reach your target
| equity %. This is relevant if, for example, you downsized
| your home or received a retirement payout.
| patrick451 wrote:
| There's just as much probability that you miss out on a
| big swing up as there is that you miss a big a drop.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| It's not the big swings you're trying to avoid, you're
| just trying to average together a bunch of interday minor
| ups and downs so your starting price is not as volatile.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Depending on the definition of "beating". On average
| investing right away is better but the variance of
| outcomes is higher.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| On average across all investors. Not so much if you
| invested at the peak of dot.com (would have taken decades
| to break even) or even the covid bubble.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Dollar cost averaging does not work and has never worked.
| Because most assets have unlimited upside and unlimited
| downside. A stock or asset can go ballistic for decades
| like Apple or Bitcoin, or it can fall to zero value.
|
| There are no mathematical ways of winning investing. If it
| was that easy, everybody would do it. You can only follow
| your heart and do your due diligence.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| > Because most assets have unlimited upside and unlimited
| downside. A stock or asset can go ballistic for decades
| like Apple or Bitcoin, or it can fall to zero value
|
| Spot equities and crypto have limited downside. You put
| in x, most you can lose is x as you observed. Unlimited
| downside is not a thing outside certain exotic
| derivatives.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I didn't mean the upside/downside on your investment, but
| on the asset. Most investment assets except for bullion
| can fall to 0. They can also increase without an upper
| limit, like for example Apple stock. The market being
| "high" or "low" is not remedied by dollar cost averaging.
| liontwist wrote:
| You're misusing the term "unlimited downside" which is
| why you were corrected. Shorting stock is an example of
| unlimited downside.
|
| What dollar cost averaging does is reduce short time
| price risk. The result is the long term.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Even if zero is the bottom, an asset can have unlimited
| downside. It can go from $0.1 per share to $0.0001 per
| share and so on without end. Or, with the rational
| perspective, after 0 the downside does not matter
| anymore. An asset cannot go below zero, at least the
| assets I know of. An investment can go below zero and
| beyond, when you use leverage. But that's a derivative
| and not an asset, as you've pointed out.
|
| What I mean is that dollar cost averaging is a myth and
| cargo culting in the world of investment. Let me explain:
|
| Let's say you're "dollar cost averaging" by purchasing an
| asset during a few years, which fluctuates between $90
| and $110. So after some time you have averaged around
| $100 per share. Now if the asset goes to $5000 next year,
| what has your dollar cost averaging accomplished? Or if
| it goes to $3, what has your dollar cost averaging
| accomplished. Nothing in both cases.
|
| One of the hardest myths about investment, that seems to
| be impossible to beat out of people's heads even with a
| sledge hammer, is that there is a proper historical price
| for an asset and that prices only fluctuate around that
| price. So you buy when it's under that price and sell
| when it's over that price. Smart, right? No, it's dumb
| and the reason why most people trying to invest lose
| their money. An asset can go down and stay down on a new
| price level. Or it can go up and stay up on a new price
| level.
| abduhl wrote:
| >> Even if zero is the bottom, an asset can have
| unlimited downside. It can go from $0.1 per share to
| $0.0001 per share and so on without end. Or, with the
| rational perspective, after 0 the downside does not
| matter anymore. An asset cannot go below zero, at least
| the assets I know of. An investment can go below zero and
| beyond, when you use leverage. But that's a derivative
| and not an asset, as you've pointed out.
|
| This is drivel. Being able to tag on infinite 0s after
| the decimal doesn't make an asset have unlimited
| downside, the limit is $0 as you yourself apparently
| know.
| stocknoob wrote:
| X to 0 is an interesting definition of unlimited.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Unlimited in ratio, I guess.
| stocknoob wrote:
| Even then, brokers just show a percent loss of -100%. Our
| buddy would never see the cool infinity symbol.
|
| It's too bad they aren't a fan of dollar cost averaging
| into broad index funds, I think their older self would
| thank them.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| My investments have always had fantastic results, far
| above what any index fund could render. I have been
| forced to involuntary "dollar cost averaging" by having
| to wait for the next salary in order to invest more. But
| "dollar cost averaging" is not an investment strategy,
| it's confusion on the highest level.
| IshKebab wrote:
| So what you're saying is you avoid timing the market (which
| doesn't work) by timing when you buy shares? What?
| dpkirchner wrote:
| You buy at a regular cadence, and sometimes it's low and
| others it's high, but on average you do OK.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| No. You invest the same amount of money at a regular
| cadence throughout the year. The end result is that you
| obtain less shares when the price is high, and more
| shares when the price is low. It's explicitly not timing
| the market.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's implicitly timing the market. If you have all the
| money available at the beginning of the year a better
| strategy is to just invest everything asap.
|
| If you get the money monthly (e.g. from salary) then
| that's just normal investing and you don't have a choice
| anyway.
|
| If you think that is some clever strategy then honestly
| you probably should get professional advice because you
| have some fundamental misunderstandings of the stock
| market.
| Huppie wrote:
| Heh, I totally agree with you.
|
| I don't know hoe many times I've explained people the
| given strategy is not what researchers mean when they
| compare lump sum investing (LSI, a.k.a. converting all
| cash you have available for investing into equities) and
| dollar-cost averaging (DCA, a.k.a. splitting the
| available cash into equal parts and slowly converting the
| cash into equities at a regular pace.)
|
| What that strategy is is just a regular (e.g. monthly)
| series of lump sum investments every time cash comes
| available (e.g. when salary comes in), that people tend
| to confuse with a DCA strategy.
|
| Having said that: one LSI investment every month is a
| great strategy that historically does better than any DCA
| strategy.
|
| ETA:
|
| Relevant research:
|
| - Vanguard Research's Dollar-cost Averaging is Just
| Taking Risk Later:
| https://www.passiveinvestingaustralia.com/wp-
| content/uploads... - PWL Capital / Ben Felix's Dollar
| Cost Averaging v.s. Lump Sum Investing:
| https://pwlcapital.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Dollar-
| Cos...
| stouset wrote:
| Please everyone note that there is a long-standing and
| somewhat pointless argument over whether or not DCA means
| "regular monthly contributions" versus "taking a lump sum
| contribution and dividing it up into contributions over
| time".
|
| Strictly speaking time in the market beats timing in the
| market. If you have a lump sum, the theoretically best
| option is to put it into an index fund today.
|
| Most people in most situations _don't_ have one lump sum to
| invest, so recurrent monthly contributions to retirement
| accounts is the way to go (and what OP here is advocating).
| CocaKoala wrote:
| I remember at one point a couple years ago, I saw a thread on
| the Bogleheads forum where people could basically call their
| shot on market crashes; they would post and timestamp when
| they exited the market and when they re-entered, so that
| people could go and calculate if the timing was correct or if
| they lost money by missing out on market growth.
|
| I might not have the dates correct, but I remember the
| general strokes of one guy who decided in like 2017 or
| something that the market had topped out, the crash was
| coming any moment now, and he sold everything and called his
| shot. He missed out on three years of incredible gains, and
| then the market absolutely _crashed_ in early 2020. He got it
| right, by a very small amount; he had gotten more selling his
| positions than he would have gotten selling in march 2020. He
| buys back in at what ended up being the absolute nadir of the
| market in like april 2020 or something. The rare success
| story of timing the market, you love to see it.
|
| And then a few days later, he decides that actually, no, the
| market still has more to drop, and he sells again. Oh well.
| usefulcat wrote:
| > He buys back in at what ended up being the absolute nadir
| of the market in like april 2020 or something. The rare
| success story of timing the market, you love to see it.
|
| The stock market usually goes down faster than it goes up,
| which makes it slightly easier (well, less difficult
| anyway) to time the bottoms than to time the tops.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Yes, the problem with market timing is it requires _two_
| decisions that for the marginal investor are
| _inconsistent_. That 's why people who sell at a high fail
| to reenter at a low, and also why people who stay invested
| at the high remain fully invested long after prices revert
| to a much lower level.
|
| This suggests the answer is... fundamental analysis, which
| neither camp is doing.....
| cj wrote:
| Agreed this sort of advice is standard - but many people
| don't follow it because it's boring.
|
| One way to make this sort of advice "not boring" is to apply
| the advice to 90% of your net worth (or cash flow), but then
| give yourself permission to "gamble" with the other 10%.
|
| For me, that has fulfilled my personal interest in playing
| around in the markets for fun while still building/growing a
| traditional "safe" portfolio at the same time.
| fragmede wrote:
| This is the way. Boring is, well, boring. Slice off some
| small percentage to do high risk investments with to sate
| your FOMO. Buy GME, sell it for Doge, and short TSLA with
| that pool after inhaling too much r/WSB because you want to
| think you're a genius.
| stouset wrote:
| Why do I need to get my ya-yas off gambling _any_ part of
| my retirement? There is zero coherent nor compelling
| reason to tie your enjoyment of gambling to the size of
| your portfolio.
|
| To be clear I'm not opposed to gambling. I enjoy
| occasionally going to the local poker room and have an
| established bankroll. I have plenty of fun at $1/$2
| tables even though the buyin is a fraction of a fraction
| of my net worth. I am mildly profitable in the long run,
| but nobody sane would suggest I'd be better off at the
| $100/$200 tables even though my Vanguard balance could
| easily support it.
|
| All of this advice to keep it at 10% also ignores what
| happens when you lose most of that. Do you restart with a
| new 10%? Ideally no, but that's really unsatisfying to
| somebody who's enjoying their new day trading hobby.
|
| Honestly just save yourself the headache. Put your nest
| egg into index funds and find some other way to make your
| life exciting. Gamble with pocket change from your
| entertainment budget. Or maybe even just don't.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| For those who need it, it is a way to manage impulse
| control. Not everyone needs it, but some people do.
|
| GLP-1s may regulate it (via anti addiction mechanisms
| observed), more data to come in that regard.
| stouset wrote:
| For those who "need" it, you are really playing with
| fire. It's not like chasing after losses to turn things
| around is a particularly rare response.
|
| We're in a thread under an article revealing how more and
| more people are falling victim to gambling addiction
| through the stock market. I'm not convinced that "you
| should just gamble _some_ of your life savings" is the
| best suggestion for most people.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| I just always buy and never sell until the leadership and the
| board of the company appear to be going full retard. And not
| in a good way like Netflix pivoting to streaming in 2006 but
| like HP in 2006. Haha.
| kacesensitive wrote:
| What was the last sell you did?
| mnky9800n wrote:
| the last big one was BABA.
| nytesky wrote:
| I assume PP means they are staying out of leveraged bets and
| risky individual stocks.
|
| Generally the saw it coming crowd is just sticking it in
| diversified index and bond funds and doing other things.
| jarsin wrote:
| The SPY and QQQ charts zoomed out are starting to look like the
| biggest parabola of all time in markets. 1999 is just a blip on
| this monster.
|
| Seeing all kinds of warning signs from family members who never
| traded or got into crypto until just this past 6 months.
| xcv123 wrote:
| Change the chart to logarithmic scaling. You need to use log
| scaling for long term stock market charts
|
| The dotcom crash was huge in terms of the percentage drop
|
| Nasdaq crashed 84%.
|
| https://www.tradingview.com/x/xm2zypvg/
| CliveBloomers wrote:
| > Seeing all kinds of warning signs from family members who
| never traded or got into crypto until just this past 6
| months.
|
| That's just jealousy, Those who sit on the sidelines complain
| the most. Like I said in my previous post if you didn't see
| it. I see it as that the barrier to entry for making money
| has never been lower. Right now, it's one of the best times
| in history for anyone to start earning, not just the Wall
| Street elites. Thanks to AI tools and online platforms, it's
| easier than ever. Every week, new tools are being launched,
| some even claiming returns as high as 400%. Take the
| NexusTrade guy on Reddit as an example. He created his own
| investment tool and is now in conversations with Wall Street
| professionals.
|
| It's so accessible now that with just $100, you could invest
| in a stock like NVIDIA, double your money in a week, then
| reinvest across multiple stocks and multiply it again.
| Suddenly, $100 turns into $2,500 in no time.
|
| I get your point about everyone making money, but why is that
| a bad thing? Isn't it great that anyone can do it? These
| platforms are practically making money for you, whether
| you're at work, at home, or even asleep. Like someone once
| said, "If you can't make money while you sleep, you'll work
| until you die."
|
| It's never been easier to earn significant amounts of money,
| and it doesn't look like this trend is slowing down anytime
| soon.
| defrost wrote:
| > you could invest in a stock like NVIDIA, double your
| money in a week
|
| NASDAQ: NVDA (3.09%) past month
| jarsin wrote:
| Chat Jippity is that you?
| n144q wrote:
| I thought people HN know better than random "traders" on
| reddit/YouTube/TikTok
| neilv wrote:
| > _The problem will resolve itself if (when?) the market
| crashes._
|
| Someone said something like, _Everyone thinks they 're a
| genius, when the market only goes up._
|
| Although, one thing different now is the heavy throughout-the-
| day manipulation of retail investors, effectively making strong
| social groups and identities around it.
|
| That wasn't a thing when, say, ETrade started, and lots of
| people dabbled, and found it was hard to lose money, just
| trading around different companies, with little understanding
| of how things even supposedly work, much less how things
| actually worked.
|
| Today, from what I occasionally glimpse, you've got all these
| supposed skills you're applying as a retail investor/sheep/pawn
| (including various degrees of snake oil, or thinking you're
| going to be one of the smarter people on a pump/dump scheme
| that leaves others holding the bag), and constant social groups
| where people even self-deprecatingly celebrate huge day-trading
| losses. Like a wholesome support group that actively encourages
| you to stick with the bad habit, rather than encourages you to
| stay sober.
|
| So maybe, when the next big culling comes, you'll have lots of
| people who can somehow still get margin accounts, and will say,
| "Blood in the streets, and I'm missing 3 limbs, but, hey,
| stocks are on sale!" And a thundering chorus of other addicts,
| and their manipulators, encouraging them.
|
| (Disclosures: S&P 500 ETF with low expense ratio in tax-
| advantaged, plus an emergency fund that goes nowhere near the
| market. :)
| prng2021 wrote:
| A market crash won't be a silver bullet. I've known several
| gambling addicts and that's not how addiction works. They don't
| just stop because they lose a bunch of money. They always hold
| out hope they'll be able to win everything back "next time".
| NomDePlum wrote:
| I've worked as a software engineer for various investment
| banks. The best quote and investment advice I've heard on those
| engagements is "Only monkey's pick bottoms"
|
| Middle of the road, risk managed funds are our best chance of
| financial success, not individually predicting the market
| dynamics.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| The worst is the crypto gamblers thinking they are "investing".
| If they make even the smallest profit you'll never hear the end
| of it.
| guipsp wrote:
| >> They expect the problem to worsen. The stock market has
| climbed 23% this year... > >The problem will resolve itself if
| (when?) the market crashes.
|
| This sounds like a terrible way to "solve" the problem
| CliveBloomers wrote:
| I see it as that the barrier to entry for making money has
| never been lower. Right now, it's one of the best times in
| history for anyone to start earning, not just the Wall Street
| elites. Thanks to AI tools and online platforms, it's easier
| than ever. Every week, new tools are being launched, some even
| claiming returns as high as 400%.
|
| Take the NexusTrade guy on Reddit as an example. He created his
| own investment tool and is now in conversations with Wall
| Street professionals.
|
| It's so accessible now that with just $100, you could invest in
| a stock like NVIDIA, double your money in a week, then reinvest
| across multiple stocks and multiply it again. Suddenly, $100
| turns into $2,500 in no time.
|
| I get your point about everyone making money, but why is that a
| bad thing? Isn't it great that anyone can do it? These
| platforms are practically making money for you, whether you're
| at work, at home, or even asleep. Like someone once said, "If
| you can't make money while you sleep, you'll work until you
| die."
|
| It's never been easier to earn significant amounts of money,
| and it doesn't look like this trend is slowing down anytime
| soon.
| fragmede wrote:
| You could also have invested in SMCI at its high of $113.
| it's now down at $34.
| solumunus wrote:
| Personally I got into this when the stock market crashed in
| 2020 and I made shit loads. There are big winners during
| crashes too, some of the biggest wins.
| dartos wrote:
| Yeah currently young adults are screwed when it comes to
| gambling addiction.
|
| They were children in the heyday of abusive loot boxes and cs
| go gambling.
|
| Turned 18 right around when sports betting apps became legal.
|
| In their early 20s crypto exploded.
|
| Now, apps like yotta prey on them. Stock trading apps make it
| easy to dump your money on tsla.
|
| Is going to be rough
| _heimdall wrote:
| I've yet to really land on my opinion of the idea of a pending
| market crash with how much money printing has gone on.
|
| All the standard indicators I look at really line up with the
| idea that a crash should be coming, or should already have
| happened. Companies aren't valued based on the fundamentals
| anymore, for example, and yet here we are.
|
| Its starting to feel more like the perpetually increasing
| market, despite the fundamentals, is a sign of how weak
| printing and inflation is making the dollar. Stocks can go up
| when the companies are worth more (ideally because they are
| producing more), but prices can also go up because the currency
| used to value the stocks is taking a serious hit.
| another_poster wrote:
| Most people have a gambler's mindset about the stock market:
|
| > [...G]ambling in financial markets often goes undetected [...]
| because individuals confuse their actions [i.e., speculating]
| with investing.
|
| The typical person speculates on the market -- buying low during
| their working years, and hopefully selling high during their
| retired years.
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| That's because that's all we can do. Buffet is an actual
| investor. His stock position allows him to remake a company if
| necessary. My stock position might buy some chickie bugs at
| Wendy's. I have no direct control over any company I "own" and
| my voting position and the position of all retail investors is
| functionally nil.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| not a lawyer here but I suspect that exercising rights as a
| shareholder takes some legal education and some networking..
| you are right that the DEFAULT stance is what is presented..
| but somehow I dont think this the whole possible story in
| 2024
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I don't think this is the right analysis. One should generally
| expect a positive return over time from investing in equities:
| you are giving up money now and taking on risk, and you are
| compensated for it by the return on investment. The word
| 'speculating' is generally referring to a different kind of
| activity from the kind of investing a typical person gets
| through paying into a pension. I don't want to make claims
| about what typical people are doing with brokerage accounts,
| and the structure of brokerages seems to have changed enough
| that it's perhaps harder to describe long term trends or the
| lives of 'typical' customers.
| habosa wrote:
| Many criticize the retail investor for treating the stock market
| like gambling, but I think it really does resemble gambling more
| than investing these days.
|
| How many times have we seen a companies value jump or fall by
| billions based on a tweet? How many meme stocks have we seen? How
| many pump and dump SPACs have there been? How many companies have
| never (and likely will never) made a dime in profit but see their
| market caps continue to climb?
|
| "Value investing" is dead for most, picking a company that you
| believe will generate solid long-term revenue is no longer
| interesting. You need to figure out what is going to 10x
| tomorrow.
|
| There are things that we could do to slow down the public equity
| markets and re-establish the relationship between stock price and
| business fundamentals, but that's not what almost anyone wants.
| mancerayder wrote:
| I agree.
|
| I think the reality is the "don't try to be smart, do these
| low-risk things because statistically you're too stupid to beat
| the market" has logic to it, and stats to back it up. But the
| unspoken part is, "let the rich do that stuff, and their wealth
| advisors and folks on the golf courses".
|
| So there's an elitist aspect to telling people to back off. We
| all know people who made a killing on individual stocks, either
| because they bought them or they worked at a company that
| issued them.
| joshlemer wrote:
| It's not really elitist. Picking individual stocks is
| essentially saying "I have brand new insight that nobody else
| has, and I'm going to earn profit by incorporating that
| knowledge into prices and be rewarded forgetting it right".
| This is clearly a very specialized activity, you shouldn't
| expect to be able to bring brand new, accurate insight, and
| out predict everyone else in the world, without a deep
| understanding of economics, finance, and expertise in the
| specific industry and the company you're trading in. It's no
| more elitist to say "most people should just buy index funds"
| than it is to say "most people should just get root canals
| done by dentists rather than doing it themselves".
| mancerayder wrote:
| > without a deep understanding of economics, finance, and
| expertise in the specific industry and the company you're
| trading in.
|
| is in contradiction to
|
| >It's not really elitist.
|
| It's not _wrong_. But elitist is absolutely is. We 're
| saying, only these people can do these things correctly. Is
| it true? It's subject to debate. You can be in IT, discover
| a software product at work and decide you think the company
| is worth investing in. Don't need an MBA for that.
| kaibee wrote:
| > You can be in IT, discover a software product at work
| and decide you think the company is worth investing in.
|
| And then you can be still be wrong because you didn't
| appreciate that the company is operating a low-trust
| environment/switching costs are high/they didn't have
| enough industry contacts/competitors outmarketed.
| joshlemer wrote:
| Well, buying stock in a company because you like their
| product is precisely the kind of bad stock picking
| strategy I'm talking about. The quality of a company's
| product is public information, so you should expect it to
| be priced in. Whether or not to pick any individual stock
| should be made on the basis of whether that stock is
| over-valued or under-valued in the market, not if it's a
| good company overall. Amazing companies can be highly
| overvalued, and crap companies doing garbage work can be
| undervalued.
|
| Like I say, best to leave it to professionals. For some
| things it's fine for people to have a DIY spirit, like
| building a website or a cabinet. For other things, which
| can harm you if you mess up, it's better to leave it to
| the pro's... electricians, doctors, etc. We're talking
| about people's life savings here, they can easily lose
| everything and ruin their lives, not being able to take
| care of their family etc.
| mancerayder wrote:
| >Amazing companies can be highly overvalued, and crap
| companies doing garbage work can be undervalued.
|
| I'm sorry, but how does _value_ matter? I 'm not being
| flippant - the Mag 7 are not 'value' companies. Are
| Nvidia, Apple, etc., overvalued? And so we should avoid
| them or short them? Is Tesla 'priced-in'? There's all
| sorts of psychology in the market. What does 'priced-in'
| even mean? What wouldn't be priced in. "Water is wet" is
| what I think of, a tautology, when I hear that all public
| information is 'priced in'. Things are incredibly
| dynamic. Here we have at a minimum: algorithmic trading
| that bounces on common measures like moving averages,
| institutions that buy or sell at various points
| strategically (like the big dump when the BOJ raised
| rates unexpectedly, tax selling, etc.), elections putting
| oligarch-ish types that own car companies and pump crypto
| coins, meme stocks that come and go on big reddit forums,
| regular buys from 401k's into indexes which move markets,
| etc. etc. With all that going on, to me it feels more
| "random" than "priced-in".
|
| One more thing. Money is also made not buying and
| holding, and not trading, but by doing things like 'The
| Wheel' where you sell puts on something you wouldn't mind
| holding, monthly, til you get assigned, and sell calls on
| it, monthly, til it gets called away. In this case, you
| don't actually have to care very much what the 'value'
| is, only tracking whether it might have a sudden swing.
| You don't have to 'time the market' that much either, as
| you're an insurance salesman.
|
| I'm not saying that people should all jump and do this -
| but when I read about stocks on HN, I always hear the
| same counter-argument against 'traders' and 'stock
| pickers' when there are other ways to make money in the
| market (i.e. collecting premium).
|
| It's definitely closer to 'gambling' when I put it that
| way. But I don't see any value in Efficient Market
| Hypothesis-speak like "is this stock under or over-
| valued." For _that_ I let the MBA 's / golf course
| discussions / elite experts with insider information
| rule.
| jonfromsf wrote:
| If you compare the forward PE ratio to the regular PE
| ratio on most of these stocks you will see their profits
| are growing _extremely_ fast. NVDA has a trailing PE of
| 55 but a forward PE of 32. TSM has PE of 33 but a forward
| of 23! A business growing profitability that fast is
| going to be valued at a premium.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Sure, knock yourself out. Nobody is stopping you. But
| statistically you are likely to underperform index
| investors: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investin
| g/030916/buffe...
| skybrian wrote:
| Well... yes, index funds are a safe, default choice most
| people. And yet, a funny thing about investing, versus
| other things professionals do like dentistry, is that it
| doesn't necessarily require any skill. Dumb luck sometimes
| works just as well as sophisticated analysis. What other
| professions are like that?
|
| I don't think I had any particular insight into Google, but
| I worked there and never got around to exercising my
| options until I had to because they were going to expire.
| (Good thing HR sent me an email.) The slightly more
| sophisticated people were doing same-day sales and
| immediately diversifying, which I believe in, in principle.
| But I procrastinated, because it seemed like delaying was
| working out pretty well. Past performance is no guarantee,
| but why not wait a few months?
|
| I thought Google was doing well, but so did everyone else.
| It was conventional wisdom the whole time. Apparently
| conventional wisdom wasn't priced in, though?
| nixosbestos wrote:
| So... literally survivorship bias, and insider trading.
| Great, neither of those make me think I'm arrogant or smart
| enough to day trade. Nothing about this is elitist.
|
| I've made a killing on 'X' by getting in early and holding
| over the years. Not one single person in my life knows the
| details because I want zero responsibility for them getting
| wrapped up in it, and I know how hard it is for people to _be
| patient and hold_ when they 're chasing a high, I mean
| profits.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Most of those rich people with their wealth advisors are also
| underperforming: https://stockanalysis.com/article/can-you-
| beat-the-market/
|
| I know people who won big on the ponies or shitcoins, but
| that doesn't make those smart places to put my money.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Aren't index funds more modest in gains but more safe?
| joshlemer wrote:
| Yes
| itake wrote:
| Depends on the index fund. There are triple leveraged funds
| that can go to zero in a crash
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Sure, but the person asking this question is asking from a
| more beginner level that doesn't need to know that unusual
| edge case.
|
| The answer I'd give is:
|
| Yes, index funds made up of stocks are safer than
| individual stocks, because it's very unlikely _all_ the
| investments in a large index will go to zero, or even all
| go down.
|
| _On average_ , index funds of stocks _aren 't_ more modest
| in gains than stocks--they do just as well as stocks _on
| average_.
|
| People think they can pick individual stocks that beat an
| index, and sometimes they do, but there is good reason to
| believe that their successes are the product of random
| chance rather than actual ability. If it is possible at all
| to pick stocks that beat the market, it is a lot of work.
| If you're thinking of investing, I'd start with an index.
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| > "Value investing" is dead for most, picking a company that
| you believe will generate solid long-term revenue is no longer
| interesting.
|
| In that sense, value investing has always been dead--most
| people were never interested in that. That's why value
| investing worked.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| Technically, value investing still work.
|
| The key tenant of value investing is that there exist
| companies which based on their financial metrics are
| fundamentally under valued by the market (in opposition to
| what market price efficiency predicts).
|
| From there, an insane market should provide you with even
| more opportunities to value invest.
| photonthug wrote:
| > an insane market should provide you with even more
| opportunities to value invest
|
| This seems like a uniquely bad time to make this sort of
| argument.
|
| There are many old tools for insane markets to perpetuate
| themselves that are recently stronger (revolving doors
| between industry/government and other garden variety
| corruption; all the monopolies we _have_ to tolerate out of
| fear, convenience or greed; "too big to fail" and trends
| towards globalism in general). There are also several
| relatively new tools (algorithmic price-fixing so that
| industry "competitors" can now collude forever with
| impunity; total masks-off no-holds-barred corruption where
| the unelected/unqualified are simply appointed to positions
| of power regardless of clear conflicts of interest). Add to
| this what others have observed re: meme-stocks, huge moves
| based on tweets or concerted disinformation. Or there's the
| cooked books on a massive scale with Theranos or SBF or the
| out of control corporate fraud with VW's dieselgate or
| Boeing's 737 Max, or .. or .. pick your own recent scandal.
|
| Value investing seems to need reliable information from
| somewhere to make informed decisions, but where is that
| going to come from? Investment in individual companies
| rather than in diversified aggregates seems nuts if the
| financial markets are going to be as "post truth" as the
| political world.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| > Value investing seems to need reliable information from
| somewhere to make informed decisions, but where is that
| going to come from?
|
| Value investment is entirely based on financial
| fundamentals. You don't need magic information. That's
| the whole point. For something that old, people like to
| use the world but seem blissfully unaware of what it
| actually is. Graham's books are available pretty much
| everywhere.
|
| The whole point of the thing is that fundamentals
| actually matter and markets misprice because they rely on
| other less sound things. That's why it seems even more
| relevant in a post truth market.
|
| None of the companies you listed would have qualified as
| sound for value investing by the way.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| We'll look back and see with clear eyes the transient phenomena
| that made strange and magical meme stocks and unicorns what
| they all were. Somewhere in the last 50 years stock investing
| turned from green-eye-shade economic analysis to a social
| phenomena that couldn't be bothered with dividends and profits.
|
| I go to the supermarket and milk is on sale, I buy two. But
| momo clowns go and see milk is on sale and they try to sell the
| milk they have on hand back to the store. They don't act like
| the products they buy have fundamental value, because in many
| cases that value was inflated wildly beyond justification long
| before the trader ever got started.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I mean, it's widely understood. There was deregulation in the
| '80s that kicked off the financialization trend (along with
| private industry customs being invented like Jack Welch's
| whole chasing shareholder value uber alles shtick), and then
| the interest rates cuts in the wake of the 2008 recession
| (and then again during the pandemic) superheated this kind of
| behavior.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| The thing is, picking a company that actually will generate
| solid long-term revenue isn't really a thing. You can try, but
| your success rate, if you're good at it, is going to be about
| equal to the success rate of companies. There are dozens of
| studies of professional traders showing this. If you're bad at
| it, you'll buy into the companies that are pure hype and do
| worse. And... you probably aren't good at it. Most people
| aren't.
|
| The people who beat the market consistently have information
| you don't. Instances of people who call major trends before
| they happen and get rich are likely survivor bias and not
| genius.
| rsanek wrote:
| things haven't changed since vanguard started index funds 5
| decades ago. buying and holding diversified assets prevents you
| from thinking "You need to figure out what is going to 10x
| tomorrow."
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Many things look like gambling on short time frames. Investing
| requires taking a long view that averages out the short-term
| noise like meme stocks.
|
| It does require patience, which is admittedly harder to come by
| when you're young.
| mancerayder wrote:
| People want a chance to get rich. They also want excitement.
|
| Doesn't that say more about our jobs that are a) dead-end for
| most b) financially limiting, with a salary that goes up slowly,
| if at all, unless you find a new job
|
| People want the chance to win, and some meaning, and some daily
| purpose.
|
| No one cares anymore about the stats of "stock pickers" "day
| traders" and other arguments for DCAing into index funds and not
| touching it until you're 65. A 60/40 portfolio. Don't time the
| market. Efficient market hypothesis. We live in a new world now,
| and people are willing to gamble. Sentiment is obvious for the
| average person to get a sense, and they trade on sentiment.
|
| Maybe give people new meaning somehow, or a chance to make
| unscheduled money other than the slow-as-molasses salary
| increases.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| You describe the psychological motivations for gambling.
| mancerayder wrote:
| The psychological motivation for taking risk.
|
| I don't necessarily call all risky stock activity gambling.
| At the risk of splitting hairs, it's a little different to
| buy Tesla stock because of, for the sake of argument, let's
| say a really bad reason (CEO smart, car go fast), i.e.
| uninformed, than it is to bet on a number on a roulette
| wheel.
|
| I think we paint it as _gambling_ because gambling has an
| aura of naughty judgment about it, as in, "Oh, you're just
| _gambling_ because you made an uninformed stock purchase. "
| I'd prefer the term speculating or risky stock picking.
| Gambling, which is banned in many places and is against the
| law in religious texts, has a taboo because it's addictive. I
| daresay only a minority of stock trading bros are addicted in
| that way.
| seydor wrote:
| when you re generationally deprived of real estate heroin, you
| end up with stock market cocaine
|
| it s all partly gambling but different strokes for different
| generations
| jajko wrote:
| Good insured real estate is always a good safe bet. The best
| conservative investment that current & few past gens could have
| done while being completely clueless about stocks, markets,
| politics etc.
|
| People need to live someplace to be just part of society and
| also to just survive, plus there is emotional and status
| aspect. Western construction is lagging behind population
| growth in popular places plus running / ran out of good space.
| Do the math.
| mancerayder wrote:
| I am not so sure. An article is on the front page of the WSJ
| (online) about property taxes and insurance becoming more
| than the mortgage payments.
|
| In parts of the country there's a crash in the works
| (Sunbelt, Florida in particular).
|
| Where I live renting is _substantially_ cheaper than buying,
| by thousands a month. You are absolutely better off buying a
| mutual fund with the difference and enjoying the flexibility
| of having cash.
|
| I am not so sure what is going on in the housing market, but
| there is so little inventory in the hotspots, and what
| appears to be a dump in the no-longer-hot-spots, that it's
| scarier than buying stocks right now.
| hiddencost wrote:
| I've done the math for a bunch of properties family and
| friends have owned, and they were never beating index funds.
|
| Do the math and you'll find that putting your money in an
| index fund almost always beats real estate, with much less
| risk and much less work.
|
| It's easy for one property to underperform the market by a
| lot. It's hard for an index fund to do the same.
|
| I own a $1.5M rental home in a luxury destination and
| profoundly regret it. The amount of work I put into it was
| enormous. I'm not outperforming the market, and I can't sell
| it because the mortgage rate is 2%.
| rsanek wrote:
| I've found this to often also be the case, but leverage
| completely blows these numbers up.
|
| you'd be right if someone was willing to let you lever up
| 5:1 and bet on index funds. however you can only accomplish
| this with real estate, and with such leverage the required
| rate of return is far lower to make it worth it.
| itake wrote:
| TQQQ is 3:1.
|
| Every time I ask people to factor in their time in
| managing the property (yes, even time spent finding the
| property to buy counts), they end up way behind.
| itake wrote:
| Yeah, no one ever accounts for the labor requirements for
| these projects. If you can earn $100/hr from your career or
| contracting work, then spending 20 hours per month finding
| tenants, mowing lawns, fixing plumbing issues, etc, gets
| expensive fast.
| navs wrote:
| I lost my life savings chasing the dopamine hit and can relate to
| this. I'm in my mid 30s and suffering from career burnout. I know
| I can't afford a home when I can barely work full-time so I
| figured I'd trade. I was up, and up and up!
|
| Then I was down, then up, then down.
|
| One morning I woke up and I was so down, I sold out of fear.
|
| Now I'm left with so little I might as well be starting from
| scratch.
|
| This feels like gambling and here I thought I was smarter than
| those people that lost in casinos.
| bell-cot wrote:
| My experience, with a wide variety of generally older friends &
| associates & such -
|
| If they're talking about an occasional visit to the casino,
| people will be up front about the fact that they walked into
| the place with $X in their pocket, and walked out with $Y.
| Almost always, $X > $Y.
|
| If they're talking about stocks they've bought, people will be
| incredibly selective, and describe only some of their greatest
| successes. They could lose money in a rising market, and you'd
| have to carefully question them to even realize that fact.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Which is ridiculous because while casinos are engineered to
| ensure $x > $y over time, economies are existentially
| dependent on _the reverse_ being true over time and across a
| broad enough portfolio.
|
| Folks you can just buy the S&P 500 and wait. It really is
| that simple. Money will go down sometimes, up sometimes, down
| some more, but in the long run it will almost certainly go
| up. And if it doesn't, the world is crumbling anyway so who
| cares?
| barfingclouds wrote:
| Yep this is the craziest part. The answer has been known
| for a long time. S&P500. Literally that simple
| navs wrote:
| 100% I did that at first and got greedy and impatient.
| Serves me right.
| bell-cot wrote:
| From both the folks I know, and years of comments here on
| HN - you have _LOTS_ of company.
|
| In the fictional world of Economics, humans are all _homo
| rationalens_ , and never make such mistakes.*
|
| Vs. in the real world...
|
| *Yes, I sometimes wonder if there's a brutally predatory
| subtext here - with Economics quietly endorsing "do unto
| them as you will" maltreatment of anyone who the 0.01%
| can maneuver into behaving "irrationally".
| ikiris wrote:
| Because the way you did it, it _is_ gambling.
| liendolucas wrote:
| Coincidentially today I've just finished reading: "The Little
| Book on Common Sense Investing" by John Bogle. What's described
| in the article is exactly the opposite of what people should be
| doing if interested in serious investing. The book mostly focus
| on index funds and I highly recommend its reading to anyone who
| wants to understand and embark on investing seriously. The book
| is short, extremely easy to read, full of examples, wise advices
| and quotes from remarkable people of the investment sector.
| itake wrote:
| I'll add it to my reading list, but I think a lot has changed
| in the world since this book was written.
| directevolve wrote:
| It's a cheap way to purchase a diverse subset of the global
| economy. That's as timeless as it gets.
| justin66 wrote:
| Online stock trading has gone from cheap to free, but that
| doesn't affect the worthiness of the book.
| n144q wrote:
| What hasn't changed:
|
| * US economy has been growing steadily, and will do so for
| the foreseeable future
|
| * Index funds are still a great way to invest your money
|
| And more importantly,
|
| * Most people suck at picking stocks (including the average
| Joe, mutual fund managers, YouTube/TikTok influencers and
| "stock analysts"). It's better to just leave it to the
| market, aka SPY(VOO)/VTI etc., and have good sleep.
| itake wrote:
| Fair. Many people will continue to invest in ETFs for a
| long time, but when people start retiring and selling from
| their ETFs, then the party is going to end.
|
| ETFs, because of their algorithmic known trading, don't
| always get the best price for their underlying assets.
| Notice how before an ETF is created (see bitcoin) or a
| company enters the snp500, the stock shoots up in price.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| After losing my first chunk of cash during 2000 .COM crash I
| became be quite contrarian. Thought real estate is way too high,
| thought the stock market is nuts, bitcoin is a scam. Turns out
| the big crash never happened and everything ket going up. Three
| years ago for some reason I jumped into the stock market, bought
| a house, bought some bitcoin. Turns out so far the gains have
| been life changing. If I ever get laid off,I may be able to just
| call it quits and retire.
|
| I still think the whole thing doesn't make sense but it seems
| economic fundamentals don't work anymore. Everything is a bubble.
| advilgel4 wrote:
| Exactly me -- except still a contrarian.. Everything just goes
| up and up and up.
| smt88 wrote:
| You went long on some fairly general assets. That's not
| gambling.
|
| The problem with gamblers is (for example) making risky bets on
| margin and ending up losing massive amounts of money because a
| meme stock lost 5% of its value during a normal market
| fluctuation.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Same. Friends who just threw money at stuff are millionaires,
| and I'm... not. Hard to just put the money in and expect more
| back when it took so much hard work to get in the first place.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| If you haven't already, now might be a good time to sell some
| of that bitcoin
| boopk wrote:
| okay I don't comment on here often, can check my post
| history, but absolutely would not sell your bitcoin any time
| soon considering we have a pro crypto president and have an
| approx 40% chance of a bitcoin strategic reserve within the
| first 100 days. terrible advice tbh.
| skybrian wrote:
| I think the word _some_ is doing most of the work there.
| There are other investments, too, you know. Diversifying
| means you sleep better.
|
| (Also, Congress just showed that many Republicans won't
| listen to Trump, or Musk, when they have other ideas.)
| boopk wrote:
| I wouldn't sell any imo. if anything his conviction
| should have grown. sell now for what? to buy back higher
| in 4 years? diversifying in assets that historically
| perform worse would not make me sleep better tbh esp
| considering the events on the horizon for btc... nation
| states buying, US strategic reserve potential,
| microstrategy issuing 10b stock proposal, etf's buying at
| an alarming rate. Way too much happening imo to sell at
| the precipice of what very well could be the end of
| consumer friendly pricing for btc.
| skybrian wrote:
| If you're right that Bitcoin will go up forever, there is
| no need to buy any back because when Bitcoin goes up, it
| becomes a larger part of your portfolio. To rebalance
| your portfolio (get back to the same percentage), you
| need to sell, and there's never a time to buy unless it
| goes down again.
|
| But going by the price history, Bitcoin is very volatile,
| going down as well as up. Keeping it a fixed percentage
| of your portfolio would result in buying when it's lower.
|
| (Substitute any volatile investment for Bitcoin.)
| raincole wrote:
| Yeah HN has been giving this advice since BTC was at 60k.
|
| And 30k.
|
| And 10k.
| edm0nd wrote:
| Hard disagree. 2025 is going to be a huge pro-crypto year
| IMO.
|
| Gensler is resigning (bc Trump was going to nuke him on day
| 1). The SEC replacement, Paul Atkins, is pro-crypto.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2024/12/04/g-s1-36803/trump-crypto-
| paul-...
| the_king wrote:
| It may turn out that in the "next epoch," our stock market will
| be understood as our civilization's greatest work of art - our
| greatest cathedral to capitalism.
| Hilift wrote:
| Some guy wrote a book recently and claimed that about 10% of
| workforce-eligible men are long term out of the workforce, due to
| some type of disability. Also 50% either aren't engaged at work
| or don't really do anything essential, meaning their job could
| disappear and it wouldn't be a huge impact.
|
| https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...
|
| https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/eco...
| BobbyJo wrote:
| I think this is and overlooked factor. Though living standards
| have not fallen, the perceived risk of it falling is probably
| at an all time high. We got rid of pretty much all cultural
| safety nets, and now people are desperate to replace the lost
| security.
| spoonfeeder006 wrote:
| There's a paper I saw a while ago that uses LSTM for some kind of
| technical analysis trading, and the portfolio grew from 115k to
| 155k in a year, but also consistently
|
| Seems like there's clear patterns to the market. If only these
| apps would teach people these patterns and trading techniques in
| depth rather than just letting them trade
| dzogchen wrote:
| There's a paper I saw a while ago that uses patterns for some
| kind of roulette strategy, and the bankroll grew from 115k to
| 155k in a year, but also consistently.
|
| Seems like there's clear patterns to how roulette tables
| operate. If only casinos would teach people these patterns and
| strategies in depth rather than just letting them play.
| djsnoopy wrote:
| The sp500 did 20%+ over 12 months. Hardly worth trusting the
| llm
| nixosbestos wrote:
| "I'm not gambling! I'm smart." [proceeds to repeat this
| mentality, as it all dwindles away]
| Dansvidania wrote:
| Dunning Kruger IMO makes it quite likely that any substantial
| investment be a bit more like gambling than it ideally should be,
| as the difference really only exists in the amount of knowledge
| one has in the industry one invests in.
|
| On the other hand, most financial advice also states that one
| should not keep more than X months worth of expenses in cash,
| otherwise one is still losing money on inflation and the likes.
|
| EDIT: Then again, if you are staring at the tickers all day, that
| might still be a problem.
| farceSpherule wrote:
| Pure schadenfreude for retards who use Robin Hood thinking they
| are making money...
| liontwist wrote:
| The real elephant in the room is sports betting. Sports has
| mainstream appeal and accessibility that stocks will never have
| (primarily white collar with good jobs).
|
| Every libertarian theory about legalizing gambling has been
| wrong. Marketing and ease of access increase use. It's making
| sports worse and hurting young men.
| sakopov wrote:
| The hardest thing about investing is to not turn it into
| gambling.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| At some point the US will have to come to terms that the insane
| libertarianism that it shows to individuals is not a recipe for
| them living a good or meaningful life. Modern life makes it
| extremely easy for men to ruin their lives, with gambling, drugs,
| alcohol, screen addiction etc. We know what a good life looks
| like, we lack the will of forcing people who make destructive
| decisions into living the good life. Until that is done, things
| will keep getting worse.
| narrator wrote:
| I make enough trading to live off of. Sure, I lost small amounts
| of money for about 15 years to get good enough at it to do well
| the last 4 years, but now I spend a lot of time looking at the
| market because it's basically my job. If I had a real job, I'd
| spend all my time peeking at the market, and probably make less
| money, lol.
|
| I'd say it's a great job for generalist news junkies. Also, now
| with AI you can have it grind through hundreds of pages of stuff.
| It's like having your own hedge fund research department. Getting
| over the psychological difficulties to becoming a good trader and
| unlearning bad conventional thinking takes a while though. It's
| why good traders are such non-conformists. They have trained
| themselves to not trust crowds and instead determine the truth
| themselves in controversial matters and then ride the crowd as it
| slowly realizes things.
| harimau777 wrote:
| I wonder if this could, in a manner of speaking, be a "rational"
| choice that indicates a breakdown in society. That is to say,
| perhaps some of what we are seeing is that younger people have
| concluded that the only way to live a decent life in America is
| to become rich and becoming rich mostly comes down to luck. If
| gambling is the only way to get a decent life then they may as
| well gamble. If they lose, then they were already going to have a
| bad life anyways.
| dingdondengar wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember when you couldn't just buy one share
| (you had to by a "lot" of 100), and when I actually received a
| paper stock certificate that I had to sign and mail to my broker.
| Rubes will try to beat the market and one in 1000 will succeed.
| Ignore them and follow the basics. I've been investing since the
| 80s and all my peers that did the boring thing are retiring
| comfortably.
| nc wrote:
| The boring thing being buy and hold?
| billy99k wrote:
| Even worse is the 'air drop' craze of the crypto world. I also
| think the people that invested (and lost) their money in HAWK
| coin knew what they were doing.
|
| They wanted to pump and dump the coin and couldn't get out fast
| enough. It's just another way to gamble.
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| Capitalism-meritocracy= lottery. This feeling percolates deeply
| into society over time.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-12-25 23:01 UTC)