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Comment by float4 | Hacker News Reader

Aren't people getting tired of the asset bubble by now?

I understand that in the past year it has enabled people to easily make a lot of money. I personally made a lot of money (relatively speaking that is, as I'm a student) in the past year. But it's just so tiresome to read about it all the time.

Asset X goes up, asset Y comes back down. Rinse and repeat. It wears me out.

My emotional state of mind is not great at the moment, because of lockdown & loneliness, but I think this long lasting asset bubble would've made me tired regardless of my state of mind.

Maybe I'll just do ETFs, maybe I'll just quit for the year.

Any people here who feel the same?

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Prices are still high so it's safe to say that people aren't tired. It's also hard to determine how much of what's going on is a bubble and how much is just the new normal. There's a lot of money floating around and it has to go somewhere - stocks, crypto, property etc.

If you aren't feeling great mentally, it might be good to not get emotionally involved in daytrading, speculation or anything related to crypto. Just park the money in a fund, don't touch it, don't check prices, and make sure that the rest of your life is okay.

I feel you. I started feeling "can we not have a crazy bull run now please" when it was clear 20k was broken for this cycle. I completely quit trading after the 2017 bubble, though. If I had placed bet on the promising small-caps (defi projects) I worked with through work over the past couple of years, I would have been wealthy now.

But I have no regrets, it has allowed me to detach mentally and emotionally from the price swings and I find my mental health worth more than the chance to get dirty rich (or lose it all). I see the prices of a lot of assets I hold during my daily work, but they're just numbers now.

I still have significant (to me) crypto holdings, but I take a longer-term perspective now and am fine with the fact that their market price may very well crash to 10% of now during the year.

But yeah, the goddamn media. Can we stop talking about price please? It's just so uninteresting.

Yes, exactly this. Speculators will speculate, gamblers will gamble, and media consumers will consume media. Nothing I can do about any of that.

But I can regulate myself. Stop trading. Stop consuming media. Stop watching prices. All this short-term stuff is not meaningful.

Time is the true test. What ideas, companies and crypto projects will survive for decades, and which ones are ephemeral get-rich-quick vehicles?

I'd rather put my wealth in a handful of the former than pretend I can beat people smarter and faster than me by trading the latter.

My own psychology is the biggest obstacle to hanging on for multiple 10X's. I'll always sell winners too soon and hang on to losers too long. So for me, the best strategy is to "set it and forget it" and stop paying attention every day or even every week.

I always see situations like this as a personal problem. Perhaps by viewing it that way too, you can find a way to feel better. For example, you say "But it's just so tiresome to read about it all the time," so why don't you just stop reading about it?

The past year has been far and away the best year of my life, and that feeling continues today. I credit that to being mindful of how I live my life and making sure that I'm very careful to not live life in a way that becomes self-destructive.

I’ve seen some arguments that ETFs might be in a bubble aswell, due to increased retail investor demand.

I feel similarly. I have done well but it’s mentally draining and I’m compulsively checking balances. If I sold everything and moved into an ETF I’d pay a lot of short term cap gains but I still probably will.

Part of the growth of the narrative is that new people are getting brought in and act like you and I did when we first got in. Meanwhile we are being quietly worried at this point.

Everybody is tired of it. Except for the central bank that is causing it. As soon as central banks stop printing money the whole crypto verse will die like a fad. But so will your passive investments like ETFs. That can't happen therefore the printing continues.

It’s laughable to think central banks will stop printing money one day.

EVERY single fiat currency in human history has either gone to zero, or has lost 99% of its value.

They're designed to lose value at a measured rate. That's not really a criticism.

Devaluation is the deliberate downward adjustment of a currency, that's very different to depreciation.

Fiat currencies cannot be "designed" to lose value at a measured rate. Even bitcoin, which is actually designed with a measured addition of supply up to 21 million, cannot control its value.

How do you imagine devaluation works with modern free-floating currencies?

The president of the central bank doesn't just announce the new exchange rate, because exchange rates are set by markets.

To devalue a currency, the central bank sells a lot of it in the market.

Where do they get all that currency to sell? Either by selling government bonds in the market and using the proceeds to buy foreign currency, or by printing new units of the currency from thin air and selling that to buy bonds or foreign currency.

And your point is?

The point I was making is that devaluation is a term to describe a deliberate thing whereas a currency losing its value 99-100% over time is not.

They're both deliberate, and they both use the same mechanisms to accomplish the devaluation/depreciation. The only real difference is that one is fast and one is slow.

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