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Comment by thunky | Hacker News Reader

> I bought a small amount

This is why it's really hard to win big buying individual stocks. You finally pulled the trigger, and you won, but you never even had a chance to make more than a small gain.

Say you even bought $100k, which is probably much more than most mere mortals have the stomach to "place a bet" with. You'd be up 60k, which is great, but probably not life changing. And now you have to decide if you want to cash it out or let it ride and risk losing it.

On the other hand, it doesn't take much intestinal fortitude to park 100k in VTSAX and sleep well every night.

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> You'd be up 60k, which is great, but probably not life changing

I certainly hope that it wouldn't be, for the person who placed a $100k bet.

Obviously one way to hedge risk is to use smaller amounts. His gains on that portion are still greater than if it was parked 100% in VTSAX.

Only if you care about percentage gains more than dollar amounts.

Depending on how much meta he actually bought, he may have made more money today with the s&p's 0.22% gain that he's made with meta all time.

But meta probably feels like the big winner.

I don't see how that's the case. If he had 95% of portfolio in S&P and the FB he bought was 5%, he still did better in dollar terms than 100% S&P.

We can't know unless we know how much meta he bought and how much s&p he owns (if any).

But 5% is probably much more than anyone should allocate to a single stock.

And just to demonstrate my point, he could have bought 1 share of meta a couple months ago for $100. And he could have $1 million in his 401k.

> But 5% is probably much more than anyone should allocate to a single stock.

With the exception of Apple?

And that 1 share still outperformed the equivalent amount of S&P.

Right, but my original point was that no normal person (including OP) dares to take such a risk with a single stock, so in real life there is no "equivalent amount of S&P" in the equation.

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