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Comment by leowoo91 | Hacker News Reader

You might got lucky or not, but your comment is very dangerous for the people who have no idea and haven't been in the field. FAANG compensation is not peasant to billions of people, so please don't do that.

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I'd be interested in understanding how someone sharing their experience and opinion is dangerous.

Not sure if "dangerous" per se, but the OP's comment about having made millions leveraging on SPY and QQQ over the course of 100+ trades doesn't check out, given that a few days back, they created this throwaway account to complain about finding it hard to quit their job at Amazon because the pay is so good.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25878201

IOW, they're lying for Internet points.

No kidding, this is HN lol people talk about taking drugs to slow aging, building recycled battery packs, open-source sex toys and a lot of other marginal topics. That's why most people actually like this community.

People are adult, if a simple comment makes you YOLO your life savings on options you probably had a lot of issues to begin with.

It's just as dangerous as people who work for options that will never best in their favour.

Par for the course, really. Wait better because their main source of income might not be related to a gamble

I made the money myself, I didn’t get lucky.

Edit:

The money was made over a 100 trades

Yes you did get lucky on an option play

I made over 100 trades

I make winning option trades as well, as a hedge against my portfolio. If you made a disproportionate amount of cash of an options play it was luck. I’ve done it before, made almost 1500% on an AGFS play when I saw a consistent downtrend in it. But it was luck and nothing else.

This is a really, truly bad take.

Option prices move every day.

There do exist, in fact, some people who are very skilled at making money trading options. Some people do it for a living with rich people's money, and many of them have the same skillset/education as the general HN audience.

If this guy actually made millions over the course of dozens of trades, it makes more sense to let him talk than to downvote him and tell him that he's just an aberration of probability lol. Like, what do you gain by that? If he's lying, humor him and enjoy the conversation. If he's telling the truth, pick his brain.

I don’t have enough karma to downvote, dude. It’s also not a bad take. Institutional investors do indeed make a killing and you can do fine using i.e. the wheel strategy. But if you’re YOLOing on WSB and you aren’t an institutional investor it is almost certainly luck to turn thousands into millions.

First of all, if you're YOLOing on WSB and you are an institutional investor, you should really re-examine your choices lol.

My view is that most people don't talk publicly about windfalls, so if someone's willing to do it on a throwaway it's way more useful IMO to tease information out of him than to marginalize his comments. That's also the best way to determine whether or not he's lying.

If he's consistently lucky, then he's good.

Probabilistic tails are narrow but they do exist. By that, I mean you shouldn't assume that something isn't worth discussing just because it is improbable. That approach stifles the free exchange of thoughts and ideas, and neglects the reality that some people are in fact talented at things that most people can't do.

PS I didn't say you specifically downvoted the guy, but we as a collective have downvoted several of his comments on this article, and you as an individual are trivializing his (claimed) experience as luck.

I'm with you. I think the thing is that a YOLO play has better odds than winning the lotto or playing roulette. Some people make millions playing poker too.

Definitely it does, and it’s not all luck. As I said I’ve done pretty good myself with options with basic trend following techniques I learned as an aspiring algotrader. I believe I would have made money either way but my couple of >1000% gains were luck on top of the trend following.

If everyone is following his strategy the market would be swept with liquidity and there would be no upside to his strategy.

What's your return distribution look like on those trades? Pareto?

people don't know just how hard it is to compound gains -- congrats.

Personal note: I really don't know why you would bring attention to yourself over this

It’s a throwaway account and I just quit my job, I read for years that you can’t beat the market.

Nobody ever said you can't beat the market. They said you can't _consistently_ beat the market. Doing it once or twice happens all the time.

Are you trolling or being serious?

The entire persona is quite clearly fabricated. I'm gobsmacked people are replying to them in good faith.

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