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Comment by aphextim | Hacker News Reader

I do know he sold, was just being silly.

I like how you can be a literal billionaire bank founder and still buy a speculative asset at it's peak and sell at it's lowest after a 90% crash

Buy high sell low

>>The investment came at the peak of the bitcoin frenzy in late 2017 after the digital currency had already risen more than 10 fold that year. The exact size of the bet couldn’t be determined, but bitcoin peaked at nearly $20,000 in mid December 2017 and Mr. Son sold in early 2018 after bitcoin had plummeted, the people said.

Well 10% is better than less or nothing, right? Shows his lack of confidence in it going up any further - or at least within a timeframe that there aren't better investments.

>Well 10% is better than less or nothing, right? Shows his lack of confidence in it going up any further - or at least within a timeframe that there aren't better investments.

Pretty much any good book about investing (eg. The Four Pillars of Investing) teaches you that following your human emotions and irrationality in investing is the worst you can do, basically selling when everybody IS selling is the worst move (Warren Buffett: Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful, https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/012116/warre...)

So I'm pretty surprised to see Masayoshi Son acting like a rookie investor, and following the crowd of uneducated investors buying during the mania and selling during the crash

It's the opposite of investing 101

You’re oversimplifying.. selling while everyone else is often due to irrationality, but quite often it is the best move. In the case of a crashing asset that is determined to be unlikely to recover, selling with “everyone” else is the rational action. cf cutting your losses. In fact I’ve feel like more experienced investors are prone to the opposite problem... irrationally holding on to a hopeless asset when they could have cut it.

Cut your losses and let your winners run.

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