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Comment by throwaway-571 | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of depressing when you look at these crazy success stories of lottery winners. You realize even a small bet at the right time could be life-changing.

Let's say instead of buying a Latte every working days at starbucks over the last five years you had invested it in tesla stocks. Or maybe for every starbucks latte you drank, you invested the same amount in ETF and in Tesla (pay 3 latte, drink one). Where would your life be? Would you still be at your 9-to-5 or would you go work for that non-profit? Or would you just be lazing around on the sofa or at the beach sipping pina-coladas?

Anyway, sometimes it takes a lot of energy to deal with the KIMO (Know I Missed Out).

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Totally know what you mean. What I do is just assume I'm going to have to work until I die, and keep angling toward work I tolerate better. I try to invest wisely, maintain a few months of cash savings, etcetera, but don't think about it otherwise. Money is imaginary and anything could happen to it at any moment.

If once in a while I want to use some of my disposable income to spin a roulette wheel or buy GME, and can keep it under control, I see no problem. If I win, it's a nice surprise. But if I don't feel like playing, of course I won't win anything.

Despite having watched it since Monday or before, I don't think about what I could've won on GME this week any more than what I could've won at some dog track. I decided not to play, and that's that. My life continues on as normal.

It's funny, because I was visiting Gamestop's website last November trying to find a Pink 3DS and remember thinking, 'oof, Gamestop's website is in bad shape'.

When I get the FOMO urge I think about how BBY just sucks as a store, how much better Netflix is than AMC, and how airlines regularly go bankrupt.

I believe that GameStop has a future as they have a lot of mind share and goodwill. But they need to get rid of their brick and mortar stores.

The idea behind buying those companies wasn't that they had a lot of a future, it was that they had more of a future than their price estimated.

The best analysis is always against the company itself:

- SBUX instead of buying Starbucks

- MO instead of buying cigarettes (see The Millionaire Next Door for this analysis)

- LVMH instead of buying LV, M, or H

- NVDA instead of buying video cards and AAA games

- CVS instead of shopping at convenience stores

This doesn't seem to be saying anything about those companies though. It's just that you will do better financially if you invest money instead of spending it.

Well...yeah.

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