You're Not Too Late | Hacker News Reader

You're Not Too Late

paranoidenough.com

12 pointsgringoDan18 comments

“You’re still early” is the official calling card of every MLM and Ponzi scheme out there. Gotta convince people they’re not too late so you can redistribute their money to previous participants.

Whether that applies here is up to the reader.

I recently learned investing in TQQQ at almost any point in the last 5 years would have yielded better returns than Bitcoin. With much lower volatility. shrug.

Financial opportunities are like a bus route: there’s always another one coming. Don’t let people FOMO you into investing in something you don’t understand or are uncomfortable with. Especially not with something of unquantifiable risk.

Author here. Couple of things:

1. Not investment advice, as stated in the article. That said, I agree there is a lot of pump-and-dump going on in crypto. Do your own due diligence.

2. The main point was that if the typical HN reader feels late to adopt some technology or trend (with NFTs being the example of choice), they are still probably early compared to the rest of the population.

3. You can download the historical TQQQ data from Nasdaq along with historical Bitcoin pricing and take a look at the returns to date. (Bitcoin data starts just March 8, 2019, but it's not worth the time right now to find a bigger dataset.) Assuming you bought on the same day and held to yesterday, Bitcoin outperforms TQQQ on 58% of buy-in days: https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/funds-and-etfs/tqqq/h...

4. Investing in a 3x levered Nasdaq 100 index reinforces the point that "we're still early" -- your investment thesis is that large-company tech innovation has a lot of room for growth.

5. Completely agree with the point that there are always additional financial opportunities coming. Don't FOMO in.

Edit - Numbered my bullet points incorrectly; added clarity on dates for Bitcoin data.

To borrow a question from Burry - do you know how much leverage is in crypto?

I did the tqqq historical comparison on yahoo finance and explored it for all dates after roughly October 2017 and for most Buy in dates it outperformed. Selecting 2019 is pretty adverse since the collapse happened in 2018, so you exclude a giant range of down only days.

Prior to late 2017 Bitcoin clearly outperformed. However the fact they’re competitive at all for the last 5 years says a lot when the narrative is that there’s no way to win in traditional finance. Quite false, you just have to find a vehicle that aligns with your risk tolerance. And if you set it to “holy moly that’s risky” like every crypto investment then similar or better returns are very achievable.

Thanks for your clarifications!

My point is more, are we early to the space? Maybe. Does that make it a good investment? Nobody can possibly know. Being early to Betamax did nobody any good. Will any particular coin or chain or technology win? Who knows. If it wins will it be valuable? Who knows! For it to win, it will by definition have to be in reach of the average individual so if you can match your ROI in an established market why on earth wouldn’t you? Also #nfa lol.

I’ll be sitting on the sidelines making comparable returns without having to worry about which rock JPEG is going to make my kids inheritance haha.

Currently the Google trends data on bitcoin is pancaking, the price is going up appatently, on basically zero volume, and the leading liquidity provider coin in the space (USDT) received DOJ target letters for all its executives for committing bank fraud.

That’s gonna be a no for me, fam.

The argument feels like survivorship bias. Yes, there are always new opportunities for good fortune, but there also is a constant stream of potential pitfalls and mishaps.

One should not let the constant stream of social media and other arbitrary data provoke an irrational fear of missing out.

That might be a fair criticism of a reading of this as "you should speculate in NFTs".

Less so if you follow the conclusion that recent sales of NFTs are the latest in a long line of mass adoption/mainstreaming of Blockchain tech and investments. From that perspective, it's more comparable to telling lifelong cash holders people to begin "investing" - there's certainly survivorship bias if you're looking at specific stocks/markets, but the thing to "buy into" is the ecosystem.

Who in earth is a “lifelong cash holder”

48% of the American populace, if we're talking participation in the stock market. A significantly higher percentage if we exclude those whose only holdings are in opt-out company-sponsored 401k plans. [0]

More than 5% of US households are entirely "unbanked," so literally cash only. [1]

I hope that fills in the knowledge gaps, so you can now engage with the content presented to you.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/25/more-than-h...

[1] https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/household-survey/index.html

Hold on haha, put away your snark.

Just because someone doesn’t participate in the stock market doesn’t mean they’re “cash holders for life” - people do participate in real estate and accrue other assets. I would be stunned if those 48% of people were just stuffing cash in couch cushions. Not to mention why would we exclude 401(k)s?

57% of Americans don’t have a spare $500. [1] This sounds a suspicious amount like 48% + 5%. Give or take. The un-banked aren’t unbanked because bank accounts are inaccessible. They’ve got nothing to put in them.

They’re not “lifelong cash holders” they’re broke. Cash non-holders if you will.

So basically anyone with money invests it, and most people are hand-to-mouth broke.

What exactly are they saving or investing? This is a fundamental social policy issue and not something you’re going to solve with blockchain magic.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-americans-cant-afford-a-50...

Yes, people with no money have trouble investing money, I'm not sure where I stated otherwise. But sure, let's continue down the rabbit hole of analyzing a group I referenced off-hand for the sake of a hypothetical example.

wrt my comment about 401ks - they are often opt-out these days in part due to regulatory maneuvering on the part of the C-suite to protect their own benefits (e.g. safe harbor plans). Including folks with a 401k as "participants" in the stock market vastly overstates their actual investment activity and participation. More telling of actual participation is that 86% of households in the US don't own any individual stocks - most people with a 401k have it invested in whatever the default managed fund is.

Convincing some portion of that 86% to participate on their own in the stock market is the parallel I was drawing - those with resources to participate in a financial system, which has lower barriers to entry than they might anticipate.

"This is a fundamental social policy issue and not something you’re going to solve with blockchain magic."

This conclusion is so orthogonal to the literal content, and point of my original comment that I can only recommend you reread it and start from there.

I’m only discussing the idea there’s such a thing as a “lifetime cash holder” who holds any material quantity of their net worth in an asset that says it depreciates on the tin.

Yes, and we've established that these people exist - aside from the info you've been presented, it should be pretty clear, anecdotally, if you have spent time with communities of first generation immigrants.

For example, I grew up with close friends whose parents were Bulgarian immigrants. Their parents had "good" jobs (dba, generic in-house IT) and were not hurting from money, but: they did not purchase homes, did not invest their money, and literally kept stacks of cash in the home.

Your personal experience and values are not necessarily representative of every other group in your country.

You can keep making jabs at me or you can provide some sources that aren’t personal anecdotes :) I’ll be the first to change my tune with data.

The poor's, like me.

Don’t poor folks not have money to invest?

Bingo. 50% of us are paycheck to paycheck, ain't much to invest when 70% of your income goes to the landlord...you know, to further invest.

Yeah I’m sorry that’s really tough. Fingers crossed for ya things will get better.

I thought this was an article about not being too late to do something with your life. That might be ridiculous to some people here, but at 24, having started programming with college at 18, I sometimes feel way behind people that started coding at 5, or people that were doing open source stuff in their teens.

RE: this section "If you recognize (recognize – you don’t even need to be able to define) one of those words, you’re early to crypto"

This does resonate, as we have seen huge growth and continual adoption (even by what wall street would call Dumb Money") over the past several years, while otherwise tech-savvy non-olds sit on the sidelines. Myself included.

I've been making an effort to educate myself recently and keep up with crypto trends, because it really does feel that this is a key innovation of this century. Maybe it's irrational, but I feel like if I opt out of this in my late 20s/early 30s, then I'll be our generational equivalent of the Boomer who never bothered to master Excel basics at [insert bank here].

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