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Comment by _slyo | Hacker News Reader

The conventional wisdom of "buy equities regardless of price" doesn't make much sense to me. I can temporarily convince myself it's the smart thing to do, but the thought of putting my money into stocks just makes me sick for some reason. I can't do it.

I've missed out on a great deal of money hoarding cash instead of stocks, but I have peace of mind. The cost of inflation is worth that to me. I have felt that a crash -- a real crash, i.e. a change in public opinion about the equity markets -- has been just around the corner since 2016. I'm much less worried about the prospect of a dollar crash, even with today's inflation.

This is not investment advice and is only my personal opinion.

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Keep in mind it's not a binary choice. You can exchange anywhere between 0 % and 100 % of your savings for some other asset class, like stocks. An extreme position in either direction is probably a mistake, but what about 20 %? 30 %?

The idea is not to get rich quick, nor is it to avoid any risk (because both are statistically impossible.)

The idea is to limit how much a crash of any type hurts, by having some savings also in other types of assets.

So for example, if your savings are $100 and you buy stocks for $30 of that, and the stock market crashes so you're down to $10 in stocks, now you only have $80 in savings. But you can use your cash savings to bootstrap your stock position back to 30 % again. If the market recovers, you get an outsize benefit from that.

(Similarly, if there should be some sort of dollar crash, you can probably use your stock market savings to bootstrap your dollar position again, putting you in a good position for recovery.)

Bravo. Peace of mind is an indirect cost of investment. I've met a brilliant head of engineering, that told me "I've sold all my stocks/coins so I can stop looking at my phone and reading articles, and I can really focus on what matters". Not having state bonds that allow people face inflation, has a HUge indirect cost: having offices full of nerds looking at stock/coin exchanges. How much human valuable time is now lost on that?

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