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Comment by halflings | Hacker News Reader

> By July I realized a couple things (and adjusted my investments accordingly)

You're definitely making valid points, but this sounds like a whole lot of hindsight bias: you're rationalizing something that was rather unpredictable (the full impact of the pandemic on the economy, and whether that would surpass the market's expectations or not).

How did you possibly adjust your investment strategy based on these "learnings"? It sounds like this can only lead to the same forms of losses you've had with your initial risky investment (overly confident that pandemic = stock market crashing).

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Basically, completely reversing course:

1) Focusing on the winners (FAANG and those that sell shovels to the gold miners)

2) Momentum driven companies where tons of liquidity is flowing to (TSLA etc)

You should not be actively investing.

To be clear to the three instant downvoters, I'm saying parent is deluded and is going to lose repeatedly, not that active investing is a losing proposition in general:

> 2) Momentum driven companies where tons of liquidity is flowing to (TSLA etc)

Put the money in the money thing! Yea! Parent is the portrait of sad hype-driven retail investor.

> You should not be actively investing.

Someone is.

Active investing is a full time job that people who do it full time often fail it. You often need multi millions in the bank for it to start outperforming your actual job income too, so it doesn't make sense outside of investment firms and banks most of the time.

Realize that part of active investing is you have to beat the returns of VTI + your current job / biz income.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't momentum a well-known and fairly tried-and-tested strategy, and hasn't it greatly outperformed value over the past decade or two? Doesn't mean it will keep working forever, of course.

Momentum trading is a specific TA approach which I seriously doubt parent knows about. It doesn't sound like identifying "Momentum driven companies" (wut) but specific technical signals. More likely they have $1000 in RobinHood and their "big loss" was $200, so this entire thread is pointless.

OP here: My options trading account is well into 7 figures, and I do a tremendous amount of selling premium and wheel strategies on quite a few stocks, in addition to momentum trading.

Careful on the investment lectures.

Have you made that money in bad times as well as good though? Plenty of people posting gain porn for 2020, but they may not be the next Warren Buffett....

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't momentum a well-known and fairly tried-and-tested strategy, and hasn't it greatly outperformed value over the past decade or two?

If that was true everyone would be doing it, and then the advantage would go away.

In short: if you think there's a "tried-and-tested strategy" that outperforms over anything but the short-term, then you either reject the efficient markets hypothesis--which would be pretty remarkable--or you don't understand it.

“Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful” - Warren Buffett

You seem to be doing the opposite.

someone could have used that logic to avoid TSLA when it was at $50 Not that he is wrong, but heeding aphorisms is not that useful in terms of making money.

Yup, exactly. There is such thing as momentum trading.

Most of my positions were already closed out last month. So all the above thesis’ that said I was doing the wrong thing were.... wrong.

I also have significant positions that are DCA boring stuff, angel investments, real estate, all across the board. As well as I do a lot of selling premium in the options markets (theta gang).

It’s funny how folks are quick to lecture... :)

You're chasing the money after it's already gone to those stocks.

Piling onto an investment trend late is the classic retail investor mistake - because most of the upward movement already happened and that leaves limited upside and large downside potential.

I don't recommend that as an investment strategy. It would be safer and likely better to just buy the index instead.

If you want to make money actively investing you really need an insight that most other investors don't yet have.

In a bull market you can make money picking stocks with darts, but that doesn't make it a good strategy.

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