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Comment by conover | Hacker News Reader

This seems absolutely crazy to me. I was always taught put money into long term, stable investments when you are young so that you have the longest possible period for return.

The last paragraph I think is dangerous. Putting $5000 towards four ideas may teach you something but it's certainly not going to guarantee "Something is going to hit."

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This seems absolutely crazy to me. I was always taught put money into long term, stable investments when you are young so that you have the longest possible period for return.

You're in the wrong place.

$20,000 is more than enough for a young person to support themselves, and possibly a co-founder, while they bring their product to market. As the article states, if it hits, you'll see returns in the thousands of percents, not tens or hundreds.

Young people are precisely those who least need risk-free investments. It's as you get older that you should adjust your investment mix towards more risk adverseness.

Not sure why you were taught that. If you walk into any financial planner's office and tell them you're in your 20's, they will set up your investment portfolio to be almost 100% stocks. They will then tell you that as you get older, they will scale back the % held in stocks and replace it with bonds (which are safer). As you near retirement, your portfolio will mostly be bonds/other safe vehicles, and very small % of stocks.

On the other hand, any financial planner who told you the best thing to do was to stick your money into the highest-yielding bank account you can find would be out of a job. They have an incentive to make investing look complicated.

I've tried both commission-based financial planners and fee-based financial planners.

Not surprisingly, commission-based financial planners hawked their firm's mutual funds which just so happened to have high fees on them.

With my fee-based financial planner, their only incentive was to make sure I did well, was happy, and would be back next time to get more unbiased advice. If you're interested in a referral, send me an email. She appears on CNBC a couple times a month, and I've been satisfied with her work.

Agreed. If you try to think up four ideas under the constraint that they all have to cost roughly five thousand dollars, I'm not convinced you'd get better results than trying to think up four ideas you can do for less than fifty bucks. You'll probably have an equal chance of success, and wind up $19800 better off (plus if any of the ideas does start to take off you'll have some money to sink into it).

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