Hacker News Reader

Comment by karpodiem | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this market at all. I'm in cash/Ethereum. I've suspended my 401K contribution and buy a small bit of ETH every paycheck.

For example, Caterpillar -

(Revenue/EPS)

Q3 2012: $16.4B/$2.54 Q3 2017: $11.4B/$1.77 Stock price: 2012: $85 2017: $139

View on HN

Wouldn't the pre-tax nature of a 401k mean that an alternative investment would need to return ~25% in the first year in order to break even with a 401k contribution returning 0%?

I'm not arguing that the market is currently rational; just surprised you've suspended 401k contributions because of it.

Yup, unless GP for some reason can only buy 401k into their own company, rather than some broad-market fund, in which case if they're specifically skeptical about their own company then maybe not putting stuff into a 401k.

But yea generally pre-tax dollars are better than any other investment you can reliably make.

I've suspended my 401K contribution and buy a small bit of ETH every paycheck.

What is the rational here? Interested in ETH, however I haven't seen it move past $400 in months.

Just because its not tracking with BTC at the moment does not mean its never going to increase in value.

You mean $300? ETH seems to lack the drama of BTC and Byzantium is humming along. I see the ETH dev team being active/creating off-chain solutions (whether the market will adopt these solutions is a valid question to ask) - I think these solutions offer value that isn't fully priced in.

I like ETH (especially the lack of fork drama every few months) but the only thing that's stopping me regularly buying more is a fear for what will happen to the price if the ICO market starts receiving sustained negative attention from regulators. Blog posts like this one suggest a (probably necessary imho) storm is coming: https://blog.colony.io/the-colony-token-sale-7ac14c845bc0

I know ETH isn't just about ICOs but I remain skeptical how big of a market there is, outside of the ICO world, for Dapps and smart contracts. That's before considering potential competition from projects like NEO, ARK and LISK; which could further splinter demand.

It's not rational. It all depends on wall street hype and their interest is to keep increasing value so any remote news that has no play in the market is used to hype something up every week. Companies with very solid earnings and increasing profits/growth like Apple get little love while others keep increasing then all of a sudden they barely bear estimates and the shares climb up 30% in 3 months.

My lesson, just ride the flow

Reply on news.ycombinator.com