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Comment by morelandjs | Hacker News Reader

1. Plan to continue investing in index funds on a schedule 2. Watching myself for lifestyle creep. Would like enough reserves on hand that I’m not a cornered animal if I lose my job. 3. Building up separate savings (brokerage) for a house. Will pounce a little early if the housing bubble pops. 4. Applying some healthy skepticism toward “too good to be true” investment schemes 5. Unplugging from the click bait cycle to preserve my sanity 6. Staying heavily invested in tech stocks. They seem to just scale better over long time horizons, and I’m in it for the long haul.

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I agree with most of these things. The one caveat is #1. Though index funds have historically been the best investment, the past does not equal the future. With EVERYONE getting the advice to invest in index funds, that pushes up the price of the stocks in the index. That's where all the competition is. I'm more a fan of Peter Lynch's philosophy of investing where you have an advantage.

I'm not saying don't do index funds at all, and niehter is morelandjs, but just be conscious of this dynamic.

My personal approach is to invest directly in industries that I know well, like tech, and to find funds to invest in industries that I think are promising but I don't know enough about to make good investment decisions, like ARK Genomics.

And I'd add to the list "get some reputable crypto (BTC, ETH, ETC)".

investing where you have an advantage.

Do you spend 40 hours a week pouring over the 10-Q’s of any particular company, and its competitors and customers and suppliers, or directly engaging with upper management and bankers?

Then why would you think you have any advantage over the insiders that do?

I’ve read Peter Lynch’s investment book to start out and found it as a great intro.

I’ve followed it for two of my very modest investments and they have all worked out way better than I would have thought. I know there is a big chance that this is all just being lucky and that this is just a side effect of a bull market.

But he means you have an advantage as an insider.

For example, if you saw that you and all your tech friends companies’ were switching to this payroll system that seems light years ahead of the current one. That can be an indication its worth looking into.

Maybe as a radiologist, you know that a certain x-ray machine will be leaps and bounds better than what the current standard is.

It is not simply based on insider information though. There’s a bunch of chapters dedicated to what numbers to look through, identifying if a stock is cyclical.

"Normally" it is in an area where you have some advantage. Being in tech, we do have an advantage. You had the opportunity to know about crypto before anybody had any clue what you were talking about as well.

As a developer, I started using AWS when it was just E2C (or was it S3 first? - whichever), but again, you're seeing things before most people do or before they become big.

It's more about "noticing" than it is about reading prospectus and quarterly reports. Yes, you'll want to look at those as well, but only when you think you've noticed something that looks promising.

Arkg is the reddest red I have in my account lol. My girlfriend is in genomics and I felt like I’d get some more “insider” view of the industry but it doesn’t seem to really matter when the etf does it’s own thing.

It's my 2nd reddest, but I'm it that and my reddest for a long haul.

> 2. Watching myself for lifestyle creep.

I feel this all the time and haven't been able to quite formulate it. I like to think of this as convenience things like subscriptions or fancy items that we can live without.

Keeping a separation between wants and needs can be trickier than it sounds. Avoiding a want becoming a need is important to preventing lifestyle creep.

Over the top example: buying a travel trailer because you think it will save money on hotel rooms, and you have a large SUV already that you like. Now you have pushed your large SUV a step closer to a need, because without it, your rapidly-depreciating travel trailer is worthless to you.

More HN-relevant: you have a bunch of streaming subscriptions because there are series on each of them that you can’t bear the thought of dropping in the middle. You slowly accumulated this collection of subscriptions as you started watching other, previous series that “everyone” was talking about.

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