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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

The article is arguing that you aren't likely to be able to pick the ones that will grow faster than the economy as a whole over the time frame you intend, because it relies on an extreme amount of right-place-right-time luck. If you were looking for the next Beanie Baby for the last 20 years, do you think you would've found it?

I think it's also arguing that the particular appreciation you need to capture largely only happens at the "before you heard of it" part of the curve. I don't think it has quite enough specifics there, e.g. would buying a Honus Wagner card in 1990 compared to a bunch of stocks have paid off over the last 30 years? I haven't done that research myself.

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> If you were looking for the next Beanie Baby for the last 20 years, do you think you would've found it?

Even easier, if you just pick the right 6 numbers you could end up with millions of dollars.

Unfortunately this is why I've given up on investing anything more in stocks or crypto. Everything I invested since before COVID is down.

My coinbase account currently has only 34% of the value I put into it 2 years ago, and I spread my investment over the top 5 hot currencies at that time (ethereum, cardano, algorand, sushi, bitcoin).

My stock investments are doing better at 65% of what I invested (tech, engineering, infra, pharma). Most are doing ok (down about 10%) but one in particular has absolutely tanked even though their pharma products are doing great and they've got two promising drugs in clinical trials. It's value has gone down 65% in the last year.

People will tell you to do you DD but the simple fact is, you can't. The market doesn't operate on any type of logic, a cat can do as well as a stock broker at picking stocks, and huge investment firms only win out in aggregate because they can (usually) absorb gigantic losses.

Right now I'm "bag holding" for the foreseeable. I consider these things "back pocket lottery tickets" that might one day give me a small win. But for the future I'm maxing out my pension and saving enough to buy a rental property, because one thing that has never dipped through boom and bust (at least where I live), is rent.

Edit: I lie, part of my TC is stock, so wherever I work, I am "investing in them" too

> People will tell you to do you DD

No they do not tell you to DD. Just do boggleheads method.

And its your fault for "investing" in shitcoins (all coins are shitcoins).

And the time horizon is 20 years and not 2.

You can buy a house and it needs a repair in the 2nd year and you are again in the hole. You get a bad tenant and again bag holding.

Everybody has promising clinical trials all the time.

> investment [...] hot [...] at that time

I don't think "hot at a point in time" is a good way to choose investment. Perhaps exactly the opposite?

Edit: uhh, and the other things? I honestly think you were a little unlucky...

Atleast he's not both buying high _and_ selling low.

> Unfortunately this is why I've given up on investing anything more in stocks or crypto. Everything I invested since before COVID is down. My coinbase account currently has only 34% of the value I put into it 2 years ago, and I spread my investment over the top 5 hot currencies at that time (ethereum, cardano, algorand, sushi, bitcoin).

You may want to reconsider investing in crypto too if you are down %65.

Eth was -$100-300 about 2 years ago and now $3k and Btc ~$8-12k now up ~$40k, exactly how are you down investing in top 5 projects 2 years ago or am I missing something? You should be up significantly and I’m kicking myself for not investing.

What killed my investments was the advice to "diversify your investments" (or as I think of it, "spread your bets"). Look at charts for ADA, SUSHI and ALGO over the past 1.5y and imagine getting in at the wrong point in all of them. Plenty of opportunity for losing most of your investment. On average I've done poorly. If I had only invested in BTC and ETH I would have done great, but that would have been against all good advice.

ah I see, win some and lose some. Hopefully you can dollar cost average you way to profitability moving forward

Sorry my reply was meant for @raffraffraff

There’s some predictability in terms of people trying to buy all the things they wanted as a kid when they finally have the adult income to afford it. Some examples include muscle cars, BMX bikes, LEGO sets, and other things that a large population of children were aware of and wanted. If you just stock-pile the big sellers or scoop up the used stuff when it bottoms out in value then you might be able to profit.

The big issue is carrying costs. If I could have parked a bunch of 70s/80s Porsches in a climate controller garage for 30+ years I’d be cashing in right now.

How are 90s baseball cards, pogs, and yo-yos looking? Or "regular" opened copies of NHL 94 or what have you? I think we often overlook all the shit we were into that hasn't gotten expensive. We'd have to basically index-fund this shit if we had really been trying to invest in it in 2000 or so, and I think the losers would be a big problem for our fund. Maybe you bought a 3000GT instead of a Supra because you didn't see The Fast and the Furious coming. Whoops.

Let's try to predict the future instead: which of things that 2022 kids are into should we be buying up for 20 years from now? Roblox items? New Pokemon cards? (I don't know if I actually can come up with any other things off the top of my head, lol.)

> which of things that 2022 kids are into should we be buying up for 20 years from now?

Streamer memorabilia: https://www.gwern.net/Startup-ideas#streamer-memorabilia

Tho I think the average HNer is too out of touch to make good investments in this field and would be better off asking their kids

Regular copies of NHL ‘94 aren’t worth much (because yearly sports releases have a lot of copies and are typically fungible with the year prior or later), but is still a fantastic game and worth the $17 market price. That said, 16-bit games have doubled to quadrupled in market price in the last 3-4 years and are becoming increasingly hard to find. I’m interested in seeing how a recession affects prices, but some rarer, low print games have been expensive for a decade add and probably won’t lose much value.

Obviously, who would have known, but at least in video games you can watch prices start to rise about 20 years after a consoles original life.

Are there counterfeits being made? Seems like those games would be relatively easy to copy for someone with a little skill. I don't imagine many buyers are able to verify authenticity.

There are counterfeits, but they are easily spotted by inspecting PCBs, packaging, printing, etc. There may be some skill involved in identifying a counterfeit, but that’s true of most collectibles. If you get a copy of Snatcher for less than $1,000 it’s probably a counterfeit, and if you can’t tell, you probably wouldn’t be spending that much to begin with.

fwiw Topps (one of the Big Two manufacturers of baseball cards) recently attempted to go public via a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC). Their pitch? NFT baseball cards.

So they might actually make a comeback.

Vtuber merchandise? It might actually be decent bet. Start expensive and limited, might go up with right popular groups.

From cars I'm not sure, Teslas? Or will they just die on their own.

> I’d be cashing in right now

Are you sure? I investigated once the Mercedes 300SL Gullwing. Despite the high price it fetches, it's still a lousy investment, if you consider inflation, compare it to S&P 500 returns, and account for all the storage costs, insurance costs, and costs to keep it in running condition.

Cars decay even in a climate controlled garage. I've had some problems with my '72 Dodge with plastic parts becoming very brittle, and some things just disintegrating when they're touched. Not that I mind, I didn't buy it as an investment.

Some of those things have a floor - LEGO basically never goes under $10 or so a pound even used, so if you can get unopened sets for that price or so, you’re basically guaranteed to make money someday.

Probably not worth it as an investment however - I’ve done it and sure some of the sets I was able to sell for much more but many just sit there.

Cars are an interesting example. They are very generational outside the premium outliers. What is raising in price now are those that people are nostalgic with, but they are different from ones that parents or grand parents were nostalgic about, those in current day are just bad bets.

It is about timing, in both buying and selling. And then in carrying.

> "before you heard of it"

Not quite true for MTG. It was insanely popular in the mid-to-late '90s, and you could still pick up a black lotus for $250. Dual lands, which are now $100+ each, could be had for $5 each.

For MTG, the problem was more "is this gonna keep increasing in value". In hindsight the answer is yes.

And in foresight, maybe further question how long will it keep going up? What is the size of new player base considering how expensive it actually is. And how long will the old guard or current active players stay alive and active.

>The article is arguing that you aren't likely to be able to pick the ones that will grow faster than the economy as a whole over the time frame you intend, because it relies on an extreme amount of right-place-right-time luck. If you were looking for the next Beanie Baby for the last 20 years, do you think you would've found it?

While that might be true for toys, it's not entirely true for art. Some old paintings of reasonable quality which aren't already sold at exorbitant prices will go up in price because of scarcity. After the buyers will decide they can't afford the best known ones and current favorites, their attention will switch to what can afford.

For modern art you have to find quality. Because at some point in time its value will rise.

So, it's possible to knowingly buy art which will appreciate, the only question is if it will beat the stock market.

As for that, if I'll buy something, I won't do it as an investment. I will be happy to not lose money.

How do you determine quality in modern art?

$1 on Bitcoin ten years ago are worth over ten million dollars now. And I think people thought Bitcoin had potential, even back then. Definitely something you wouldn’t mind spending a few bucks on. But back in the day it was quite different for average folks without enough tech knowledge to mine or buy crypto.

Getting in early on BTC, ETH, or crypto of your choice from this bull run was probably a pretty non-reproducible fluke though. Once the leverage in crypto markets gets cracked down on (up to 100:1 leverage is definitely contributing to the wild moves including to the upside), the return profile won't look like that any more.

And with NFTs, there's just this endless sea of them. Even within one collection, most of the supply stays dormant so there's no telling who might wake up at any moment and completely flood the market.

why does 100:1 leverage contributes to upside, but isn't cancelled out by 100:1 to downside?

Because you can't go below zero. There's a floor to how much you can lose, and it's "everything you've put in", not "everything plus additional debt".

...typically, anyway.

> Because you can't go below zero. There's a floor to how much you can lose, and it's "everything you've put in", not "everything plus additional debt".

If you're leveraged, you are borrowing money, which means you can lose more than you put in as you could lose the money you borrowed and thus would owe on the debt. Further, if you are shorting bitcoin for instance, there is no floor.

You can't generally go beyond 0 though. You'll get liquidated before that due to the exchange's risk engines. If it goes beyond, that loss is passed on to the lenders.

Well, for starters the funding and borrow rate(s) are often positive because people just tend to be bullish. So things have to get pumped up somehow before they come crashing down, it's a much stronger tendency among the crypto faithful to be bullish than to be bearish. I also think the other commenter's insight about how gains on the short side are capped at $0 price is relevant.

So while there is downside pressure from liquidation cascades on the levered positions, the main point is that volatility in general will smooth out. The juiced up all time highs we've seen so far have been driven by leverage. Maybe BTC sells off to $12K but if there was no leverage in the system I think it would take a lot longer to bring up to $69K than it did before.

Where are you getting your numbers? They don't match my recollection, or some articles I'm seeing:

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/121815/bitcoins-...

"Bitcoin's price rose again on April 13, 2011, from $1 to a peak of $29.60 by June 7, 2011, a gain of 2,960% within three months. A sharp recession in cryptocurrency markets followed, and Bitcoin's price bottomed out at $2.05 by mid-November.4 The following year, its price rose from $4.85 on May 9 to $13.50 by Aug. 15."

So let's use that $2.05 price as "ten years ago," I'm willing to give you 10 and a half years ;). A dollar in bitcoin then would be worth about $20,000 now.

So sure, pretty good. Nowhere near tens of millions, though.

And that $30->$2 change, and a few more up/down cycles between 2012 and 2017, shows that plenty of people thought it had already peaked. See also the various "oh no I lost my hard drive with the bitcoins I'd mined since I didn't think it was that important" stories. So sure, getting in for just a few bucks before 2011 and holding? Yeah, you're looking super great! But most people hadn't heard of it by then, and that's not who the article is talking about... when they did hear of it, you had a huge wave of pump-and-dump shitcoins proving the point of the article: the average person getting in at that point was largely too late for the level of return they were looking for.

You'd have to go a little further back. The first real price for BTC was in 2010, when someone paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas, worth about 40 bucks. From that to the current price of $40K per BTC is a gain of ten million times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bitcoin#2010

Of course, you had to be a serious deep-in-the-weeds enthusiast to get in that early. Maybe that's the sort of people who tend to make money on collectibles, too.

I had plenty of coins in 2010 that I'd mined, the problem was that they were just a toy at the time and so when I lost the keys that same year, I didn't give a shit. Now of course I have regrets :)

Your numbers may be correct, but you missed the point.

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