More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market | Hacker News Reader

More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market

wsj.com

283 pointsthm602 comments

> They expect the problem to worsen. The stock market has climbed 23% this year...

The problem will resolve itself if (when?) the market crashes.

I remember the run up to the dot-com bust. I was too much of a bumpkin at the time to even know how I would trade stocks — but I listened to an acquaintance go on and on about how much he was making on the market.

At the time I guessed that he was much smarter than me — that it would take me years to become as investment-savvy as this guy was.

In time, especially after the next bubble in 2008 when I had become more savvy, I came to see this guy as having been in the market at a time when even a monkey throwing darts could look like Warren Buffet.

So too I think are many of today's investors. (I would include myself but perhaps not: I have been won over by Boglism, a balanced portfolio, infrequent trading, etc.)

I have to disagree with you. Comparing long-term, passive investors to short-term speculators seems unfair and simplistic to me.

I thought we were talking exclusively about short-term speculators.

Oh? Perhaps I misunderstood when you said "infrequent trading".

I'm also wondering why I'm getting downvoted but this is the Internet for me :)

> At the time I guessed that he was much smarter than me — that it would take me years to become as investment-savvy as this guy was.

You lucked out by mistakingly believing he was intelligent. The classic scenario is when your neighbor is obviously an idiot, making tremendous amounts of money in the market, and you have to explain to your spouse why you can't/won't emulate them. That's when even bright, (normally) level-headed people start piling in before the bubble bursts.

Indeed, most frustrating is when someone (stupid) is proven right, even though they used completely wrong reasoning (in spirit of Gettier problem).

There’s a common saying in the investing world that applies here: “confusing strategy with outcome.” The outcome may be good, as it was in this case, even though the strategy was terrible. But most people get them confused and think it’s the strategy (going all in on bitcoin or TSLA options or whatever) that was good and won them their riches.

The Gov't / Federal Reserve has made it clear they will not let the value of assets drop significantly ever again. The entire planet's capital is now betting on US equities going up and to right forever, and all levers will be used and invented wholesale from nothing to keep that going.

At some point though something will happen such that they can’t keep their fist on the scale, and then the market can correct suddenly.

Unfortunately government intervention makes it even more unpredictable when that will be.

Yea, except the inflation we encountered in the last 3 years were directly from trying to keep asset values from dropping. They are at their ropes end. There really isn't that much room between mass inflation vs. the rich keeping their numbers infinity growing.

That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of asset prices vs interest rates.

Exactly. The "crash" can happen via exploding inflation, or falling markets. Either way results in the same thing.

This implies that a sustained crash will only happen if/when these two institutions are no longer capable of supporting the market. In effect, it's a bet against the US, which so far has been a losing one.

The federal reserve literally just got through a monetary tightening policy that paid zero regard to the stock market.

The fed will juice to keep employment up and tighten to keep inflation down. They will not support stocks at the expense of those mandates

We're dealing with people who interpret the words "price stability" to mean "prices should increase exponentially, we'd consider it a serious problem if they stayed level". It seems a bit of a stretch to go from that to believing that their mandate constrains them somehow. Their mandate can be interpreted to mean whatever they want it to mean. They're a political beast, they're going to do whatever they can get away with politically while making life comfortable for the banks.

And I'd imagine the stock market is still fairly confident that rates are going back down. If we look at a chart of fed interest rates [0] the statistical evidence suggests we're going to see low rates in the near future. It'd be nice to buck the trend and have the US stay focused on prosperity but there isn't much evidence of it yet. The basic plan of high debt then inflating the debt away hasn't changed.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfunds

It’s impossible to keep prices perfectly steady, the Fed could not possibly be that precise. If they tried, we would bounce back and forth between inflation and deflation, which would be incredibly destabilizing to long-term investment… and therefore destabilizing to job growth and capital improvement, innovation, etc.

So instead the Fed aims for a small amount of inflation. That way when they miss a bit, we still stay out of deflation. It is much better to bounce between 2% and 3% than between -1% and 1%.

If the goal was actually to inflate the debt away, they would be aiming higher. Proof: the debt has been growing in real terms, not shrinking.

The Fed has stated that one benefit of a small amount of inflation is that it provides employers with a mechanism to effectively revise wages downward without employees quitting (by denying them an annual raise), but yes - they have never stated that they are trying to inflate the debt away.

The Federal Reserve targeting "price stability" literally does mean that they target prices increasing exponentially by an average of 2% per year[1]. The mathematical form is P(t) = P₀(1.02)ᵗ, where P₀ is the initial price level and t is time in years.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/economy-at-a-glance-inflation...

There's more to assets than US equities, the Fed would be far more concerned with serious weakness in the Treasury market, and Treasuries often move inverse of US equities.

Certainly hope they’ll keep going to the right…

I wonder if this sets up a moral hazard that only exacerbates a possibly coming crash. People assume the Fed will prevent assets from dropping, which makes them bid up asset prices to even higher levels that even the Fed is incapable of maintaining.

This is easy to say but the reality is being a monkey and throwing money in the market over the last 15 years would have made you f u money. Yet most people never did it. So who is the genius: the guy who remains on the sidelines and eventually is proved right or the guy who remained in the market and did face a brutal correction. One thing I've learned about myself is that I'll never be the guy on the right end of that mid curve meme so I might as well lean in on being on the left.

The problem is that I have been seeing some version of the “crash imminent, sell everything” thesis for my entire life. Almost nobody who “saw the crash coming” in the case of the dotcom bubble, or covid, or the subprime crisis made any money, because almost nobody gets the timing or magnitude of the crash right. You can find YouTube channels that have been warning people that a crash is imminent for the last two years. If you had been out of the market for the last two years you would have missed historical gains, and for what? The magnitude of the crash you’re protecting yourself from would now have to be impractically huge for you to come out ahead.

Much better to just stay in the market, knowing that there will be crashes and you will have days where the numbers look awful, because they’ll look great again in a few years.

The risk of a crash is why you stay out of single stock concentration and why you avoid day trading. Its not an argument to stay out of the market.

This is the reason dollar-cost-averaging works. You buy less (shares) when the market is high, and more when it is low, without thinking about it and without trying to "time" your transactions (which almost always fails unless you have inside info).

It works in a sense of not timing the market. Lump sum beats dollar-cost averaging - because you have more time in market.

Sure, if you have a lump sum to start with.

But dollar-cost-averaging beats saving up a lump sum and then investing.

I think the phrase you're looking for is "automatic investing" or something, not DCA. DCA is usually framed explicitly as a counterpart to lump sum of an existing pile of money

DCA in my understanding is automatically investing a fixed amount at fixed intervals. E.g. $100/month, or whatever. The amount and interval aren't all that critical. The point is to do it automatically and not try to time the market.

Yes I also have heard the advice to dollar cost average a lump sum, not so much in the scenario of a rollover of an existing investment, but when a large amount of cash has become available for some reason. I guess the theory there is you won't risk putting it all in at a market high point. If you average it in over a year in a declining market, you're better off. If you average it in to a rising market you're worse off than if you had invested it all up front. Trying to guess which of these scenarios is going to happen is trying to time the market. I'm sure people have done the research -- intuitively, if you're investing for the long term, better to put it all in at once. But there are probably risk tolerance considerations.

A year is pretty extreme. If you cut a lump sum into a series of transactions over a couple weeks or even days it is just about the least expensive way to exchange earning potential for reduced volatility. You miss out on like 2 weeks of earnings in exchange for a huge reduction in the chance that you buy in and are immediately down 2% or something.

You can do both. You can invest the entire amount, but make it short/medium bond heavy on Day 1. As you go thru the year, you rotate more and more of your fixed income allocation towards equity until you reach your target equity %. This is relevant if, for example, you downsized your home or received a retirement payout.

There's just as much probability that you miss out on a big swing up as there is that you miss a big a drop.

It's not the big swings you're trying to avoid, you're just trying to average together a bunch of interday minor ups and downs so your starting price is not as volatile.

Depending on the definition of “beating”. On average investing right away is better but the variance of outcomes is higher.

On average across all investors. Not so much if you invested at the peak of dot.com (would have taken decades to break even) or even the covid bubble.

Dollar cost averaging does not work and has never worked. Because most assets have unlimited upside and unlimited downside. A stock or asset can go ballistic for decades like Apple or Bitcoin, or it can fall to zero value.

There are no mathematical ways of winning investing. If it was that easy, everybody would do it. You can only follow your heart and do your due diligence.

> Because most assets have unlimited upside and unlimited downside. A stock or asset can go ballistic for decades like Apple or Bitcoin, or it can fall to zero value

Spot equities and crypto have limited downside. You put in x, most you can lose is x as you observed. Unlimited downside is not a thing outside certain exotic derivatives.

I didn't mean the upside/downside on your investment, but on the asset. Most investment assets except for bullion can fall to 0. They can also increase without an upper limit, like for example Apple stock. The market being "high" or "low" is not remedied by dollar cost averaging.

You’re misusing the term “unlimited downside” which is why you were corrected. Shorting stock is an example of unlimited downside.

What dollar cost averaging does is reduce short time price risk. The result is the long term.

Even if zero is the bottom, an asset can have unlimited downside. It can go from $0.1 per share to $0.0001 per share and so on without end. Or, with the rational perspective, after 0 the downside does not matter anymore. An asset cannot go below zero, at least the assets I know of. An investment can go below zero and beyond, when you use leverage. But that's a derivative and not an asset, as you've pointed out.

What I mean is that dollar cost averaging is a myth and cargo culting in the world of investment. Let me explain:

Let's say you're "dollar cost averaging" by purchasing an asset during a few years, which fluctuates between $90 and $110. So after some time you have averaged around $100 per share. Now if the asset goes to $5000 next year, what has your dollar cost averaging accomplished? Or if it goes to $3, what has your dollar cost averaging accomplished. Nothing in both cases.

One of the hardest myths about investment, that seems to be impossible to beat out of people's heads even with a sledge hammer, is that there is a proper historical price for an asset and that prices only fluctuate around that price. So you buy when it's under that price and sell when it's over that price. Smart, right? No, it's dumb and the reason why most people trying to invest lose their money. An asset can go down and stay down on a new price level. Or it can go up and stay up on a new price level.

>> Even if zero is the bottom, an asset can have unlimited downside. It can go from $0.1 per share to $0.0001 per share and so on without end. Or, with the rational perspective, after 0 the downside does not matter anymore. An asset cannot go below zero, at least the assets I know of. An investment can go below zero and beyond, when you use leverage. But that's a derivative and not an asset, as you've pointed out.

This is drivel. Being able to tag on infinite 0s after the decimal doesn’t make an asset have unlimited downside, the limit is $0 as you yourself apparently know.

An asset has unlimited downside, in the same sense that you can't move anywhere. See, to move somewhere, you would first have to get halfway there, and to get halfway there, you first half to get a quarter of the way there, and so on, so therefore you can never move from where you are.

X to 0 is an interesting definition of unlimited.

Unlimited in ratio, I guess.

Even then, brokers just show a percent loss of -100%. Our buddy would never see the cool infinity symbol.

It’s too bad they aren’t a fan of dollar cost averaging into broad index funds, I think their older self would thank them.

My investments have always had fantastic results, far above what any index fund could render. I have been forced to involuntary "dollar cost averaging" by having to wait for the next salary in order to invest more. But "dollar cost averaging" is not an investment strategy, it's confusion on the highest level.

Dear Internet Stranger (who is also an amazing investor): Have you considered starting you own hedge fund? If not, are you willing to share some of your best investments in the last few years?

You wouldn't be interested in an answer from an internet stranger. But please tell me how "dollar cost averaging" would help any investor in a real world scenario?

It actually grieves me that your average person is completely unwilling to just take a few days of their life to understand investing and what it is and how they can sensibly do it. Instead they decide to treat it like a casino and chase hocus-pocus like "dollar cost averaging" or "technical analysis" or "day trading".

Every person usually has some area of expertise or interest, or even a hunch. Take that and invest accordingly, long term. There are tools available to make any investment very conservative or very risky, according to taste.

So what you're saying is you avoid timing the market (which doesn't work) by timing when you buy shares? What?

You buy at a regular cadence, and sometimes it's low and others it's high, but on average you do OK.

No. You invest the same amount of money at a regular cadence throughout the year. The end result is that you obtain less shares when the price is high, and more shares when the price is low. It's explicitly not timing the market.

It's implicitly timing the market. If you have all the money available at the beginning of the year a better strategy is to just invest everything asap.

If you get the money monthly (e.g. from salary) then that's just normal investing and you don't have a choice anyway.

If you think that is some clever strategy then honestly you probably should get professional advice because you have some fundamental misunderstandings of the stock market.

Heh, I totally agree with you.

I don't know hoe many times I've explained people the given strategy is not what researchers mean when they compare lump sum investing (LSI, a.k.a. converting all cash you have available for investing into equities) and dollar-cost averaging (DCA, a.k.a. splitting the available cash into equal parts and slowly converting the cash into equities at a regular pace.)

What that strategy is is just a regular (e.g. monthly) series of lump sum investments every time cash comes available (e.g. when salary comes in), that people tend to confuse with a DCA strategy.

Having said that: one LSI investment every month is a great strategy that historically does better than any DCA strategy.

ETA:

Relevant research:

- Vanguard Research's Dollar-cost Averaging is Just Taking Risk Later: https://www.passiveinvestingaustralia.com/wp-content/uploads... - PWL Capital / Ben Felix's Dollar Cost Averaging v.s. Lump Sum Investing: https://pwlcapital.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Dollar-Cos...

Please everyone note that there is a long-standing and somewhat pointless argument over whether or not DCA means “regular monthly contributions” versus “taking a lump sum contribution and dividing it up into contributions over time”.

Strictly speaking time in the market beats timing in the market. If you have a lump sum, the theoretically best option is to put it into an index fund today.

Most people in most situations don’t have one lump sum to invest, so recurrent monthly contributions to retirement accounts is the way to go (and what OP here is advocating).

If dollar-cost-averaging is so great, why don't professional asset managers use this strategy? (Hint: They don't.) I think dollar-cost-averaging is an idea promoted to non-professional investors to help them manage the psychological burden of (initial) paper losses after making an investment. Assuming that very short term stock market performance is essentially random (long term: it is not), then the day after you make an investment is roughly 50/50: Am I up or down? Recall: The human brain wants to avoid losses much more than gains.

I remember at one point a couple years ago, I saw a thread on the Bogleheads forum where people could basically call their shot on market crashes; they would post and timestamp when they exited the market and when they re-entered, so that people could go and calculate if the timing was correct or if they lost money by missing out on market growth.

I might not have the dates correct, but I remember the general strokes of one guy who decided in like 2017 or something that the market had topped out, the crash was coming any moment now, and he sold everything and called his shot. He missed out on three years of incredible gains, and then the market absolutely _crashed_ in early 2020. He got it right, by a very small amount; he had gotten more selling his positions than he would have gotten selling in march 2020. He buys back in at what ended up being the absolute nadir of the market in like april 2020 or something. The rare success story of timing the market, you love to see it.

And then a few days later, he decides that actually, no, the market still has more to drop, and he sells again. Oh well.

> He buys back in at what ended up being the absolute nadir of the market in like april 2020 or something. The rare success story of timing the market, you love to see it.

The stock market usually goes down faster than it goes up, which makes it slightly easier (well, less difficult anyway) to time the bottoms than to time the tops.

    > The stock market usually goes down faster than it goes up, which makes it slightly easier (well, less difficult anyway) to time the bottoms than to time the tops.

As the saying goes: "Elevator down; escalator up."

Yes, the problem with market timing is it requires two decisions that for the marginal investor are inconsistent. That's why people who sell at a high fail to reenter at a low, and also why people who stay invested at the high remain fully invested long after prices revert to a much lower level.

This suggests the answer is... fundamental analysis, which neither camp is doing.....

Agreed this sort of advice is standard - but many people don’t follow it because it’s boring.

One way to make this sort of advice “not boring” is to apply the advice to 90% of your net worth (or cash flow), but then give yourself permission to “gamble” with the other 10%.

For me, that has fulfilled my personal interest in playing around in the markets for fun while still building/growing a traditional “safe” portfolio at the same time.

This is the way. Boring is, well, boring. Slice off some small percentage to do high risk investments with to sate your FOMO. Buy GME, sell it for Doge, and short TSLA with that pool after inhaling too much r/WSB because you want to think you're a genius.

Why do I need to get my ya-yas off gambling any part of my retirement? There is zero coherent nor compelling reason to tie your enjoyment of gambling to the size of your portfolio.

To be clear I’m not opposed to gambling. I enjoy occasionally going to the local poker room and have an established bankroll. I have plenty of fun at $1/$2 tables even though the buyin is a fraction of a fraction of my net worth. I am mildly profitable in the long run, but nobody sane would suggest I’d be better off at the $100/$200 tables even though my Vanguard balance could easily support it.

All of this advice to keep it at 10% also ignores what happens when you lose most of that. Do you restart with a new 10%? Ideally no, but that’s really unsatisfying to somebody who’s enjoying their new day trading hobby.

Honestly just save yourself the headache. Put your nest egg into index funds and find some other way to make your life exciting. Gamble with pocket change from your entertainment budget. Or maybe even just don’t.

For those who need it, it is a way to manage impulse control. Not everyone needs it, but some people do.

GLP-1s may regulate it (via anti addiction mechanisms observed), more data to come in that regard.

For those who “need” it, you are really playing with fire. It’s not like chasing after losses to turn things around is a particularly rare response.

We’re in a thread under an article revealing how more and more people are falling victim to gambling addiction through the stock market. I’m not convinced that “you should just gamble some of your life savings” is the best suggestion for most people.

In a just and sane world, we would have pensions, locking up retirement savings away from human impulses and bad decisions. But here we are, doing our best to get through the shit show, surprised when humans do humans things.

I get that there are some people who do need that outlet. I’m just saying we don’t need to make “set aside 90% to gamble with!” the first recommendation, but maybe the last.

I just always buy and never sell until the leadership and the board of the company appear to be going full retard. And not in a good way like Netflix pivoting to streaming in 2006 but like HP in 2006. Haha.

What was the last sell you did?

the last big one was BABA.

I assume PP means they are staying out of leveraged bets and risky individual stocks.

Generally the saw it coming crowd is just sticking it in diversified index and bond funds and doing other things.

    > The problem is that I have been seeing some version of the “crash imminent, sell everything” thesis for my entire life.

What do you think is the root cause for this kind of thinking? It is hard-wired from childhood, or borne of (difficult) experiences?

    > Much better to just stay in the market, knowing that there will be crashes and you will have days where the numbers look awful, because they’ll look great again in a few years.

This assumes that you are talking about the US stock market. Most other stock markets are far slower to recover from economic downturns and crises. Why? Their economies are less dynamic and their political leaders are more fearful of difficult (economic policy) changes.

    > The stock market is a mechanism for transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient - Warren Buffett

    > For 240 years it's been a terrible mistake to bet against America - Warren Buffett

Lastly: The Nikkei 225 (Japan's most important equity index) peaked in 1990, then took 30+ years to recover.

Also: Look at Mainland China since it was opened to (direct) foreign investment in the last 15 years. Overall: The Mainland China economy has grown a lot, but their stock market is a terrible place to invest.

`What do you think is the root cause for this kind of thinking?`

It's probably quite advantageous to have some individuals irrationally hedging against catastrophe--even though they are likely to be wrong, when one of them is very occasionally right the humans survive.

Your point is that patience and discipline, not panic or overconfidence, are the real superpowers in investing

The market is people making bets on bubbles and crashes. That's how we get prices.

At any point or during any stretch of time, one of these sides will be correct.

The SPY and QQQ charts zoomed out are starting to look like the biggest parabola of all time in markets. 1999 is just a blip on this monster.

Seeing all kinds of warning signs from family members who never traded or got into crypto until just this past 6 months.

Change the chart to logarithmic scaling. You need to use log scaling for long term stock market charts

The dotcom crash was huge in terms of the percentage drop

Nasdaq crashed 84%.

https://www.tradingview.com/x/xm2zypvg/

> Seeing all kinds of warning signs from family members who never traded or got into crypto until just this past 6 months.

That's just jealousy, Those who sit on the sidelines complain the most. Like I said in my previous post if you didn't see it. I see it as that the barrier to entry for making money has never been lower. Right now, it’s one of the best times in history for anyone to start earning, not just the Wall Street elites. Thanks to AI tools and online platforms, it’s easier than ever. Every week, new tools are being launched, some even claiming returns as high as 400%. Take the NexusTrade guy on Reddit as an example. He created his own investment tool and is now in conversations with Wall Street professionals.

It’s so accessible now that with just $100, you could invest in a stock like NVIDIA, double your money in a week, then reinvest across multiple stocks and multiply it again. Suddenly, $100 turns into $2,500 in no time.

I get your point about everyone making money, but why is that a bad thing? Isn’t it great that anyone can do it? These platforms are practically making money for you, whether you’re at work, at home, or even asleep. Like someone once said, “If you can’t make money while you sleep, you’ll work until you die.”

It’s never been easier to earn significant amounts of money, and it doesn’t look like this trend is slowing down anytime soon.

> you could invest in a stock like NVIDIA, double your money in a week

NASDAQ: NVDA (3.09%) past month

Chat Jippity is that you?

I thought people HN know better than random "traders" on reddit/YouTube/TikTok

> The problem will resolve itself if (when?) the market crashes.

Someone said something like, Everyone thinks they're a genius, when the market only goes up.

Although, one thing different now is the heavy throughout-the-day manipulation of retail investors, effectively making strong social groups and identities around it.

That wasn't a thing when, say, ETrade started, and lots of people dabbled, and found it was hard to lose money, just trading around different companies, with little understanding of how things even supposedly work, much less how things actually worked.

Today, from what I occasionally glimpse, you've got all these supposed skills you're applying as a retail investor/sheep/pawn (including various degrees of snake oil, or thinking you're going to be one of the smarter people on a pump/dump scheme that leaves others holding the bag), and constant social groups where people even self-deprecatingly celebrate huge day-trading losses. Like a wholesome support group that actively encourages you to stick with the bad habit, rather than encourages you to stay sober.

So maybe, when the next big culling comes, you'll have lots of people who can somehow still get margin accounts, and will say, "Blood in the streets, and I'm missing 3 limbs, but, hey, stocks are on sale!" And a thundering chorus of other addicts, and their manipulators, encouraging them.

(Disclosures: S&P 500 ETF with low expense ratio in tax-advantaged, plus an emergency fund that goes nowhere near the market. :)

A market crash won’t be a silver bullet. I’ve known several gambling addicts and that’s not how addiction works. They don’t just stop because they lose a bunch of money. They always hold out hope they’ll be able to win everything back “next time”.

I've worked as a software engineer for various investment banks. The best quote and investment advice I've heard on those engagements is "Only monkey's pick bottoms"

Middle of the road, risk managed funds are our best chance of financial success, not individually predicting the market dynamics.

The worst is the crypto gamblers thinking they are "investing". If they make even the smallest profit you'll never hear the end of it.

>> They expect the problem to worsen. The stock market has climbed 23% this year... > >The problem will resolve itself if (when?) the market crashes.

This sounds like a terrible way to "solve" the problem

I see it as that the barrier to entry for making money has never been lower. Right now, it’s one of the best times in history for anyone to start earning, not just the Wall Street elites. Thanks to AI tools and online platforms, it’s easier than ever. Every week, new tools are being launched, some even claiming returns as high as 400%.

Take the NexusTrade guy on Reddit as an example. He created his own investment tool and is now in conversations with Wall Street professionals.

It’s never been easier to earn significant amounts of money, and it doesn’t look like this trend is slowing down anytime soon.

You could also have invested in SMCI at its high of $113. it's now down at $34.

Personally I got into this when the stock market crashed in 2020 and I made shit loads. There are big winners during crashes too, some of the biggest wins.

Yeah currently young adults are screwed when it comes to gambling addiction.

They were children in the heyday of abusive loot boxes and cs go gambling.

Turned 18 right around when sports betting apps became legal.

In their early 20s crypto exploded.

Now, apps like yotta prey on them. Stock trading apps make it easy to dump your money on tsla.

Is going to be rough

I've yet to really land on my opinion of the idea of a pending market crash with how much money printing has gone on.

All the standard indicators I look at really line up with the idea that a crash should be coming, or should already have happened. Companies aren't valued based on the fundamentals anymore, for example, and yet here we are.

Its starting to feel more like the perpetually increasing market, despite the fundamentals, is a sign of how weak printing and inflation is making the dollar. Stocks can go up when the companies are worth more (ideally because they are producing more), but prices can also go up because the currency used to value the stocks is taking a serious hit.

Illusion of genius

Many criticize the retail investor for treating the stock market like gambling, but I think it really does resemble gambling more than investing these days.

How many times have we seen a companies value jump or fall by billions based on a tweet? How many meme stocks have we seen? How many pump and dump SPACs have there been? How many companies have never (and likely will never) made a dime in profit but see their market caps continue to climb?

“Value investing” is dead for most, picking a company that you believe will generate solid long-term revenue is no longer interesting. You need to figure out what is going to 10x tomorrow.

There are things that we could do to slow down the public equity markets and re-establish the relationship between stock price and business fundamentals, but that’s not what almost anyone wants.

I agree.

I think the reality is the "don't try to be smart, do these low-risk things because statistically you're too stupid to beat the market" has logic to it, and stats to back it up. But the unspoken part is, "let the rich do that stuff, and their wealth advisors and folks on the golf courses".

So there's an elitist aspect to telling people to back off. We all know people who made a killing on individual stocks, either because they bought them or they worked at a company that issued them.

It's not really elitist. Picking individual stocks is essentially saying "I have brand new insight that nobody else has, and I'm going to earn profit by incorporating that knowledge into prices and be rewarded forgetting it right". This is clearly a very specialized activity, you shouldn't expect to be able to bring brand new, accurate insight, and out predict everyone else in the world, without a deep understanding of economics, finance, and expertise in the specific industry and the company you're trading in. It's no more elitist to say "most people should just buy index funds" than it is to say "most people should just get root canals done by dentists rather than doing it themselves".

> without a deep understanding of economics, finance, and expertise in the specific industry and the company you're trading in.

is in contradiction to

>It's not really elitist.

It's not wrong. But elitist is absolutely is. We're saying, only these people can do these things correctly. Is it true? It's subject to debate. You can be in IT, discover a software product at work and decide you think the company is worth investing in. Don't need an MBA for that.

> You can be in IT, discover a software product at work and decide you think the company is worth investing in.

And then you can be still be wrong because you didn't appreciate that the company is operating a low-trust environment/switching costs are high/they didn't have enough industry contacts/competitors outmarketed.

Well, buying stock in a company because you like their product is precisely the kind of bad stock picking strategy I'm talking about. The quality of a company's product is public information, so you should expect it to be priced in. Whether or not to pick any individual stock should be made on the basis of whether that stock is over-valued or under-valued in the market, not if it's a good company overall. Amazing companies can be highly overvalued, and crap companies doing garbage work can be undervalued.

Like I say, best to leave it to professionals. For some things it's fine for people to have a DIY spirit, like building a website or a cabinet. For other things, which can harm you if you mess up, it's better to leave it to the pro's... electricians, doctors, etc. We're talking about people's life savings here, they can easily lose everything and ruin their lives, not being able to take care of their family etc.

>Amazing companies can be highly overvalued, and crap companies doing garbage work can be undervalued.

I'm sorry, but how does value matter? I'm not being flippant - the Mag 7 are not 'value' companies. Are Nvidia, Apple, etc., overvalued? And so we should avoid them or short them? Is Tesla 'priced-in'? There's all sorts of psychology in the market. What does 'priced-in' even mean? What wouldn't be priced in. "Water is wet" is what I think of, a tautology, when I hear that all public information is 'priced in'. Things are incredibly dynamic. Here we have at a minimum: algorithmic trading that bounces on common measures like moving averages, institutions that buy or sell at various points strategically (like the big dump when the BOJ raised rates unexpectedly, tax selling, etc.), elections putting oligarch-ish types that own car companies and pump crypto coins, meme stocks that come and go on big reddit forums, regular buys from 401k's into indexes which move markets, etc. etc. With all that going on, to me it feels more "random" than "priced-in".

One more thing. Money is also made not buying and holding, and not trading, but by doing things like 'The Wheel' where you sell puts on something you wouldn't mind holding, monthly, til you get assigned, and sell calls on it, monthly, til it gets called away. In this case, you don't actually have to care very much what the 'value' is, only tracking whether it might have a sudden swing. You don't have to 'time the market' that much either, as you're an insurance salesman.

I'm not saying that people should all jump and do this - but when I read about stocks on HN, I always hear the same counter-argument against 'traders' and 'stock pickers' when there are other ways to make money in the market (i.e. collecting premium).

It's definitely closer to 'gambling' when I put it that way. But I don't see any value in Efficient Market Hypothesis-speak like "is this stock under or over-valued." For that I let the MBA's / golf course discussions / elite experts with insider information rule.

If you compare the forward PE ratio to the regular PE ratio on most of these stocks you will see their profits are growing extremely fast. NVDA has a trailing PE of 55 but a forward PE of 32. TSM has PE of 33 but a forward of 23! A business growing profitability that fast is going to be valued at a premium.

But, when buying those stocks, you're paying for perfect execution. If profit growth doesn't meet expectations, there's a lot of room for the valuation (and the stock price) to fall.

Sure, knock yourself out. Nobody is stopping you. But statistically you are likely to underperform index investors: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/030916/buffe...

Well… yes, index funds are a safe, default choice most people. And yet, a funny thing about investing, versus other things professionals do like dentistry, is that it doesn’t necessarily require any skill. Dumb luck sometimes works just as well as sophisticated analysis. What other professions are like that?

I don’t think I had any particular insight into Google, but I worked there and never got around to exercising my options until I had to because they were going to expire. (Good thing HR sent me an email.) The slightly more sophisticated people were doing same-day sales and immediately diversifying, which I believe in, in principle. But I procrastinated, because it seemed like delaying was working out pretty well. Past performance is no guarantee, but why not wait a few months?

I thought Google was doing well, but so did everyone else. It was conventional wisdom the whole time. Apparently conventional wisdom wasn’t priced in, though?

So... literally survivorship bias, and insider trading. Great, neither of those make me think I'm arrogant or smart enough to day trade. Nothing about this is elitist.

I've made a killing on 'X' by getting in early and holding over the years. Not one single person in my life knows the details because I want zero responsibility for them getting wrapped up in it, and I know how hard it is for people to be patient and hold when they're chasing a high, I mean profits.

Most of those rich people with their wealth advisors are also underperforming: https://stockanalysis.com/article/can-you-beat-the-market/

I know people who won big on the ponies or shitcoins, but that doesn't make those smart places to put my money.

Aren't index funds more modest in gains but more safe?

Yes

Depends on the index fund. There are triple leveraged funds that can go to zero in a crash

Sure, but the person asking this question is asking from a more beginner level that doesn't need to know that unusual edge case.

The answer I'd give is:

Yes, index funds made up of stocks are safer than individual stocks, because it's very unlikely all the investments in a large index will go to zero, or even all go down.

On average, index funds of stocks aren't more modest in gains than stocks--they do just as well as stocks on average.

People think they can pick individual stocks that beat an index, and sometimes they do, but there is good reason to believe that their successes are the product of random chance rather than actual ability. If it is possible at all to pick stocks that beat the market, it is a lot of work. If you're thinking of investing, I'd start with an index.

> “Value investing” is dead for most, picking a company that you believe will generate solid long-term revenue is no longer interesting.

In that sense, value investing has always been dead—most people were never interested in that. That's why value investing worked.

Technically, value investing still work.

The key tenant of value investing is that there exist companies which based on their financial metrics are fundamentally under valued by the market (in opposition to what market price efficiency predicts).

From there, an insane market should provide you with even more opportunities to value invest.

> an insane market should provide you with even more opportunities to value invest

This seems like a uniquely bad time to make this sort of argument.

There are many old tools for insane markets to perpetuate themselves that are recently stronger (revolving doors between industry/government and other garden variety corruption; all the monopolies we have to tolerate out of fear, convenience or greed; "too big to fail" and trends towards globalism in general). There are also several relatively new tools (algorithmic price-fixing so that industry "competitors" can now collude forever with impunity; total masks-off no-holds-barred corruption where the unelected/unqualified are simply appointed to positions of power regardless of clear conflicts of interest). Add to this what others have observed re: meme-stocks, huge moves based on tweets or concerted disinformation. Or there's the cooked books on a massive scale with Theranos or SBF or the out of control corporate fraud with VW's dieselgate or Boeing's 737 Max, or .. or .. pick your own recent scandal.

Value investing seems to need reliable information from somewhere to make informed decisions, but where is that going to come from? Investment in individual companies rather than in diversified aggregates seems nuts if the financial markets are going to be as "post truth" as the political world.

> Value investing seems to need reliable information from somewhere to make informed decisions, but where is that going to come from?

Value investment is entirely based on financial fundamentals. You don’t need magic information. That’s the whole point. For something that old, people like to use the world but seem blissfully unaware of what it actually is. Graham’s books are available pretty much everywhere.

The whole point of the thing is that fundamentals actually matter and markets misprice because they rely on other less sound things. That’s why it seems even more relevant in a post truth market.

None of the companies you listed would have qualified as sound for value investing by the way.

Nitpick: a tenet is a foundational principle or belief; a tenant is someone who pays rent. (Which I suppose could be used as a metaphor for a dividend-paying stock, but.)

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I thought I was going out of my way to not be insulting. It has absolutely nothing to do with feeling superior. It has everything to do with the fact that I frequently encounter people who surprisingly don't seem to know things like this, and I wish for them to learn so they can avoid the mistake in the future.

I did not engage in the discussion because I had nothing further to contribute to it. I recognized that, and contributed what I could entirely orthogonal to that.

I think the bigger problem is having a rational basis for choosing a company and believing in its revenue prospects. It's probably gotten harder now that companies much more commonly reinvest their profits in the company or into stock buybacks, rather than paying a dividend, for tax reasons. (Modulo the tax effects, paying a dividend vs letting the stock appreciate should be a wash, but it's harder to evaluate the current fair value of a stock when your evaluation is based on the expectation of that fair value changing over time.)

We'll look back and see with clear eyes the transient phenomena that made strange and magical meme stocks and unicorns what they all were. Somewhere in the last 50 years stock investing turned from green-eye-shade economic analysis to a social phenomena that couldn't be bothered with dividends and profits.

I go to the supermarket and milk is on sale, I buy two. But momo clowns go and see milk is on sale and they try to sell the milk they have on hand back to the store. They don't act like the products they buy have fundamental value, because in many cases that value was inflated wildly beyond justification long before the trader ever got started.

I mean, it’s widely understood. There was deregulation in the ‘80s that kicked off the financialization trend (along with private industry customs being invented like Jack Welch’s whole chasing shareholder value uber alles shtick), and then the interest rates cuts in the wake of the 2008 recession (and then again during the pandemic) superheated this kind of behavior.

The thing is, picking a company that actually will generate solid long-term revenue isn't really a thing. You can try, but your success rate, if you're good at it, is going to be about equal to the success rate of companies. There are dozens of studies of professional traders showing this. If you're bad at it, you'll buy into the companies that are pure hype and do worse. And... you probably aren't good at it. Most people aren't.

The people who beat the market consistently have information you don't. Instances of people who call major trends before they happen and get rich are likely survivor bias and not genius.

things haven't changed since vanguard started index funds 5 decades ago. buying and holding diversified assets prevents you from thinking "You need to figure out what is going to 10x tomorrow."

Many things look like gambling on short time frames. Investing requires taking a long view that averages out the short-term noise like meme stocks.

It does require patience, which is admittedly harder to come by when you’re young.

The best we can do is navigate this landscape with open eyes

I lost my life savings chasing the dopamine hit and can relate to this. I'm in my mid 30s and suffering from career burnout. I know I can't afford a home when I can barely work full-time so I figured I'd trade. I was up, and up and up!

Then I was down, then up, then down.

One morning I woke up and I was so down, I sold out of fear.

Now I'm left with so little I might as well be starting from scratch.

This feels like gambling and here I thought I was smarter than those people that lost in casinos.

My experience, with a wide variety of generally older friends & associates & such -

If they're talking about an occasional visit to the casino, people will be up front about the fact that they walked into the place with $X in their pocket, and walked out with $Y. Almost always, $X > $Y.

If they're talking about stocks they've bought, people will be incredibly selective, and describe only some of their greatest successes. They could lose money in a rising market, and you'd have to carefully question them to even realize that fact.

Which is ridiculous because while casinos are engineered to ensure $x > $y over time, economies are existentially dependent on the reverse being true over time and across a broad enough portfolio.

Folks you can just buy the S&P 500 and wait. It really is that simple. Money will go down sometimes, up sometimes, down some more, but in the long run it will almost certainly go up. And if it doesn't, the world is crumbling anyway so who cares?

Yep this is the craziest part. The answer has been known for a long time. S&P500. Literally that simple

100% I did that at first and got greedy and impatient. Serves me right.

From both the folks I know, and years of comments here on HN - you have LOTS of company.

In the fictional world of Economics, humans are all homo rationalens, and never make such mistakes.*

Vs. in the real world...

*Yes, I sometimes wonder if there's a brutally predatory subtext here - with Economics quietly endorsing "do unto them as you will" maltreatment of anyone who the 0.01% can maneuver into behaving "irrationally".

Heh, I'm kind of the opposite. I like talking about the time I gambled with a couple thousand on options and after a rollercoaster experience, lost it.

But my index funds are not an interesting topic, imo.

Because the way you did it, it is gambling.

It’s easy to convince ourselves we’re “investing” and not gambling

At this point I’m just watching a slightly younger cohort of men repeat all of my worst digital addiction mistakes like getting inserted into the online video game -> toxic online behavior pipeline (or worse, fascism), ideologies (Musk), crypto and options gambling (thanks Reddit a la 2013 for all of the crypto communities and WSB) too much computer (ouch, my neck, arms and back.)

I’m not doing particularly well, especially mentally, despite having tons of opportunity and successes. Worried about the younger cohorts, but I guess that is a tale as old as time.

Are they also drinking tons of soda? I can’t believe how much I used to drink. I don’t touch any drink with sugar (other than lactose/latte) nowadays. It’s so disgusting, don’t know how I ever did it in the first place.

God my teeth wish i had just stopped drinking soda a decade ago. It wasnt even that hard to kick

How much of that was soda, and how much was it access to preventative care?

If you're drinking soda daily, your teeth are coated in acidic liquid for hours a day. This is incredibly damaging to your enamel.

I would posit there’s an overlap between those who drink cola daily and limited access to healthcare.

Dental care is cheap and insurace is usually sub $100/month (at least in the US)

Broad brushstrokes incoming and pure speculation but I wrote it out anyway…

Today’s youth are more proactive with their identities these days than we were. We were and remain reactive with our identities. That preference influences what triggers the dopamine hits needed for life.

The drugs of a reactive identity culture are sugar, alcohol, narcotics, work, anything that’s a trope in movies made by boomers. These drugs have consequences that shape the user’s identity. For example: weight gain or burnout.

But the drugs of a proactive identity culture are those that drive the person’s perception of their identity. The live ahead of the consequences. Things like digital social networks, status symbols like shoes, colleges, or jobs, and anything that drives success in those status symbols. Example: Adderall helps the user study, which helps the user get better grades, which opens the door to a better college, which allows the user to flaunt that college association as part of their identity. That doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences to those drugs but those consequences aren’t tropes of modern life just yet because we’re still normalizing their outcomes.

All of this to say: sodas aren’t their thing because soda is “unhealthy” and that drags on their identity.

> Today’s youth are more proactive with their identities these days than we were.

I wanted to echo this and say that I believe younger people create a "symphony" with their identity; picking and choosing from various sub-cultures to create a unique combination. Flexible, morphing.

Gen Z uses a lot more steroids which tracks with your analysis.

But also I think you're falling for sample bias. The ones who don't have a billion followers are overweight and generally less healthy than previous generations.

And more depressed since massive quick/instant success is seemingly everywhere, apart from their own hands. Cancer if social media at its best, spreading depression like chemtrails.

This breeds greed for status & perceived success and 0 patience to get there. You see it here on HN all the time when talking economy and real estate - young people complaining how they they cant own some well located nice house right now, how everything is shit and their future stolen, despite stats saying exactly the opposite. Where the fuck is at least a bit of decency to wait a decade of hard effort for such a success? Thats shit for losers, nobody got time for that.

How I feel sorry for them, all the added value of technology is nothing compared to what they 'lost' or more like never experienced. At least many of them, the vocal majority, the rest goes on just like we did

Ok but housing is legit screwed up.

What a brilliant observation.

Has anything else been written online about proactive vs. reactive identities, and particularly - how this has changed historically. Could it have been the case that prior to television, generations (for example "The Greatest Generation") grew up with a proactive identity culture, due to having a more proactively social culture?

"Our youth now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders, and they love to chatter instead of exercise. Children are now tyrants not servants of their household. They no longer rise when elders enter the room."

— Socrates

This is a famous misattribution typically used to state generational views have always been the same. Unfortunately its not Socrates, but actually Kenneth Freeman, Cambridge, 1907.

A very interesting observation. I wonder though if the difference is genuinely a different kind of self-understanding between the generations, or more a question of the prevalence of these two approaches to identity. I think in my generation there were also plenty of people that at least tried to be 'proactive' about their identity building (and greatly valued status symbols etc), but I believe it was not as common, because this meme of 'seeing yourself as your own brand and wanting/needing to market yourself' was not as prominent. Maybe there even were, relatively speaking, more people back then that actively tried to avoid the 'status games', because they were still easier to escape then -- but that's just speculation, and certainly influenced by my own aversion to these games and hence my own youth.

Wsb was 2013??

It existed at least: https://web.archive.org/web/20121218025312/http://www.reddit...

I remember the “community” having its own well-defined memes and culture by at least 2016

I feel like the patterns are more or less the same but the cycles are getting shorter and more pronounced.

I met the son of a family friend today, he's 13, already has an opinion about the Israel/Palestine war and spent $500 in roblox so far, they're not wealthy at all. Back in my days I was stuck in the free to play parts of mmorpgs (or had to beg for months for a $5 monthly membership), playing tf2 (free) and had 0 political ideas or even knew people who cared about politics

$500 in Roblox? that's a lot of money for a 13 year old and that money could likely be spent elsewhere... As far as the opinion about Israel/Palestine it's likely that opinion is inherited from family or cohort and it's not fully their own.

I recall in grade school in the 80's lots of kids had opinions on Jews, Poles, black folks, gay folks, etc. Clearly, all acquired from relatives.

Young people emulating the adults in their life is how it always has been.

Oh yea I was a big Republican when I was in high school because I went to a private school and all my friends were also Republicans (except the theater students). We were all Republicans because our parents were Republicans.

Then I got several years in the workforce and realized I wanted nothing to do with the Republican party.

If you don't have decades of built up propaganda it's pretty easy to see that Israel is the bad guy. The condescending "it's complicated" line is part of the propaganda telling you that you're not allowed to come to the obvious conclusion for yourself. My 10 year has figured out that Russia is the bad guy in Ukraine and that Israel is the bad guy in Gaza.

Must be nice if politics is just good and bad guys for you.

It should give you some pause that a 10 yo has the same level of understanding of global politics.

Yes, it's pretty scary that anyone sees things so black and white and would encourage their children to do the same. These are multi-decade conflicts where no one has clean hands.

10 year olds can figure out that killing children for 14 months is evil . That everyone can't see that is the power of propaganda.

I suspect most parents would be prepared to risk the lives of strangers' children if it stopped their own from being killed.

Some of you may die, but it is a sacrifice I am willing to make.

People know it’s evil, they are just unwilling to point it out because driving the conflict into some resolution is already hard without these simplistic views which helped no one before and continue to do so. Kid’s naivety is just that, naivety. Put him into a rulers chair (either side), provide all the factual info with zero propaganda and see him trying to escape at all costs, because all decisions including doing nothing make people die or worse. At some point you just have to choose sides without much meaning attached to it.

> Must be nice if politics is just good and bad guys for you.

Some politics are more complicated. Other politics are treated as more complicated because people get uncomfortable when you point out that they're casually endorsing-via-silence the mass murder of one group of people by another.

There's nothing complicated there. If you as a nation state or standing army are obliterating an opponent that can't fight back in a meaningful way, with lethal force, along an ethnic or racial line, that's a genocide. That's just what that is. The past year of desperate attempts by the West to re-frame it as something else have not been successful for exactly that reason.

And before you say it, no Palestine is not innocent. But unless I missed some pretty radical court proceedings in the UN, the punishment for their crimes as a state was not ruled to be "Israel gets to ethnically cleanse you" which is what is now happening.

> It should give you some pause that a 10 yo has the same level of understanding of global politics.

Kids aren't inherently stupid either. Kids have a lot of good questions to ask about our modern world and the fact that you don't have answers beyond "that's the way it always has been" both a) does not make that complete horseshit far more often than not, and b) does not make the question somehow lesser compared to you, irrespective of how many journey's around the sun they've taken.

Good, what’s your plan of resolution?

I answered you in the other comment, but my "resolution" would've been not carving out a chunk of a number of middle eastern former colonies and turning it into a Jewish ethnostate. But that's done now, and now Israelis have lived there for so long that simply "packing it up" and moving them elsewhere is now also, if not equally IMO, problematic as an action.

Israel is itself a project of the latter end of colonialism, and like many projects and side-effects and consequences of colonialism, we will be feeling it for hundreds if not thousands of years into the future. I don't know how you fix it, apart from letting Israel demolish Palestine, and all the human horror that comes with that.

> I answered you in the other comment, but my "resolution" would've been not carving out a chunk of a number of middle eastern former colonies and turning it into a Jewish ethnostate. But that's done now, and now Israelis have lived there for so long that simply "packing it up" and moving them elsewhere is now also, if not equally IMO, problematic as an action.

That's a lot of words to say you have no resolution.

> I don't know how you fix it, apart from letting Israel demolish Palestine, and all the human horror that comes with that.

I see. Maybe you do have a resolution.

Israel is not the product of "the latter end of colonialism". It was the product of the Holocaust, which occurred just three years before its founding.

Should Europe have used Palestine for this purpose, that is debatable. But to lump it into the same colonial endeavors such as England's occupation of India or Belgium's occupation of the Congo just doesn't add up.

Complex entities such as states can be the product of many things.

That is an oversimplification of history

https://www.britannica.com/event/Balfour-Declaration

Yes, there was a lot of factors, going back years before WWII, but I still believe that the aftermath of the Holocaust was major contributing factor to the creation of the State of Israel.

https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/holocaust-factor...

The Holocaust created hundreds of thousands of European Jewish refugees and international sympathy which had an effect on the UN vote for statehood.

I don't take issue with the creation of Israel as a means to put all the displaced Jews somewhere. I take issue with that the land provided for this project was taken without the consent of any of the nations from which it was taken, which is colonialism and why it's impossible to separate Israel from the colonialist roots that helped create it. Just as it's impossible to not see it as an act of Western dominance towards the middle east to whom it was done. Like, there's no reason at all (apart from latent, extremely quiet antisemitism on the part of the Allied powers post WWII that they didn't want to discuss) that all those refugees couldn't have been subsumed into any of these countries, especially America, who at the time was boasting not only the only economy not obliterated by WWII, but also shit tons of open land. We could've absolutely made room for all the Jews that would be sent to colonize Israel (yes I chose that word on purpose).

However localizing it in an area none of them had any stake in was better politically, and yeah it meant pissing off basically every neighboring country to Israel, but that was also in line with the other priorities the West was holding: a strategic, permanent emplacement in the middle eastern region that would not ever oppose Western interests in any way, because it owed it's existence to the West.

It's a brilliant strategy overall as long as you ignore how it treated entire swaths of humanity as beneath consideration for what their own futures looked like, as long as those swaths of humanity were darker in complexion than yourself.

The same thing happened to Jewish people in those "pissed off" surrounding countries, to the extent that a plurality of the Jewish population of Israel is of MENA origin (the "Mizrahim"). There is no simple history of the area, and nothing that will fit into an HN comment.

"I take issue with that the land provided for this project was taken without the consent of any of the nations from which it was taken, which is colonialism and why it's impossible to separate Israel from the colonialist roots that helped create it"

Who was the land taken from? It was owned by the British from WWI to '48. Before that, it was owned by the Ottoman empire, before that it was an Egyptian kingdom and going further back it was the Roman empire. And at some point before that, it was Judea which was the land of the Jews. The Romans renamed Judea to "Palestine" to remove the connection of Jews to that land.

"Like, there's no reason at all (apart from latent, extremely quiet antisemitism on the part of the Allied powers post WWII that they didn't want to discuss) that all those refugees couldn't have been subsumed into any of these countries, especially America, who at the time was boasting not only the only economy not obliterated by WWII, but also shit tons of open land."

Israel was pretty empty too in 1948. There was enough room for the European refugees and the Palestinians. The 1948 partition was not the best for everyone, but it did give both Jews and Palestinians a new homeland, something neither had post Judea or anytime for the Palestinians.

A big reason for wanting their own land, was to provide a safe haven. Jews were doing very well in pre-Nazi Germany, and that changed quickly. The same could happen in the US too. There's historically been very few safe havens for Jews in Europe (And America is pretty much an extension of Europe).

I don't agree with your premise about colonialism or that Israel was created to be a bridgehead for western powers. But I do appreciate your writing and dialog on the matter.

Who was the land taken from?

The people living there.

I think this was pretty clear from the context of what the commenter said when they referred to the "nations" from which the land was taken.

In terms of, you know, the people who had been living on that land peacefully for more than a thousand years.

Not from the various dying empires that temporarily occupied that land, and pretended to "own" it.

This is gross history revisionism.

Israel unilaterally declared independence following what was in essence a civil war in Mandatory Palestine. The UN had partitioned the territory but Israel took much more than had been allotted to them. Israel also illegally expelled many Palestinians and refuses them the right of return to this day, which they do counter to international law. In 1967 Israel expanded even further and took the remaining Palestinian territories which they occupy to this day in the world’s longest occupation. To this day, Israel keeps taking more land from Palestinians e.g. by setting up illegal “security corridors” or opening new illegal settlements.

So to answer the question. The land was taken from the Palestinians. And it keeps being taken from the Palestinians, in defiance of a number of UN resolutions, to whom the British had given the mandate to.

In an alternative universe where Israel wouldn’t be colonial, there would not have been a civil war, Israel would not have unilaterally declared independence, but done so in agreement with Palestinians, the UK and the UN. They wouldn’t have expelled any Palestinians, and they wouldn’t have maintained a policy of maintaining an ethnic majority. Jews would live now as a minority in Palestine, hopefully with some minority protections mandated by the UN (and probably demanded by the UK as part of the independence agreement).

In a slightly less alternative universe where the Zionist national project still happens and Israel unilaterally declares independence, at any time after 1948, in an effort to right previous colonial wrongs, Israel would offer the expelled Palestinians the right to return and reparations for their years or decades in exile. They would dismantle their ethnodemographic policies, and either integrate the occupied territories into a single democratic (non-apartheid) Israel-Palestine or recognize an Independent Palestine at the 1967 borders with some freedom of movement between the two states (similar to Ireland and Northern Ireland). For as long as non of this happens. Israel’s current policies are an unbroken link to their colonial past.

You are omitting that each of those events happened after the neighboring Arab states declared war on Israel. Israel won those wars. If they didn't, Israel would not exist.

Israel should get out of the West Bank, just like the way Israel exited Gaza. And I would like to see Palestinians flourish in both those areas. I'd even be happy to see Israel go back to pre-67 boundaries. But this will only happen when both sides desire to have peace and acknowledge their rights to exist. Sadly neither do.

Why the hell should the Palestinians even come to the table anymore? They have been mercilessly brutalized for decades. You're effectively saying that a home invader who has taken your living room, kitchen, dining room, and left you isolated to your bedroom and bathroom upstairs has just as much right to your home as you do, and you need to now come and negotiate to maintain access to your upper floor.

It's patently ridiculous. Do both sides aggress? Yes. But one side enjoys the strategic and financial backing of the West for their aggression, and one does not, and ergo, the conflict will never, EVER be on a level playing field. To go back to my own metaphor, the invader in your first floor has the backing of the police department. What are you going to do in this situation?

I‘m not omitting anything. The neighboring Arab states invaded after Israel declared independence, and after many Palestinians had already been expelled from their homeland. The colonial act came first, and the invasion and wars were a reaction to that colonialism.

Also what Israel ought to do, is not what Israel is doing, and what Israel is doing, is pure colonialism, taken straight from the 19th century, genocides and everything.

And all these Arab states were just supporting the poor "Palestinians", much like Hezbollah has for the past year. You're clueless.

That is not at all the definition of genocide. Israel is not pursuing a strategy of indiscriminate killing. Hard to take anyone seriously making such good/evil distinctions, especially when the they are not reckoning with the evil of Hamas & co. beyond “well gee shucks Palestine ain’t perfect either yall!”

Only one side has the state md objective of “ethnic cleansing” and it’s not the Israelis

There's no shortage of material in print calling for the destruction of Gaza, the non personhood of Palestinians, etc. from Israel ministers and commentators from before the October attacks by Hamas.

You can, for example, look to the Journal of Genocide Research at articles that draw parallels between Holocaust scholar Eugene's Finkel's declaration of Ukraine as a genocidal event and his point by point justification and similar parallels with Israel and Gaza.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.2024.2...

There's no shortage of evidence of extremists in power on both sides calling for the destruction of the other.

> Israel is not pursuing a strategy of indiscriminate killing.

No they're pursuing a strategy of using intelligence and AI to strategically target "Hamas hideouts" which both conveniently for the state of Israel and in fact are often civilian structures, which result in tremendous "accidental" civilian casualties, which Israel is clearly incredibly broken up about as they continue causing them week after week.

In reply to both this and the other person who's asking for my solution: I don't know, because fighting insurgent forces in any area of the globe at virtually any time in human history has only rarely succeeded for the non-insurgent side, and universally that success came at the cost of numerous atrocities perpetrated against the insurgent forces and the civilians they hide amongst. The most powerful military on the planet tried this exact same thing in Iraq, and 2 decades and trillions of dollars later, we left the Taliban and ISIS billions of dollars in U.S. war materiel, and the state of Iraq such as it was was quickly overrun by those same forces which enjoyed at least some level of support among the civilians they were hiding with, probably because it's extremely easy, even if they don't think you give a shit about them, to explain to people that the other side shelling their cities to rubble every day are bad people that are trying to kill them. Shock of shocks, even civilians largely against the ideological positions of organizations like Hamas, end up more or less on their side, because again, the other side is Israel, who is actively killing them, accidentally or not making precious little difference to the people at the wrong end of their missile strikes.

I would say, with a grain of salt as I am not even remotely in this line of work, but I would say: when your enemy combatants are sheltered by a civilian population, do not possess a standing traditional army that would otherwise meet you on a field of battle, and are prepared to carry this out as long as your state is: then there is no solution, apart from killing everyone. The problem is the more civilians you kill in your quest to kill the combatants simply makes your combatants job of recruiting people to their cause even easier, because you killed their family in the previous bombing run. Ergo, the logical endpoint of this cycle is either returning to the stalemate that has persisted for decades now, where Hamas takes pot shots at Israel from neighborhoods, or the Israeli's just finishing the job and turning Palestine and what remains of her people into dust and corpses. Simply openly declaring that one state, Israel, and her people, have a greater right to exist than Palestine and her people do, and let that play out.

However, that is an ethnic cleansing, and IMO, still a heinous crime against humanity unless we're just going to plunk down some UN courts and say, once and for all, that a resistance movement fighting inside a besieged state is such an impossible strategic puzzle to solve, that it's okay to just obliterate the entire fucking thing. Which is an option, though I think it's a pretty horrific one.

> If you don't have decades of built up propaganda

But how are you so sure that doesn't apply to you?

I'm saying it doesn't apply to my 10 year old

Properly propagandized parents have no issue letting their perspectives flow to their children.

Well he didn't have decades of propaganda but still roots for Israel... I didn't mention this subject there because I have better things to do with my time than ruin Christmas by talking politics with teenagers so I can't tell you where he got that from

When I was 13 I had a paper route and mowed lawns, and with those earnings I spent about $75 per month on video games and comic books, easily exceeding $500 over a year.

This to me on a surface level this seems totally fine, however I can't help to feel conflicted when that money is being spent on some of the more "predatory" games like gachas, however I'm not sure if it's really too different from kids spending their money on pokemon cards either. Do you feel different about those or would you say it's the same thing?

There’s nothing to say it was predatory games. Roblox is a platform with a vast number of games from unaffiliated developers.

Oh yeah I should have clarified my post wasn't necessarily aimed at Roblox but rather generally speaking.

i mean they're pretty affiliated, they develop games that only work on their platform and get paid by Roblox directly.

The developers themselves are anyone who wants to make and publish games is my point, and unaffiliated with own another. And those developers are free to build and monetize games however they want. Just like other closed-ecosystem (e.g. iOS) game devs.

It really is not beyond the reach of a motivated and curious 13 year old to have an informed opinion on (geo)politics.

You don't gave to be particularly motivated to get predigested opinions from influencers. There's too damn many boys and young men echoing how the "Matrix" keeping them down

Sure, but that has little to do with age. To rephrase in terms of an older crowd, there’s too many damn 60+ year old men parroting what they hear on conservative AM talk radio. But there are, nevertheless, 60+ year old men with well informed and well considered opinions.

Yes.

As you noted, the first[1] batch of mass-media "influencers" were AM Radio hosts, then came cable infotainment , and now vloggers.

1. Perhaps preceded by syndicated newspaper columnists, but there was an editorial filter for those.

It's normal for 13 year olds to have strong opinions on such topics - they have plenty of time to refine them or even change their mind.

I would be more worried about those who by this age didn't develop any interest in geopolitics - it affects them all the same but they typically don't understand why and pick whatever source tells a more compelling story.

When I was 13 (in the US in the 1970s) none of my classmates or friends ever expressed any interest in geopolitics or international relations.

No one had an opinion about Vietnam? I was 13 in 2003, plenty of people had an opinion about 9/11, civil liberties, and Iraq.

I don't recall any opinions about Vietnam and would probably have remembered if someone had expressed an opinion to me.

And the war or whatever we call the situation in Gaza would be something I'd want to shield my 13-year-old child from having any knowledge of if I were a parent -- for basically the same reason I'd want to shield them from learning about sadomasochistic sex as long as possible.

I guess it's part of growing up when there's no longer any living memory of war on your soil.

Anyway I need to ask the same question I always do in such conversations: what's the plan when this hypothetical child hits legal age and immediately receives the legal right to learn about all of this at once?

Just curious, why would you want to shield them from reality? At 13 they’re only a few years from becoming a full fledged adult. Unsheltered life is coming at them fast. I don’t have children yet, so maybe my perspective would change if I did, but (while I would not intentionally expose them to harsher realities) I would never shield my kids. Instead, I would want them to be curious and ask questions while I still had a large influence in their lives, so that I could help guide them and give them tools and strategies to navigate a complex world. I experienced a fairly sheltered (religious/conservative) upbringing socially, but we had a subscription to US News & World report during the height of the GWOT which I read cover to cover. I understood geopolitics before I understood how to make friends. My transition to adult life was tough socially, but I at least had a decent understanding of how the world worked on a macro scale. If children are not sheltered socially, then they’re already encountering pretty much everything through their social circles. And with the internet, 10x+ that.

    > I don't recall any opinions about Vietnam

It was constantly on the nightly news. The Vietnam War was one of the first widely filmed conflicts. Plus, there were regular violent protests against the draft. I find it hard to believe that the adults around you didn't have strong opinions about it. Did that not interest you or affect you?

I am bit younger, but I was exposed to the outfall of Vietnam through Hollywood films and documentaries.

    > the situation in Gaza

Your (hypothetical) 13-year old child is probably learning about it in their social studies class. Also: What age do you think German children begin to learn about the National Socialist/WW-2 era? I guess around 12-13 years old, and they turn out pretty well-adjusted to the world (in my humble opinion).

That's probably the benefit of you not being 24/7 glued to the broadcast system called social media. I imagine in the 70s you spent your time mostly with friends in real life, and geopolitics was just 10 easily missable minutes on TV every evening.

Sure maybe there's a minority of kids with social media/smartphone bans nowadays, but they're probably as plentiful as 13 year olds interested in geopolitics in the 1970s.

I browse Instagram's TikTok clone ("Reels") when idle, it's rather dull, when that hurricane hit a few weeks ago, the stories were all about that, a few days later it was forgotten. Obviously, lately it's been about Luigi Mangione...

You don't need social media to be aware of what's going on in the world.

At 13 (early 2000ish) I was reading the newspapers my parents brought home and debated a friend of mine who in turn read his parents' newspapers - mutually exclusive sets from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

I need ask: when is the best moment to, as a parent, introduce a young person to the news cycle? You'll inevitably have to since they're on their way to become voters and taxpayers.

You don't even need newspapers or debates, sometimes existing leads children to politics. I'm a similar age to you, and social media didn't exist yet but I had political opinions.

My first independent political opinion (if we can expand politics to include techno/digital politics and not just national/state/local government politics) was formed at the age of 4/5. Just from reading discussions and arguments around me.

And, as a girl and a lesbian, I was starting to read ideological theory in part to cope with my life situation pretty early: I followed news about gay issues because I knew I was gay at 6/7 and it was clear that some people were okay with that and some were very much not and I needed to know the difference. Likewise with being female - the switch up in how I was treated by men when I crossed the pubescent threshold led me to seeking out books/works/discussions on feminism (as well as arguments against it). Suddenly, people cared a lot more about my body than they ever had before, and as an intellectual child, I wanted to understand what was going on.

I'd expect that's even more common now and extends to new groups of people. I know I've seen young men/teenage boys talk about how a lot of anti-male sentiment filters down and makes them feel terrible and also having to deal with their own switch in puberty where people go from feeling protective of them to scared of them.

A lot of politics and the news cycle has to do with domestic cultural issues, and many children are very aware of those by the time they reach 9 or 10.

International politics is something that a lot of adults don't engage with on any meaningful level, and conflating the news/political awareness solely with international military conflict would be an error, I think.

I think the best time to introduce children to politics and the news cycle is when they start asking questions about why the world is the way it is, or why different families/places do things differently than their own family or culture. Or when something political touches their life in a very personal way: e.g. the Japanese-American children being interned during WWII would have to be introduced to politics. This is going to vary by child; I don't think there is a hard and fast rule.

Most US-educated people take a class called "social studies" in middle school (grades 6-8). That will introduce them to the news cycle and geopolitics. Also, if there is an exciting political election in your early teens, many people become interested in politics at that age.

The difference between me as a 13 yr old (1990) and my 13 yr old son now is we have a different dimension which is way more important. Critical thinking about sources of knowledge.

As a parent now, we ‘know’ more than ours did. Helping with guidance is our role!

online games aren’t the problem imo, it’s disposable identities and ~zero repercussions for bad actors.

The remedy is far worse than the problem

Yeah I don't know how you preserve much-needed anonymity, while also binding humans to their personas and holding them accountable for their actions.

Why do you believe anonymity is "much-needed"? Human society was built for tens of thousands of years on "stay away from Ben because he has a bad habit of not paying back what you loan him"

Anonymity is new and probably not something the human brain, which isn't meant to handle more than a few hundred familiar faces, can manage reasonably.

If you want anonymity 200 years ago, you had to print your own pamphlets and hand them out on the corner in a costume and hope nobody recognized you. Then you would go to church on sunday where the entire community would gossip about everyone's "sins" after the service.

Human history was radically more transparent about who was doing what, and who was saying what.

Nobody standing on a sop-box ever wore a mask, and while most used pseudonyms or pen names, there were only so many printing presses in the colonies, but that didn't stop the American rebels from spreading their claims.

The need for anonymity is in the face of enormously concentrated organised mass surveillance and power.

So, yes, it's relatively new. But it's not the only thing that's new.

Anonymity is, in fact, quite crucial to a surprisingly wide range of people: <https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22R...>

That page doesn't make a very compelling argument. Yes, bullying and harassment without an anonymous identity is potentially more damaging. But nowhere does it seem to consider that many of the bullies and harassers would only dare do so with an anonymous identity.

Which has the better culture? 4chan, or professional settings and churches? Non-anonymous settings almost universally have better culture because people's behavior has an impact on their social standing in their community.

How do you define “better culture”?

I wouldn’t say you can compare churches and 4chan - one is an online activity with millions of people around the world joining; the other is a highly intimate affair conducted in a small community.

Exactly: the fact that people aren't anonymous and their behavior affects their standing in the community is a big part of why anti-social behavior isn't nearly as common as in anonymous spaces.

> But nowhere does it seem to consider that many of the bullies and harassers would only dare do so with an anonymous identity.

Have you seen Facebook? Anonymity does not, in any way, preclude horrible behavior and harassment.

Also, reducing the problem to “bullying and harassment” is frankly laughable, and gives rise to the suspicion that you at most only skimmed the page.

I'm sure you can find cherry-picked pages of Facebook people acting out. Likewise, you can browse /r/LinkedInLunatics. But the vast majority of interactions on these platforms are better than on anonymous and pseudonymous platforms.

Anonymity and pseudonymity are big enablers of bad behavior, since it shields reputational harm that would normally be incurred by engaging in that behavior.

I mean, public flogging also (arguably) reduces crime, but we don’t want to have it, for good reasons. Disallowing anonymity has a lot of negative effects for all but a select privileged few, as documented by the link I gave.

And again, I've read your link and found the arguments lacking. It doesn't consider the fact that much of the bad behavior it identifies is enabled by anonymity. I'm not sure how public flogging relates to anonymity. There are alternatives to public flogging, like incarceration. By comparison, the lack of accountability and lack of disincentive to engage in anti-social afforded by anonymity is inherent to anonymity. There's no way to get the same level of social responsibility in an anonymous space.

> By comparison, the lack of accountability and lack of disincentive to engage in anti-social afforded by anonymity is inherent to anonymity.

Possibly. One could argue that the problem is not nearly as closely linked to anonymity as you argue it is, but even if it was, we would still need to have anonymity, including all its drawbacks, in order to make participating in the public sphere possible to all, instead of being restricted to a privileged few.

> There's no way to get the same level of social responsibility in an anonymous space.

You do know that this very forum qualifies an an anonymous space, right?

> but even if it was, we would still need to have anonymity, including all its drawbacks, in order to make participating in the public sphere possible to all, instead of being restricted to a privileged few.

You realize non-privileged people have participated in non-anonymous forums for ages. What on earth justifies the statement that without anonymity public discourse is impossible for non-privileged people? You realize that just because an article on geekfeminism.com claims something is true... doesn't actually make it true?

It's just a demonstrably false statement. Take, say, labor organizing. People who weren't privileged participated in the public sphere in a non-anonymous fashion. The Civil Rights movement was spearheaded by people who were de jure second class citizens. I could go on with example after example of people who weren't privileged participating in public discourse with their real identities. I'm truly at a loss as to how one can assert that anonymity is necessary to "make participating in the public sphere possible to all, instead of being restricted to a privileged few" in spite of the all the non-privileged people throughout history who participated in public discourse under their real identifies. It's objectively not necessary.

> You do know that this very forum qualifies an an anonymous space, right?

Correct. Which is why commenters are emboldened to say demonstrably false things, like claiming only privileged people are capable of participating in non-anonymous public discourse. I'm willing to bet that without the shield of anonymity people would actually think through such a statement and consider the number of non-privileged people that have participated in public discourse. They'd think twice before making patently false statements under their real identities.

But with anonymitiy, one's reputation isn't tarnished by making false statements. So here we are.

People want a chance to get rich. They also want excitement.

Doesn't that say more about our jobs that are a) dead-end for most b) financially limiting, with a salary that goes up slowly, if at all, unless you find a new job

People want the chance to win, and some meaning, and some daily purpose.

No one cares anymore about the stats of "stock pickers" "day traders" and other arguments for DCAing into index funds and not touching it until you're 65. A 60/40 portfolio. Don't time the market. Efficient market hypothesis. We live in a new world now, and people are willing to gamble. Sentiment is obvious for the average person to get a sense, and they trade on sentiment.

Maybe give people new meaning somehow, or a chance to make unscheduled money other than the slow-as-molasses salary increases.

You describe the psychological motivations for gambling.

The psychological motivation for taking risk.

I don't necessarily call all risky stock activity gambling. At the risk of splitting hairs, it's a little different to buy Tesla stock because of, for the sake of argument, let's say a really bad reason (CEO smart, car go fast), i.e. uninformed, than it is to bet on a number on a roulette wheel.

I think we paint it as gambling because gambling has an aura of naughty judgment about it, as in, "Oh, you're just gambling because you made an uninformed stock purchase." I'd prefer the term speculating or risky stock picking. Gambling, which is banned in many places and is against the law in religious texts, has a taboo because it's addictive. I daresay only a minority of stock trading bros are addicted in that way.

Lot of people are becoming more knowledgable and skillful. But purpose is the missing ingredient.

Without purpose or a motivator in life people end up getting trapped in mindless rituals. It keeps the reward circuitry in the brain from decaying.

Child rearing is a possible solution—it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce, after all, and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.

>Child rearing is a possible solution—it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce, after all, and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.

I doubt it, that's because to most people it does not feel purposeful, it's a chore. Most people who say it's purposeful are generally the most vocal ones, and I suspect the minority.

Whatever purpose you decide you have, do you think it will come without chores?

Beg the question that a purpose can’t involve chores or unpleasantries much?

As someone with a young child, it definitely feels purposeful. Also the opposite of a chore, it's lots of fun and what I look forward to after a day of work.

And I'm someone who, for most of my adult life, thought I'd be childfree...

Well I've heard people say this. What about the ones that regret it? I know of one personal acquaintance of mine who confided that he regrets having his kid. He would under normal social circumstances not mention it, for obvious reasons.

The problem is that it's a one-way street if you decide to have a child. Now if only one had an option to 'trial-run-before-one-commits' that would be ideal. I suspect (but not sure) that most people will still opt not to have them.

You can always give away the kid, the whole adoption industry is here to help. In some countries you can even sell your kids, but it is frowned upon in many Western societies. Finally, fostering is the trial run you are looking for.

Wish I had the rep to downvote a comment,

> you can always give away the kid

a child is not a goddamn pet or a commodity that you can just give away

> In some countries you can even sell your kids, but it is frowned upon in many Western societies

A common country where that happens is Pakistan/Afghanistan where young boys are sold to be prostitutes. I am GLAD it's frowned upon as it should be everywhere in the modern world.

> fostering is the trial run you are looking for

Again, children are not pets, fostering is the same as raising a biological child, if you're doing it any different and treating the child differently, in my opinion, it's tantamount to child abuse.

Frankly this comment lacks any humanity, and hopefully you choose not to have or foster children.

The other thing that happens is that they (both genders) are sold into begging rings

Well, I do think children is maybe idealized a little. I'm probably pretty happy because I went into it having heard all of the negatives, decided I was ok with it and came out pleasantly surprised. Also too many people do it because of societal or family pressure.

Also some people will just always be unhappy. The grass is always greener syndrome.

Traditionally people would get a trial run by babysitting for relatives. Now that's becoming less common because families are smaller and more geographically distributed.

I would guess the only ones who do not feel it is their purpose are those for whom it happened accidentally.

Anyone who chose to have kids most likely did so with purposeful intent.

Chores are a great way to make you feel a sense of purpose. You can directly observe the fruits of your labor. Your kitchen is shinier after a deep clean. Your baby is no longer crying of hunger after a feeding. The same can't be said for scrolling through TikTok for hours or even a lot of employment. Sure your livelihood may depend on moving items from big boxes into little boxes, but it's hard to feel any sort of accomplishment for that.

There is a difference between considering a task a chore i.e a drudgerous task and 2) doing a chore (a mundane task, which may/may not be drudgerous). Same word but different connotations.

Dogs are a chore. Cats too. Oh well.

A bit off-topic, but it’s interesting how this became the de-facto answer to any question related to “meaning of life” in the last 2-3 years in HN/tech circles. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but it’s a bit weird. Like I’m sure everyone knows that? If a person isn’t having a child in their 30s, they either can’t because of multitude of different reasons, or they decided they don’t want to.

Disclaimer: I’m as pro-kid as you can get, just haven’t met a partner who would be on the same page as me yet.

When I was talking about it with my friends, our guess is, people with kids are getting worried. If others aren’t having kids, then their kids might suffer big time in a long run, thus the renewed pressure to keep suggesting the idea to others. Obviously this doesn’t relate to you, just weird how it started in the last few years.

Yes, I've noticed it too. The most blaring example was DHH going on a "Just have some kids you'll be happier than you've ever been!" rant in some zoom talk ostensibly about coding that he gave in the past year. it's gross and condescending and not someone speaking as a public figure should be advocating for. IMO, We need better parents, not necessarily more parents, and if you're having kids because you're sad with life then IMO you should reconsider the ramifications of having a kid and then fucking up the parenting process. It's incredibly selfish

Like many online sentiments I think it's reactionary, specifically to the stereotype of the liberal atheist DINK milliennial couple.

In my case this is probably partly true, but more because I think many people are actively deluding themselves and trying to reject their own mortality with fantasies of digitally transferring ones conscience, bio/medical immortality a la Kurzweil, singularity stuff, and so on endlessly.

But if people look at these things objectively, there is essentially 0% chance of any of this happening, let alone in our lifetimes or anytime remotely near it.

And when you look at the people spreading/making such predictions the timelines always coincidentally come just before their expected end of life.

When you accept the fact that you, and near to every other person alive today, will be dead in 80 years (and mostly far sooner) it rather significantly changes your perspective on life. Want to transfer your consciousness? Not gonna happen, but having a few children is at least a reasonable second.

I don’t think people who don’t have kids are thinking about sci-fi stuff. Other than my dad, I genuinely have never met a person who ever thinks about it, and well, he had me and my siblings.

Some people just believe in (and sometimes achieve!) fulfilment through other means. Problem is, that is objectively bad for economical and cultural growth of the humanity. No single country has been able to resolve that problem without religious beliefs or kinda forcing women to have children (by either taking all their opportunities away or them not having any by default).

I agree it’s becoming a common sentiment among the online pseudo-intelligentsia, but it’s still rare on a population level, so I will keep spreading the sentiment. I think it’s important, mainly on an economic level (I believe economic growth is impossible without population growth), but I speculate the decline of family-having is at the root of some of our other social-psychological malaises: loneliness, substance abuse, mental illness, increasing interest in extreme politics. Tech people should be most interested in family as an answer to social woes because currently people are blaming either social media and tech for social dysfunction,or the collapse in family-having, or both. If family is the answer then lots of tech will be exonerated.

Frankly, I don’t buy the malaises argument. It obviously has some effect, but even the countries that are known for not being lonely has dropping fertility rates. And there’s almost no good argument for having more than 2 kids, which is basically a requirement for increasing population.

People just have more stuff to do, and convincing a woman they should sacrifice at the bare minimum 6 years to give birth to 3 kids is just… yeah, good luck. The only argument is “do it for the greater good!”, and as a society, we have shown that most people don’t care about the greater good the second times become a bit hard.

Some tech circles have been entertaining the whole “trad life” idea, but it’s pretty laughable the second you start talking to real people. Not all women want to be depended on others if they have a choice.

Every single woman needs to, on average, have a bit more than 2 children to have a stable population. Fewer than that and your population (once it shares the same fertility rate across generations) will begin changing at a scalar of fertility_rate/2 each ~20 years. So a fertility rate of 1 = 50% decline every 20 years. And it's exponential - that decline never stops or slows until you go extinct or start having children again.

But in this case one frustrating thing is people don't know what they don't know. My wife was quite lukewarm on having children but shortly after our first she wanted at least two more. They really change you in ways that are impossible to describe without cliche, and I think this is, by nature, even more true for the mother.

I agree with you, and you’re probably right! My parents said the same thing. Both my siblings have children as well.

But if the argument starts with “you’ll understand when you have kids!” to convince people to have kids… well, it’s like blindly trusting people. And again, it is coming from a person who will have children when the time comes. And relatively speaking, I’m doing ok financially, and it’s one of the problems I can take care of for the future of my children.

For every good parental story, there are quite a few unfortunate ones as well. The problem with the information access is, people tend to realize that chances of it happening is not 0. So you have all the opportunity loss, combined with the potential regrets and problems that add up for every new child… the math doesn’t add up for having multiple children. Also, doesn’t help that the average age of having the first child is already at 30s.

Anyways, I think I’m just generally angry that pseudo-intellectuals (including ourselves) are scared to propose other solutions. Because they will always be very unethical (lab babies, taking rights away and etc.) or very uneconomical.

Why would lab babies be unethical? Or do you mean some more specific scenario?

We could end up with a sustainable population where few women have children, but those that do have five or more.

Division of labor, as it were.

I'd have to guess the demographics of HN lean rather Millennial, and I don't have to guess that they lean heavily male. I think it's probably just a collective biological clock thing; it's something I've started to feel myself. Intellectually, I want kids less than ever (so it's for the best I never had any), but emotionally, I do sort of understand the urge.

Could be! I share the same emotional feeling as well, but the ones telling others to have kids, already have them. They keep going above and beyond trying to portray the idea of “everything is amazing when you have a kid!”, when it’s objectively not true. It’s just a bit off-putting when you have all the information readily available and try to push an ideology to a circle that’s commonly known as skeptics. Anyone who has close girl friends in their late 20s/30s have heard the issues they’re facing and why they’re not having kids either. But then, bunch of seemingly smart people, just keep yelling “just have children!!!” looks a bit dumb. And from the guy’s side we have different sets of problems.

A bit personal, but throughout my life, I’ve met more dead-beat fathers than caring ones. So, I’m incredibly jaded when it comes to giving advice. Statistically, I wouldn’t try to change one’s mind to have a child, because I’d feel bad for the kid if things go south.

Once again, I’m still pro-having kids, but I don’t get why it became such a major discourse compared to 2010s.

Perhaps it is becoming more clear that the current reproduction rates are unsustainable if they persist.

Anyway, I have a bunch of kids, and I think from a motivational perspective, yes, kids give you meaning for some years.

But they can also help you with something else due to the necessary self-sacrifices, which is getting a out of egocentric thoughts, such as what you're going to do with your life. Read a book on biology. You are a bunch of cells put in the world to cooperate to feed and reproduce before they self-terminate to leave space for the offspring. That's it. Stop fretting. :)

(Helping society and thereby the offspring of other bunches of cells is pretty noble too, by the way.)

Because it's not only extremely fulfilling (well beyond what one might expect) on a personal level but also required on a social level for a culture to persist.

And this is in the context of ever more people complaining of loneliness, lack of fulfillment/meaning, and more. These issues are almost certainly causally related.

Help yourself, help society, and even have a voice (of sorts) in the future of humanity.

There are literal hundreds (thousands?) of philosophical schools for “meaning of life”. It’s really not a new question, and there won’t be a right answer, ever. Trying to convince someone that it is the only route to find a meaning just sounds a bit funny for anyone who watches it from the sidelines.

My question, once again, is why tech circles started focusing on this and pushing it as ideology just recently? Wasn’t a thing in 2010s, people more or less respected personal choices as long as it doesn’t harm others directly.

Interesting point in the timing. In general I think it's probably just growing awareness of the issue, also combined with a growing number of people in tech starting families (often quite late) and being like 'zomg why didn't I do this earlier.' Many people in tech are also fascinated with countries like Japan which are acting like a living warning to the rest of the world about fertility.

In general though I think cultural shifts often lack any clear reason. People like Musk or Gates chiming in on the issue are almost certainly effects rather than causes.

I guess that makes sense. Someone else commented how “maybe HN demographics just happened to be people who just had kids, thus the echo-chamber”. Which, would explain a lot.

Re: Musk — no real opinions about him wrt other ventures, but surely no sane person can look at him as a decent father figure, no? It just sounds like a “populate Earth for populating reasons!” completely disregarding the well being of the kids part. Which, I find, fairly sad.

I think it's more about concern for society and Western civilization in particular. Low fertility will cause nations, and cultures, to contract and eventually collapse. 'Eventually' not being some excessively distant reference - South Korea may well become a failed state within our lifetimes if nothing radically changes, seouly due to fertility. And most other nations will be right behind them.

As for anybody's parenting - I have certainly raised my children in ways that would offend the sensibilities of this group or that. But it's what I think is right. So under this mindset, and a bit of the Golden Rule, I do not criticize other's parenting outside of obvious extremes.

It is interesting that people have such strong views about South Korea or Japan's declining birth rate, but have very little to say about rich countries in Europe. Why is this? I never once heard anyone saw that Italy will become a failed states in X years in the future due to population decline. Recently, I saw a chart from Financial Times (here: https://www.ft.com/content/1b139d1a-07ea-4612-9c2b-62c430119...) that showed birth rates in Italy, Germany, Finland, and Spain are ultra low (less than 1.5). More likely: These countries will import more and more temporary, and possibly, permanent labour, to help in their industries. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are already doing it extensively, but it doesn't get very much press coverage.

>My question, once again, is why tech circles started focusing (emphasis mine)

One answer nobody else is willing to broach is that Elon Musk and friends are hyper-breeder crazies who think the white race will die out if white men don't all pump out as many babies with as many women as possible, and they literally own multiple tech and social media companies to push such a narrative.

HN is more influenced by chud ideology than it should be.

I think it's a pushback against the emphasis on individualism in our culture, which many find does not lead to real fulfillment. When you start a family, you're giving up your own glory, but in doing so you become deeply integrated into something greater than yourself, which makes you greater by extension.

And I say this as someone who doesn't have kids either, and as someone who used to not be so excited by the prospect, but I've witnessed how it's transformed my friends and family members.

But why now, and not like 5 years ago? That’s the weirdness I don’t understand. Is it just very loud people had a bunch of kids and trying to push the same on others? Trying to change the culture from the start? “Meaning of life” is like the oldest question that has ever existed. Both people with and without children have pondered about it for eternity. It just looks funny when you see a sudden shift in the discourse.

Maybe the demographics of HN are such that a bunch of people just had kids.

I've seen the sentiment building over the last several years. Though I think part of why it's such a prevalent sentiment now as opposed to a few years ago, is very obvious signs of cultural breakdown started to show strongly in maybe 2017 or so, and people started questioning the prominent messages in our culture and seeking answers, and for many, finding those answers takes time.

There are probably other related factors too, like increased awareness of population decline, but I think both reasons are intertwined.

2017 is actually a great reference point wrt cultural changes! I think that is the year when bubble and echo-chamber creations accelerated to the T, so people who ponder about the same things just talk to each other. And they never really get to talk to the outsider groups or hear their opinions as often. 2020s was probably the only couple of years when everyone got to talk about the same topic, but that was for unfortunate reasons. I think “have lots of kids!” idea pushers are just screaming into the void right now, because they offer no solutions to people in other chambers.

There may be some screaming into the void, but at least some of it breaks through. I was someone who, for years, bought into the idea that being idiosyncratic and self-expressive and following my passions and self-interested dreams would lead to fulfillment. I was the last person you would have expected to have been receptive to the idea that starting a family could be a means to a meaningful life. Nonetheless, I started to see the cracks in my worldview, and that made me more open to listen, and here we are.

Also there is a biological urge, so it's probably not that much of an uphill battle. Though unfortunately people also contend with biological clocks and realize that they want kids when it's already too late. I feel very bad for those people, and so if you can re-normalize the idea of starting a family, then maybe you can reach those sorts of people while they still have time.

I think there's two shifts that play a major role in explaining the timing that you're referencing:

- The 2010s represented a progressivist left-ward shift in America and the excesses of that movement are provoking a reactionary conservative shift in the populace in the 2020s: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/seven-reasons-america-is-heade.... This is cyclical is the same thing happened from 1960s to 1970s.

- The concept of population collapse entered mainstream discourse in the early 2020s and is now being accepted as the major concern for humanity moving forward, a 180-degree turn from the previous concern of overpopulation. This is something unprecedented in human history as no human has ever existed in an economy or society where the population was decreasing so all the "rules" we know about life are suddenly subject to change unless birth patterns change significantly.

> But why now, and not like 5 years ago?

It’s a product of the rise in white nationalist/supremacist movements and white replacement theory. Pro-natalism with the explicitly racial content omitted (though even their often tied to overt appeals to eugenics and/or framing it as intra-societal/cultural competition, which is itself only a shade different from racial/ethnic competition, but for some reason doesn’t produce nearly as strong a negative reaction) is a face that can be shown to audiences that aren’t ready for the full-strength message.

I’m not saying every vocal pro-natalist is a white supremacist (most of the high profile ones are, though), but that the rise in white supremacy and the prominence of white replacement theory within the rising white supremacy is a big part of the explanation of why pro-natalism is a lot more prominent right now than in the recent past.

By far most likely is that the loudest cohort of HN users (or people in your social circle) has aged to the point where they want families. Younger people are on other social networks.

I find this interesting as one of the individualist characteristics of our society is 'my children > everyone else'. I don't see the emphasis on having children as anti-individualist at all.

Many parents are completely unwilling to hold their children to account/tell them no/let them fail/etc. The experience of the people around their children means nothing to them. Teaching their children to be a part of society does not matter: All that matters is their children get what they want because their children are extensions of themselves.

A thought.

What if we have judged the healthiest of a society on the wrong metrics. And the right one is birth rate?

We might say things are bad for a society if it’s too dangerous or not enough food so the birth rate goes to near zero and as a result it dies.

How is a society that has people being too busy or occupied with other task that neglects reproducing a better society than the latter?

Obvious too much of a birth rate is bad, but too little could also be a sign of an unhealthy environment.

Basically what you’re saying is that the healthiest society is the one whose population is growing the fastest?

I would think life expectancy would be a better measure of a healthy vs unhealthy environment.

You're talking about individual health. Regardless of what specifically makes a society healthy, a necessary condition is that it doesn't die out.

A society with a 120 year life expectancy and 0 birth rate isn't healthy.

A society with 20 life expectancy and 6 birth rate is unhealthy but for different reasons.

It’s pretty easy to find high birth rate countries with low life expectancy.

While it’s much more difficult to find countries with high life expectancy with low birth rates (assuming we define “low” as any birth rate lower than necessary for the society to not die out)

I agree with you the 2 need to be balanced, but I assume any society with high life expectancy would also have a sustainable birth rate.

Are Japan and Korea not both high life expectancy but low birth rate. Along with a by other developed countries birth rates dropping while life expectancy is increasing?

This is the best answer. From a strictly rational perspective, parenthood makes little sense. The negatives are obvious and intimidating, while the benefits (which are not rational but instinctual) are less clear. Happily, oxytocin is a helluva drug. It will rearrange your universe in the course of an hour, such that all of its substance revolves around a splotchy, squinty little ape.

I highly recommend it.

And then the sleepless nights of screaming will twist it up again. Postpartum depression can affect any gender when it comes to sleep deprivation.

> jaco6 : Maybe the minority who want to reproduce will be paid to reproduce for everyone else in the future?

This latter comment of yours was down voted by idiots to the point where it's dead, so I could not respond to it directly.

Anyway, specifics aside, it is actually a good idea - for a variety of reasons.

I like the converse: pay certain people to NOT reproduce.

That's also great.

> Child rearing

For what purpose?

> it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce

Yes evolution selects for having children survive to reproduce, but that’s not a purpose, that’s just “that which continues, continues”.

> and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.

Plenty of species have evolved such that when they sufficiently saturafe their environment and resource carrying capacity, reproduction rates drop through behavior changes based on various signals.

Doesn't this seem like a tautological purpose? Our purpose is to create a new generation of beings who question their own purpose?

It's not tautological because it's objectively wrong.

There is no biological purpose. We are just a multitude of chemical reactions falling down the entropy slope in a slightly odd way.

"Purpose" is a concept entirely made up out of whole cloth for hairless apes who accidentally invented language and that allowed them to do a lot of thinking outside the confines of their biological processes.

We are perfectly free to CHOOSE reproduction as a "purpose", but nothing about biology actually cares. If you don't reproduce, oh well, something else will take that spot in the ecosystem.

That's the most plausible gloss I've heard. The new generation must be capable of framing a question at least as sophisticated as its parents can if there's to be hope of progress in the world. Otherwise we're on the way to "Idiocracy".

>most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.

Untrue: e.g., in the US, "Among women and men aged 40–49 in 2015–2019, 84.3% of women had given birth and 76.5% of men had fathered a child."

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr179.pdf

The replies are bit harsh. It is a solution to meaningless of life. I am reminded constantly by some of my friends.

But it's also a problem for some. For example, it means moving out of expensive cities, it means worrying about making lots of money (if you live in the U.S.), it means child care is thousands a month, it means health care is thousands a month. It means you have to be responsible and not drink every day. It means potentially not sleeping for a year.

Personally, seeing the stress of my workmates, and how they became more dependent on their jobs, on the shit of the jobs, and how now they're more competitive on the job, and worried... I'd personally choose to write that off.

But I know people who found meaning through child-rearing, as you say!

I once asked my wife, "what is my purpose in life?", and she has been cracking dolphin jokes at my expense ever since.

Is that a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy reference?

It's from Rick & Morty

The original joke I think is a play on porpoise and purpose.

There is another great skit from Rick and Morty on the topic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs).

Norm Mcdonald also has a horrible joke about it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3LMSflEN54

I'd thank her for the fish, but it'd send the wrong message.

Well, you have a choice there. Ask others, and get dolphins; or follow your heart.

That's good, at least. She could have said "you pass butter".

This is such an odd answer. "People are bored so they become degens", is ... not the full picture, I don't think.

But who needs hobbies, or friendship, or nature, when you have TikTok!

If you have the math chops, you should really try to get into it just so you can realize you are not going to make a money making algorithm. I got knee deep into it out of boredom during Covid and was able to have the "aha" moment where you realize the best you can do is buy index funds or just long hold companies you believe in that are in your area of expertise.

Isn't that how RenTech got started?

From what I understand, that fund still does huge gains, and can't get too big.

There's a lot of firms like that.

If the gains are huge, it's either temporary luck or they're cheating. You cannot have long term high alpha without either. If you meet a person who can constantly flip a coin heads side up, ask them to keep going and they'll either fail or you'll find the coin is rigged.

“It’s impossible for me to beat the market consistently” does not imply “nobody can beat the market consistently” or “nobody can beat the market consistently for a long enough time to become filthy rich”.

I didn't say it's impossible for just me, it's impossible for anyone.

RenTech's magic comes from their tax attorneys and creative accounting like their ploy to get long term capital gains treatment on daily trades! They've had to pay at least 7 billion in fines, which is an astronomical fine [0] and probably means they were doing even worse.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/renaissance-executi...

The N=1 or handful of people that are your exception kind of prove the rule.

Here's the thing...if you want to be pedantic, you need to explain how someone persists such alpha over time with examples. Not easy.

edit: See my note below on RenTech.

I would think that the ways that people generate consistent alpha would include scale advantages, information asymmetry, execution advantages, geographical advantages and a strategic edge. Usually some combination of those factors.

Someone like Warren Buffet has a once in a generation skill combined with massive scale and information advantage (he sees deals in publicly-traded stocks before anyone else). You may claim that it’s not fair to cite Buffet here, but he’s just the most public example of market actors with a durable advantage.

I fully agree Buffett is a one of a kind investor who's outperformed. I would love to have owned BRK shares, and still think you can't really go wrong owning them. That said, his performance v. S&P 500, a simple index, hasn't persisted. Basically, Buffett lost his advantages and even started making public bets that index funds would outperform actively managed funds.

> I did the math and starting from 1965 to 2002, a period of 38 years, the compounded annual return of the S&P 500 was 10.02% while that of Berkshire was 25.66%. But—and here's the kicker—from 2003 to 2022, a period of 20 years, the S&P 500 delivered a 9.80% compounded annual return while Berkshire came in lower at 9.75%. [0]

He's gotten fined for insider dealing by the SEC. And I figure that a lot of his "alpha" came in the earlier days of the markets when there was less regulation.

FWIW, here's an interesting article on Buffett's alpha. [1]

> Previous researchers analyzing Buffett’s returns using conventional size, value, and momentum factors haven’t been able to adequately explain his outperformance, the authors say, leaving admirers to conclude that Buffett’s magic is pure alpha. So they extend the analysis by testing Buffett’s impressive returns — as measured by Berkshire’s stock — against two factors that better reflect his folksy investing wisdom: One called “Betting Against Beta,” which represents safe, low-beta stocks, and another called “Quality Minus Junk,” which represents the stocks of high-quality companies that are profitable, growing, and paying dividends.

The results? “Controlling for these factors,” the authors write, “drives the alpha of Berkshire’s public stock portfolio down to a statistically insignificant annualized 0.1%, meaning that these factors almost completely explain the performance of Buffett’s public portfolio.” The factors also explain “a large part” of Berkshire’s overall stock return, the authors add, as well as Berkshire’s private portfolio, insofar as their alphas also become statistically insignificant.

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/warren-buffett-has-underperfo...

[1] https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2012/09/11/chasing-w...

RenTech was founded by legit signals processing guys who cut their teeth breaking codes for the NSA and basically invented ML for the stock market. They also built the best dataset in the world (at the time) for stock info as a competitive advantage. There's no real way to duplicate what they did today when everyone else is already doing quant trades to take advantage of suckers.

Note: There's a great podcast on RenTech by Acquired: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/renaissance-technologies

There's also a great book: https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Solved-Market-Revolution/dp/0...

They lost money for a long time, and it was not easy building what they built. I really enjoyed the early parts where they were solving problems in creative ways like any startup. For example, they needed data so had people calling them each day reading off numbers and someone writing them to down to enter them later.

How the later part of the story ties to today's politics is also interesting.

I tried for a long time with stocks, then I tried stock options. I eventually moved off to index and treasury futures. No money to be made in stocks, shitty leverage, high fees, LOUSY TAX TREATMENT and to complicate matters further shorting can be problematic. Also no "real" market is open 24h so you really just get to trade open-to-close standard hours. Stocks just have too many things going against you to make any money and thats before you figure your broker is front running you in the first place.

My basic strategy is that the signal/news/data contains no real information beyond whether or not people are buying or selling. When they stop selling I start buying and vice versa. Use your data skills to identify "things that work with regularity" and "things that rarely ever work" while at the same time understanding "literally any strategy works SOMETIMES".

Develop a roughly asymmetric strategy where your average gain is greater than your average loss per trade. The biggest thing you need is to pick some BIG WIN trades and ride them for a large profit. A small percentage of big wins pay for the losers and make the whole thing profitable. Remember that you "Make more money" by trading larger quantities, not by seeking larger moves. You don't "make money" so much as you harvest what the market gives you and if its not giving you close the trade. Your chosen trading system should reflect this.

Size your trades such that if you're betting N shares with $Y dollars now and you take a loss, you're coming back to the table with at least N shares and $Y dollars. Never loose $100 and find yourself in the position of recovering that loss with only $50 to play with. Read about "money management" in gambling for some ideas heres.

Don't be afraid of the short side either as you will make about half your money there. Don't be afraid to bet agains the trend and "call bullshit" on a move - your system should be designed to detect the success rates of these calls and should be looking for those situations.

For me its about using data to make bets where, in the event I win, I win pretty big and in the event I lose, I lose minimally.

USE BRACKET ORDERS FOR ALL POSITIONS OR PERISH. AUTOMATE YOUR STRATEGY OR PERISH. ALWAYS TAKE YOUR TRADES OR PERISH.

Making profitable trades here and there is EASY - keeping the money you made on those is the hard part.

EDIT: If you're concerned about "slippage" you have a bad strategy. If the strategy can be undone by a .75pt slip then you need to consider something else.

EDIT: Don't be seduced by the High Frequency Trading bullshit. You don't have the infrastructure for this and the fastest safest Rust code you can write is still connected to some slow retail trading infra here. Plenty of money to be made in Low Freq mode. 20 trades a month per instrument is a lot of trades a month!

> No money to be made in stocks, shitty leverage, high fees, LOUSY TAX TREATMENT and to complicate matters further shorting can be problematic.

Historic evidence does not support this statement in the strong sense. Whether it is true, in a weak sense, into the future, is debatable.

There is only one truth: Monthly account statements.

Extremely solid advice. As someone who has worked at a trading company that makes the big bucks, I can say you (as a single investor) will never consistently beat the market on any remotely interesting instrument. The sheer resources the institutional traders put in is mind boggling. You must understand that you truly are gambling in the face of such a sophisticated opponent. The quicker you understand, the better (hopefully without losing your life savings first). And don't even think about derivatives, you will get eaten up and spat out like you can't imagine.

What’s old is new again.

If you worked in a tech office in the late 90’s, every other guy had Ameritrade or similar up in a window. It was the gaming/porn you could get away with at work.

Dot com roasted them all.

As did 2008. A bull market is a hell of a drug, as it were. And yes, we're probably headed for another big correction in the near to medium term future.

> If you worked in a tech office

Office? ;)

I was trading stocks in between my CS classes in the late 90s lol

Same. Good times.-

Wasn't it still $10/trade back then? That adds user friction, which discourages the gambling aspect much more than "free" trades provided by Robinhood (free as in they'll sell your order flow data to third parties).

Robinhood is an ironic name for the app that enables retail investors get cleaned out by the rich at scale.

I pay my brokerage about that, which is fine, as it works out as less than 0.1% of my average deal - and it’s usually at least five years between a buy and a sell.

When people complain about brokerage fees, or are pleased that their brokerage charge no fees, it usually means they will be losing their shirt at some point.

Volatility trading is for masochists on actual cocaine, and suckers.

There are structural changes that make it much easier to convert trading into gambling. Feeless trades and easy access to margin accounts and more advanced vehicles means that you can easily make dozens of high risk trades in a single day.

I wonder if this could, in a manner of speaking, be a "rational" choice that indicates a breakdown in society. That is to say, perhaps some of what we are seeing is that younger people have concluded that the only way to live a decent life in America is to become rich and becoming rich mostly comes down to luck. If gambling is the only way to get a decent life then they may as well gamble. If they lose, then they were already going to have a bad life anyways.

Some guy wrote a book recently and claimed that about 10% of workforce-eligible men are long term out of the workforce, due to some type of disability. Also 50% either aren't engaged at work or don't really do anything essential, meaning their job could disappear and it wouldn't be a huge impact.

https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...

https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/eco...

I think this is and overlooked factor. Though living standards have not fallen, the perceived risk of it falling is probably at an all time high. We got rid of pretty much all cultural safety nets, and now people are desperate to replace the lost security.

The regular 9-to-5 is seen as a last resort now—it’s almost like you’ve failed if you don’t have a side hustle. That’s the vibe. With AI and machine learning platforms making waves, especially for traders, the game has completely changed. The barrier to entry? Practically gone. These platforms have made it so easy to get started that anyone with a bit of curiosity can jump in.

It’s not the exclusive playground of the Wall Street elite anymore. What used to be this tightly guarded world of algorithms and insider knowledge is now available to anyone willing to dive in. People are out here making bank, and they’re getting good at it. Trading isn’t just something “some people” do—it’s turning into a thriving industry where regular folks are learning the ropes and doing well for themselves.

This whole shift has made the traditional career path feel outdated. Why settle for clocking in and out when you can leverage tools and tech to build something for yourself? The idea of just sticking to the 9-to-5 feels like giving up when the opportunities to create and grow are right there, waiting.

Blocked for AI reply

It's funny because 9-5 is still a great way to actually enrich yourself. The best way to grow your wealth is to increase your income, and a salary+benefits is the juiciest way to do that.

Sadly, I've seen many male friends of mine obsess with the stock market but not have anything going career-wise. They just hope they hit big and "make it." Better to just stack salary for years the boring way and save yourself the time it takes to micromanage investments.

Also, the second best way to enrich yourself in America is probably buying a home. But you need a down payment and the ability to afford it over the 30y mortgage.

Gambling on stocks may give you a windfall that amounts to a down payment, but good luck convincing the bank you can pay that new mortgage for 30y off your stock market wizardry.

9-5 is definitely not the way to enrich yourself, that's an unfortunate message. Have you noticed how housing costs have consistently beat inflation for decades? At least if you live in a VHCOL area. It's easy - check the FRED report on the median salary and compare that with a graph showing the median housing price.

OK so the most important thing is out of reach with 9-5, independence from rent. The next set of factors like health care, and if you have a kid child care and health care, are also up compared to wages (9-5 wages).

That leaves just food and entertainment. I suppose you could live with roommates, eat frugally and not go out. And then maybe the 9-5 is the way to become rich.

For most of us the way to build wealth is through asset appreciation - housing , stocks. The 9-5 is the 'not so passive income' that you use day-to-day while you either SAVE up for the 'assets' (if you're lucky), or you gamble / inherit / get lucky with these assets.

Most of the country does not live in very high cost of living areas, so what you said isn't true in most places. And at some point, if your location is so bad that you just can't make it work financially, move. Yes, moving sucks for many reasons. But people are not powerless victims who just get stuck somewhere and can't do anything else, they have the ability to take themselves to another place where the opportunities are better.

Seattle is a high COL area and even there with a tech job you can accumulate a lot of cash..

idk man I graduated a decade ago and switched jobs every 2ish years and now my income dwarfs my expenses and I saved $100k+ for a down payment years ago. It's those raises from changing jobs, promotions, career development that paid off more than which ETF I stuffed my money into.

I don't live frugally or have roommates (except my wife who hasn't worked for years).

I've literally never had expenses so high I couldn't max my 401k, HSA, and go to restaurants, travel, buy fun stuff, keep an good emergency fund. And I lived in Seattle most of that decade. Also my job is super easy for me.

Crazy how much a degree from a midwest state school can do...

It’s still possible to do this, but requires prudence (which isn’t an appealing message).

i guess it always required prudence. good attribute to have.

Dunno about everyone but my 9-5 salary is awesome. I do Vulnerability Research at an MIT lab. Working there is amazing. Much rather my situation than one where I am forced to “trade” and make it big in order to eat and or anything else in life. Great 9-5 jobs are out there and it’s funny because I used to think of them as “awful slave” jobs. Used to think having to do a 9-5 was something to avoid at all costs. Came to realize I enjoy guaranteed income and job security over anything else. Sorry for bad grammar; typing on phone..

That particular job sounds amazing, I'd love a 9-5 doing research!

I've been working in the dreaded evil industry (non tech but I am in tech) for decades and gave up trying to find a job I loved. Corporate politics sucks that away.

You can still look for a 9-5 in a solid startup or scale-up.

> Trading isn’t just something “some people” do—it’s turning into a thriving industry where regular folks are learning the ropes and doing well for themselves.

Said every forex / options / crypto course seller ever.

Anybody remember the "Day Trade your way out of Debt" late night infomercials in the '90s?

> Said every forex / options / crypto course seller ever.

And they're correct on this. The only catch is that you don't need to buy their courses to know it.

Anyone selling the retail investor an "edge" via ML platforms or AI is selling snake oil. Sure the barrier to entry is low, but profits are never guaranteed.

Jeez, I've heard all this and much about online trading portals 2 decades ago. They weren't incorrect, anybody could trade, even alghoritmically. AI isnt bringing anything added for regular users that others dont have, so nothing.

You make your own priorities and risks, as do we. Your comment anyway reads like some cheap marketing for clueless folks on the back of a bus just before bubble bursts.

The other day at the store, in my smaaaall hometown, I overheard the cashier and an older man discuss crypto while I was waiting for my turn. They were discussing meme-coins they gambled on. Super weird to hear irl.

Sounds like shoeshine boy time.

Note this article isn't about investing, it's about gambling.

It doesn't mention Robinhood's role in promoting addictive gambling behaviors. How much has it changed since this 2020 article? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/technology/robinhood-risk...

> After funding his account with $15,000 in credit card advances

Wow. Stop right there.

Young people can take risks that seem crazy to us older folks, because they have way more time to recover.

If you leverage invest early in life, even if it completely wipes you out (once), you can leverage your way back into money.

Well, it’s harder then you’re letting on if your leverage costs 20%+.

Apple is up 40% this year, VOO is up 27%.

20% cost and you’re still ahead

Yes if the market goes up a lot you win. That's generally how leverage works. The problem is when it goes down. Or, if you're borrowing at high interest, doesn't go up quite as much. (Which leads to many people selling, which drives the price down, which leads to selling, and so on).

And what if Apple is not up 40% this year?

Apple was down 24% during Dec 2021-Dec 2022. It could have happened this year, could happen next year. Nobody knows.

By comparison, VOO was down 18% during that period. If you put money in Treasury bonds, you come out positive.

My point is that there is a reason behind many practical, reasonable financial advice instead of "cash advance at 20%, and if you are lucky, you could still be ahead".

Dear reader: do not take financial advice from this person's comments.

The supposed "survey" or whatever the hell this is was taken from a bunch of amateur people who started trading out of boredom which depicts an entirely non-real picture of the people who have been doing this for a living since quite some time. Like with everything else, using your brain cells can quickly make you realize it's a lot more than "gambling"

> a bunch of amateur people who started trading out of boredom

Former options market maker. The industry was dead for a decade until the pandemic. It’s now more profitable than ever. Lots of negative-alpha orders that can be predictably sorted from the flow. Market makers are seeing casino-like margins on some subsets of flow; that signals a problem.

It's hilarious watching the r/Superstonks subreddit live in a pretend reality. Supposedly Citadel is their sworn enemy but they've spent the past 4 years purposely buying badly priced shares from them.

How do you educate someone so confidently and consistently wrong in their world? Someone who INSISTS that "No, this letter from BBBY that says that we are going to see massive share dilution when 500k new shares are printed and sold to pay down debts before the company is shut down, is a lie because they actually are going to magically transform into a new competitor against Amazon because Ryan Cohen (a man who was only part of BBBY for like a month) is going to be the new CEO and make us all rich"

When those shares dropped at an obviously stupid price with zero future value, they bought them by the hundreds and LITERALLY wrote "thank you for the tasty dip"

> Like with everything else, using your brain cells can quickly make you realize it's a lot more than "gambling"

Which sounds similar to how gambling addicts report their thoughts on their addiction - that they are smart enough to learn poker, or they know enough basketball to be able to predict outcomes.

Like with everything else, some research and data interpretation shows that with the remarkable exception of two or three highly specialized companies that employ some of the best mathematicians alive, most active investors underperform.

This comment should not be greyed out. See the Buffett Bet [1] for the most famous example of this.

Warren Buffet bet a million against Ted Seides (head of Protege at the time) that a simple index fund investment would outperform any handpicked selection of hedge funds over a decade. And critically this bet was made in 2008 just before the market crashed! That's when hedge funds should disproportionately shine, as per their name, by hedging. In the end it wasn't even close.

[1] - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/030916/buffe...

I think it would be much better if the comments here focused on the benefits of passive, long term investments in index funds. As it is, I worry people will “correct” by leaving money in a savings account instead.

>Which sounds similar to how gambling addicts report their thoughts on their addiction - that they are smart enough to learn poker, or they know enough basketball to be able to predict outcomes.

Some people are smart enough to learn poker, and build careers out of them. And there are many books on poker. You picked a poor example.

A gambling addict thinks they can learn to play poker because there is a small elite of professional poker players.

Which is exactly what an amateur trader thinks - I will learn to beat the market, because Ray Dalio did.

I used the poker example precisely because of this parallel between a very small elite and an overwhelming majority of loss makers.

You're right in that sense that people think they can learn to be the best, and fail at it, as only few succeed. The game wouldn't have tournaments if that were true no one could consistently win financially.

You're also right that it triggers the addiction itch in some vulnerable individuals!

I play poker and would never be stupid enough to put real money on it. It's great as a social game for me where 25 dollars is the risk.

Don't hate the game...

> I play poker and would never be stupid enough to put real money on it

This whole thread is casinos arguing against regulation because casual poker players don’t get addicted. We have billions of dollars targeting young people (mostly single young men) with gambling, from zero-day options trading to crypto and sports betting.

There are plenty of people who are trading with a strategy. There are also oodles of people who are engaging with trading in precisely the same way that somebody engages with sports betting. And various platforms are using similar marketing and ux strategies as betting platforms to encourage this.

Coincidentially today I've just finished reading: "The Little Book on Common Sense Investing" by John Bogle. What's described in the article is exactly the opposite of what people should be doing if interested in serious investing. The book mostly focus on index funds and I highly recommend its reading to anyone who wants to understand and embark on investing seriously. The book is short, extremely easy to read, full of examples, wise advices and quotes from remarkable people of the investment sector.

I’ll add it to my reading list, but I think a lot has changed in the world since this book was written.

It’s a cheap way to purchase a diverse subset of the global economy. That’s as timeless as it gets.

Online stock trading has gone from cheap to free, but that doesn't affect the worthiness of the book.

What hasn't changed:

* US economy has been growing steadily, and will do so for the foreseeable future

* Index funds are still a great way to invest your money

And more importantly,

* Most people suck at picking stocks (including the average Joe, mutual fund managers, YouTube/TikTok influencers and "stock analysts"). It's better to just leave it to the market, aka SPY(VOO)/VTI etc., and have good sleep.

Fair. Many people will continue to invest in ETFs for a long time, but when people start retiring and selling from their ETFs, then the party is going to end.

ETFs, because of their algorithmic known trading, don’t always get the best price for their underlying assets. Notice how before an ETF is created (see bitcoin) or a company enters the snp500, the stock shoots up in price.

After losing my first chunk of cash during 2000 .COM crash I became be quite contrarian. Thought real estate is way too high, thought the stock market is nuts, bitcoin is a scam. Turns out the big crash never happened and everything ket going up. Three years ago for some reason I jumped into the stock market, bought a house, bought some bitcoin. Turns out so far the gains have been life changing. If I ever get laid off,I may be able to just call it quits and retire.

I still think the whole thing doesn't make sense but it seems economic fundamentals don't work anymore. Everything is a bubble.

Exactly me -- except still a contrarian.. Everything just goes up and up and up.

You went long on some fairly general assets. That's not gambling.

The problem with gamblers is (for example) making risky bets on margin and ending up losing massive amounts of money because a meme stock lost 5% of its value during a normal market fluctuation.

Same. Friends who just threw money at stuff are millionaires, and I'm... not. Hard to just put the money in and expect more back when it took so much hard work to get in the first place.

If you haven't already, now might be a good time to sell some of that bitcoin

okay I don't comment on here often, can check my post history, but absolutely would not sell your bitcoin any time soon considering we have a pro crypto president and have an approx 40% chance of a bitcoin strategic reserve within the first 100 days. terrible advice tbh.

I think the word some is doing most of the work there. There are other investments, too, you know. Diversifying means you sleep better.

(Also, Congress just showed that many Republicans won’t listen to Trump, or Musk, when they have other ideas.)

I wouldn't sell any imo. if anything his conviction should have grown. sell now for what? to buy back higher in 4 years? diversifying in assets that historically perform worse would not make me sleep better tbh esp considering the events on the horizon for btc... nation states buying, US strategic reserve potential, microstrategy issuing 10b stock proposal, etf's buying at an alarming rate. Way too much happening imo to sell at the precipice of what very well could be the end of consumer friendly pricing for btc.

If you’re right that Bitcoin will go up forever, there is no need to buy any back because when Bitcoin goes up, it becomes a larger part of your portfolio. To rebalance your portfolio (get back to the same percentage), you need to sell, and there’s never a time to buy unless it goes down again.

But going by the price history, Bitcoin is very volatile, going down as well as up. Keeping it a fixed percentage of your portfolio would result in buying when it’s lower.

(Substitute any volatile investment for Bitcoin.)

Yeah HN has been giving this advice since BTC was at 60k.

And 30k.

And 10k.

I mined a ton of bitcoin with a friend when it was really new and then forgot about it because it was useless at the time.

I kicked myself already at 1k and would have sold then. That is, if I hadn't thrown away the disk with they keys

Hard disagree. 2025 is going to be a huge pro-crypto year IMO.

Gensler is resigning (bc Trump was going to nuke him on day 1). The SEC replacement, Paul Atkins, is pro-crypto.

https://www.npr.org/2024/12/04/g-s1-36803/trump-crypto-paul-...

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/stock-market-trading-apps...

Thank YOU

when you re generationally deprived of real estate heroin, you end up with stock market cocaine

it s all partly gambling but different strokes for different generations

Good insured real estate is always a good safe bet. The best conservative investment that current & few past gens could have done while being completely clueless about stocks, markets, politics etc.

People need to live someplace to be just part of society and also to just survive, plus there is emotional and status aspect. Western construction is lagging behind population growth in popular places plus running / ran out of good space. Do the math.

I am not so sure. An article is on the front page of the WSJ (online) about property taxes and insurance becoming more than the mortgage payments.

In parts of the country there's a crash in the works (Sunbelt, Florida in particular).

Where I live renting is substantially cheaper than buying, by thousands a month. You are absolutely better off buying a mutual fund with the difference and enjoying the flexibility of having cash.

I am not so sure what is going on in the housing market, but there is so little inventory in the hotspots, and what appears to be a dump in the no-longer-hot-spots, that it's scarier than buying stocks right now.

I've done the math for a bunch of properties family and friends have owned, and they were never beating index funds.

Do the math and you'll find that putting your money in an index fund almost always beats real estate, with much less risk and much less work.

It's easy for one property to underperform the market by a lot. It's hard for an index fund to do the same.

I own a $1.5M rental home in a luxury destination and profoundly regret it. The amount of work I put into it was enormous. I'm not outperforming the market, and I can't sell it because the mortgage rate is 2%.

I've found this to often also be the case, but leverage completely blows these numbers up.

you'd be right if someone was willing to let you lever up 5:1 and bet on index funds. however you can only accomplish this with real estate, and with such leverage the required rate of return is far lower to make it worth it.

TQQQ is 3:1.

Every time I ask people to factor in their time in managing the property (yes, even time spent finding the property to buy counts), they end up way behind.

Volatility decay means if QQQ is flat, TQQQ is negative. It also consumes your dividends.

How is that different than leveraged RE? If the property value is flat, you’re in the red due to interest.

I suppose you could ask ChatGPT or another AI how to calculate Volatility Decay and it would give you a pretty good answer that you can compare against the fixed interest rate of the mortgage. A lazy way to calculate volatility decay might be to add the returns of TQQQ and SQQQ together, divide by 2 then subtract that against QQQ and then subtract out the dividends.

But that doesn’t take into account how RE is providing you with shelter and additional SQ footage. If your total mortgage, insurance and taxes are less than renting, which is the case with mine, then there is pretty much no way to be at a loss with real estate. There’s pretty much only upside then over any 3-5 year period.

Yeah, no one ever accounts for the labor requirements for these projects. If you can earn $100/hr from your career or contracting work, then spending 20 hours per month finding tenants, mowing lawns, fixing plumbing issues, etc, gets expensive fast.

At one point I knew I could beat the market with l33t software skills. I was wrong and only realized it after donating about 3k to Wall Street.

Luckily you learned the lesson when you were young and only lost $3k instead of $3M when you were old.

That’s peanuts! Congrats for realizing it early

I don't know OP but 3k can be a significant amount of money for some people esp when younger. I realise people often lose more, but that can also be because they have more money padding to lose.

The stock market is an expensive addiction. If you read subreddits like r/wsb, you’ll frequently see people losing hundreds of thousands of dollars, mortgaging houses, gambling their future on another 0dt option bet. It’s a good thing he only lost 3k!

Some folks' elementary or middle schools had stock picking lessons with fake money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21642395

From mine, all I remember was getting the impression that putting money in particular stocks without knowing what you're doing is a bad idea. Pretty valuable lesson, I guess, as I've never bought individual stocks since then...

You might have learned the wrong lesson there, if your goal is to build wealth. But it’s a good idea to prevent losses

Not really, indexing beats hedge fund managers over something like a 12 year stretch.

hedge funds are not the same thing as picking individual stocks. Not even close. Index funds are an averaging mechanism to reduce risk, not to maximize return (you can easily beat the average by allocating on the p75 instead for instance)

The problem isn't allocating, it's reallocating correctly. That problem space is much more complex for an entrenched account.

Fair, etfs do help with that

I'd be interested in something a little (but not a lot) higher risk reward than index, so I'd appreciate if you expand on this. What is the p75?

Balancing your portfolio to include the top 25 or so best performing companies of the index

Therefore ETFs that track that - eg $XLG is the s&p top 50. Unsurprisingly, consistently beats the s&p500. Same for $QQQ - in this case the skew is for more tech stocks (which were the best asset class in a decade)

We've all been there. The house always wins.

Actually, we haven't all been there. Some of us took to heart the lesson from War Games (1983), and apply it liberally:

"An interesting game Dr Falkon: The only way to win is not to play."

okay.

I don't know if the stock market is really the same as Global Thermonuclear Warfare

The principle can be broadly applied. The stock market and our society as a whole, the money never trickles down, it floods upwards, and the few people at the top will never be me, and it will never be you. Don't play the game.

Reminds me of an Andy Capp comic:

Andy: I need to borrow a fiver to put on "Flighty Horse" at 5pm. It's a certainty! I can't lose!

Flo: Where did we go on holiday?

Andy: Yer mum's.

Flo: Where did your bookmaker go on holiday?

Andy: Jamaica.

Flo: Think about it.

But that's not true in the world of stocks. If all the stocks go up, all of the owners are richer. And they do tend to go up, at least on average.. in recent history.

The futures and options markets are zero-sum. For every winner, there's an equal and opposite loser.

Zero-sum is true for stocks, too, if your goal is to generate alpha. For every alpha-generating stock participant, another one must lose.

A 3k bankroll isn’t remotely close to enough working capital to employ any kind of useful risk management strategy and get any kind of return worth the bother.

Right but if you are wrong you are only out 3k. Many people with more money think they have a good strategy and lose a lot before they realize it wasn't bad luck and risk management but a bad idea.

Well it's true, you do need an idea. But good ideas aren't hard to come by when you understand basic risk management. Take for example recent events. Say your idea is if this election goes one way, it's neutral/slightly bearish for TSLA, if it goes the other way it's wildly bullish for TSLA. Since one possibility isn't going to result in much movement you ignore it. For the other one you structure some options trades to go long where gamma will runaway in your favor. Assuming polls are to be believed, you have a roughly 40% chance of that bet paying off, and you can structure it to pay off a heck of a lot better than 150%. And if you're wrong? Well them's the breaks, but your risk management strategy means you're still in the game to give it a shot at the next good idea. And even then you won't lose your whole bet unless you picked an extremely aggressive expiry.

This is, incidentally, basically how VC works too.

You also need an idea that's somehow different from the rest of the market. (It's the difference of opinion/point of view that makes a market.)

If everyone has the exact same expectations as you, no one is going to offer you the options trade structure at a price that would be profitable for you.

Of course, but at the scale of a responsible retail options gambler (think a high six to low seven figure bankroll, properly managed), you can pretty reliably find people willing to take the other side of your seeming long shot. The temptation to pick up pennies on the train tracks is ever present.

Need for a different idea depends on the full size. If there are 10 shared available for $10, then nearly anyone could buy them all up and so all ideas are saturated at just one poor person. However if the idea is for a large company there are thousands of shared traded every day, and so if your idea is the company will go up in value almost nobody could buy enough shares to make a difference - even rich would struggle to find enough free money to move the value of the company by $1.

In the market there are ideas on all levels, some really are the $100 trade that will make money but that is the most possible to trade. However many ideas are on the large end where there is plenty of room for more people. If you think a fortune 100 company is under valued by $10/share you can make a ton of money (assuming you are right of course) and safely tell all your friends without affecting your ability to make money.

> If you think a fortune 100 company is under valued by $10/share you can make a ton of money (assuming you are right of course)

Inherent in this $10/share profit opportunity is that not everyone agrees with you. (If everyone did agree with you, the discrepancy/opportunity would collapse from $10 to under a penny.)

There is the risk. Those who don't agree might be right. However we can see at larger changes in price over a year all the time so sometimes the others are wrong.

telling which is an evercise I can't help you with. I invest in index funds.

Eh, I started with not much more than that (£5k) about ten years ago, and now have an eight figure equities portfolio, built entirely from that seed capital.

All buy & hold forever, layered sell-off, buy the next thing, take some profit for me and the taxman. Enough moved into stable instruments (bonds, real estate) that I can afford to lose the whole shebang.

So yeah, $3k is plenty, if you buy inevitable winners. Just… look at the broad sweep of the future and buy supply chains. Shovels in a gold rush and all that.

I too don’t understand why technical analysis isn’t classified as a genre of fiction…

I think some make money trading just that or am I wrong? I’m not talking about youtubers

Some people win the lottery.

You should still be skeptical if they try and sell you on their patented lottery number picking strategy.

The market is a mind game. If enough market participants care about it, then it defacto becomes a signal to be aware of.

In fact if you're a trader (not a long term investor) that manages to make money in the markets you will by definition use some form of technical analysis.

Ugh. I vividly remember when my stepfather tried to get me involved. He was retired, and had a nice nest egg built up from a small business. He was a smart man.

But he was paying thousands of dollars per year for a monthly newsletter that contained <some brand of analysis>. And he patiently showed me how he started with a row in the table that met <his criteria> then followed to the column that met <other criteria> and that was the choice he made in the market.

And I'm thinking, whatever information he's getting in that newsletter is at least a month old by the time he gets it. And he's not doing anything a program couldn't do, with the information in digital form. And he should know that -- he was a computer programmer earlier in life. As far as I could see, there was zero chance he was beating anyone or anything with that technique, and starting in a several thousand dollar hole.

Maybe I was wrong, but I don't think so.

sounds like he had a hobby.

An expensive one.

I'd spend that money on piano/drawing lessons or something. Or take a few trips around the world.

Better return on investment.

could have been worse - video games, prostitutes, etc.

I have net managed to beat the market.

My estimate is that I've earned approximately $3/hour for the time I've spent doing so. And I was trading in such thinly traded options that it wasn't a matter of "scaling up" - I was literally only able to make money because I was picking up the pennies nobody else cared about.

(And/or trading on events that were were rare, obvious, and in an area I understood, which also doesn't scale)

Good fun and educational. Not quitting my day job. Because, of course, if you do the math on it, I've lost money playing the market relative to almost any other use of my time unless you consider it an investment in education and entertainment.

Did you consider writing a bot?

Automation carries… risks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group

Folks have an unhealthy mentality about beating the market, imo. You don’t need to beat the market if you’re not a fund manager trying to advertise your record. You just need to do well.

The market is up 27% YTD. Most global trends suggest, to me, a greater centralization of wealth into the US. Just dumping everything into the SP500 is likely more than great for 99% of people for the near future.

You are correct. You just need to beat inflation. (So 27% vs. 2.7%? Pretty sure anyone can be a Wall Street wolf these days.)

I completely agree. Diversified low cost index funds are amazing. Matching "the market" has been a spectacular risk/return for a long time now.

(And to be clear, I keep approximately all of our investments there. But I have a small puddle I play with to remind myself not to play with real money. :-)

Just because the SP500 did +27% this year does not mean it will continue to do so.

Historical data shows a more nuanced picture.

Every so often I receive commercially sensitive information about my company which I'm not allowed to disclose before it's formally communicated to the stock market. For fun, I try to predict what impact it'll have on the share price (though of course I can't actually trade!)

I can successfully predict the direction of the share price movement 50% of the time and successfully predict the magnitude of the share price movement 0% of the time.

But in what time frame, can you predict that?

None.

>I can successfully predict the direction of the share price movement 50% of the time

50% performance when there are two options is chance, no? So that just means that you can't predict it at all.

Technically there is a third possibility that the price will remain exactly the same. But the odds of that are even lower.

...that's the joke.

Maybe consider using a stock market simulator, make trades based on inside information, and see where you end up in one year? That would be interesting.

> only realized it after donating about 3k to Wall Street.

An education in finance is expensive, not matter where you get it from.

3k is much, much cheaper than many college degrees, even from state schools with in-state tuition.

In the beginning, I donated about $10k to Wall Street. Got smarter, went to university for first finance, then economics. Learned to actually trade. Crushed the market, made nearly $100k annually with starting capital of only $30k. Then realized my life expenses were a significant part of that, I didn't have enough capital to grow it fast enough to both live life and accumulate capital to make trading more worthwhile than simply getting a job with that education. Getting a job + having easy passive investments (like a market fund) was less hours, less stress and more profitable than being a full time trader starting with a middling amount of capital. Also trading is less fulfilling than things like building, entrepreneurship, having a normal job plus hobbies, etc... Lots of traditional entrepreneurial paths also beat the market pretty handily.

It's good story but entrepreneurialism is a lot more than just a chosen career path, like teacher, software developer, product manager. It requires ideas, networking or connections, and usually capital.

And then that leaves working the 9-5 (or if you're in IT it's more like 8 to 6), and maybe getting 10-20% of your salary in bonus at the end of the year.

Rinse-repeat.

Trading is at least exciting.

I've taken comfort in the thought that there are millions of people much more clever than me. If they have not figured out how to game the market there's no chance I will.

So I don't even try.

The most difficult part about the stock market is that stocks don't move for the reasons people think.

People think fundamentals, news, financial performance, or chart patterns matter. But none of it does.

Markets are driven purely by supply and demand. And in this case, supply and demand for the stock itself.

Fundamentals are already priced in. Financial performance is already priced in. Expectations are priced in, and others probably have more information than you anyway. Other people also watch chart patterns and place their bets based on that.

What you're betting on is whether the market is right, or wrong. Or whether other investors will think the market is right or wrong.

Edit - the other part of it is that Wall Street firms hire tons of people who are incredibly smart, have math, economics and finance degrees or even PhDs, hire software engineers and spend hundreds of millions on infrastructure just to know the market better than you. You're not smarter than all those people put together.

In the long term fundamentals will matter. But the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Ordinarily I would say that an investment in a broad index for the long term (a decade or more) is always wise, and there's no point in trying to time it more specifically than that. However right now it's been irrationally exuberant for a long time. it's going to have to correct itself... Either tomorrow or another ten years.

Depends. If the fundamentals are already good, they're priced in, you probably have little upside, even long term. Maybe you'll just match the market. You have to think the fundamentals will improve over time more than the market expects to beat the market.

Long term, I think economics has more to do with market performance. Stocks rise as the money supply expands and capital has no where else to go.

You can't beat the market but you don't need to. The ordinary returns of GDP growth are pretty good.

The free money has definitely been screwing with GDP as a base. I'm still unclear on why the Fed would lower interest rates when the market is fine, the GDP is fine, and inflation is still slightly above baseline 2%. I know everyone is yelling for the punch bowl to come back but now would be a good time to pay down some debts.

> You can't beat the market but you don't need to.

You can, it's just difficult. Plenty of (mostly professional) traders and hedge funds do. The knowledge gap between amateurs and pros is just massive, as is the time they have to monitor their holdings.

> I'm still unclear on why the Fed would lower interest rates

There's a lot of space between where they started (0%) and where they topped (5.5%) and where they are now (4.5%).

As you approach a stop sign, do you wait to brake until you're at the sign or do you start slowing down as you approach?

At 5.5% the Fed became concerned (and I think rightly so) that they could overshoot into deflation territory so they stated easing to what they consider a current neutral position - somewhere in the 2.5% - 3% range.

The market is not efficent. The fundamentals are only partialy priced in. However finding the times when the difference is significant is not easy.

The market is definitely efficient. Try to find arbitrage opportunities (which is what actual market inefficiency is); they disappear in milliseconds.

What you're saying is that it's not infallible as far as predictive power is concerned, which is true. But every current bit of knowledge is definitely priced in.

Markets are efficient over long time spans but in short term are definitely inefficient. You can just look at volatility during earnings and lack of liquidity in small caps.

> Expectations are priced in, and others probably have more information than you anyway.

I have always made money on the stock market. I bought Nvidia in December 2022 and then again in April 2023. Yes the information was out there - anyone reading this board back then could see it. Or who saw Emad Mostaque's tweets that Stable Diffusion was trained on Nvidia, or who knew the semi-public information that OpenAI trained on Nvidia. I bought and it quadrupled in two years when averaging out. The expectations on this board were not priced in the market then.

When FAANG and more b2b tech companies (Salesforce, Oracle) tanked in 2022 I poured money into tech indexes like IYW and IGV. Not as much as into Nvidia, but they were good companies and finally and unusually cheap. They went way up too.

I was making money in the 1990s buying SGI, Sun Microsystems, Netscape, Cisco etc. No brainers for me.

Only two losses I recall - Cascade, a router company whose stock dipped and was bought ny US Robotics on the dip (1990s?). Also some ad company which was crushed by competition with Google.

I completely disagree with your premise. I don't even know how to make a neural network in Pytorch, nor can I do matrix math with NumPy. But in December 2022 Nvidia seemed worth the risk, and by April of last year a lot of that risk evaporated with a huge potential upside. I knew the stock was cheap and all the PhDs on Wall Street did not. Also, they are stuck in a bureaucracy - I used to work in IT for a major investment bank in Manhattan. Watch the Big Short on the pressure the people who were right got from their management and investors. I don't have that pressure, it is my money.

We, the people here, do get insights which are not priced in. It's not that there is no risk, but the coin flip sometimes goes 51% in our favor. Sometimes even 52% (or 53%...or 60%). This is how Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch etc. made money.

Read the Wall Street analyses from the middle of last year on AMD being a big Nvidia competitor, then read the posts here this week about how AMD engineers don't have boards to fix bugs. "We the customer had to mail the AMD engineer a spare board to fix the bug". The cobbler's children wear no shoes at AMD. Then go read some Wall Street report about the stiff competition Nvidia faces from AMD. The information is here, not in the Wall Street analysis report by people who know less than me about how transformers work.

> Read the Wall Street analyses from the middle of last year on AMD being a big Nvidia competitor, then read the posts here this week about how AMD engineers don't have boards to fix bugs. "We the customer had to mail the AMD engineer a spare board to fix the bug". The cobbler's children wear no shoes at AMD. Then go read some Wall Street report about the stiff competition Nvidia faces from AMD. The information is here, not in the Wall Street analysis report by people who know less than me about how transformers work.

Are you saying that AMD will not be a serious competitor to NVIDIA?

The second company benefiting from AI Broadcom, not AMD.

I am saying several different things. For your question, the farther out in the future, the more uncertain it is. The stock analyses from the middle of last year which talked about the threat of AMD in a more immediate tone were obviously wrong. Some of the analysis now that talks about the short-term threat of AMD does not jibe with what programmers here working with AMD have said in threads this week. Or what George Hotz or others are saying about buggy AMD chips.

One point is we here know certain things here that stock analysts looking at the last quarterly report do not. The short-term threat of AMD was certainly overstated by Wall Street last year, and in my opinion still is.

If we stop talking in terms of months and start talking in terms of years, it is harder to tell. Maybe AMD will get its act together and give Nvidia a run for its money. Maybe not. For 2025, I don't think AMD will have much effect on Nvidia though.

For every story like this, there’s another story where everything moves in the opposite direction.

https://xkcd.com/1827/

This is known as the Efficient Market Hypothesis, and having an edge against this requires specialization and focus in specific industries in which you have significant knowledge. That, or learning to recognize when the market is surprised by an outcome, and acting fast.

I don't think it's as easy as "supply / demand" and everything is priced in.

There's many forces at play here, and many different ways to play the game.

Markets are not that efficient, not everything is priced in. Earnings would have 0 effect on price if that was the case for example.

Whether you play the market on higher timeframes or on lower timeframes, different factors come in to play.

I think it's obvious that chart patterns are a thing, (shameless plug here: i'm building https://edgefound.xyz, an app to create and backtest complex trading setups). It's actually interesting how many patterns (or setups) repeat across markets and timeframes. Mostly because prices are set by traders and traders react in the same way to the same events / price movements.

I’m old enough to remember when you couldn’t just buy one share (you had to by a “lot” of 100), and when I actually received a paper stock certificate that I had to sign and mail to my broker. Rubes will try to beat the market and one in 1000 will succeed. Ignore them and follow the basics. I’ve been investing since the 80s and all my peers that did the boring thing are retiring comfortably.

The boring thing being buy and hold?

I remember a controversial scamming figure in Italy that made millions by selling lucky numbers for lotteries or exploiting people's stupidity to part them with their life savings.

Her motto was "idiots _have_ to be scammed".

While this figure was morally and ethically deplorable, it always made me think how her motto essentially implied that there was an element of pure natural selection happening and she saw herself as the executor of the oldest survival of the fittest balancing act.

At the same time, as someone who follows places like WSB seeing people getting in life-ruining leverage just for the adrenaline of it, or even worse, just for internet karma always made me think of that scammer's words: this is just natural selection doing it's thing as it has been for billions of years. And there's no third party scamming them. They know what they risk, and will do it anyway.

The world is full of physical and non physical dangers, we are naturally programmed to push for self preservation and yet there are people that willingly and consciously decide to put it all on risk, how can it be anything but natural selection doing it's thing?

> how can it be anything but natural selection doing it's thing?

Does it affect their reproductive chances? If not, then natural selection has nothing to do with it.

It’s overly simplistic to say that if a person has reproduced, then they have ‘succeeded’ in the natural selection game.

There is a whole (potential) downstream genealogical tree branching off from each individual

Certainly, any person who reproduces has done “better” at the game than someone who has not reproduced at all. But that is still not quite enough.

If a parent reproduces, but none of their children themselves reproduce, then the parent has not actually succeeded in the game.

A gambling addict who can’t hold onto any money absolutely affects their downstream tree.

In theory yes, but given the birth rate demographics I don't think it's actually true. The families giving birth to the most children in the developed world are mostly either hyper-religious or poor, whether that's because it's generational or because they just immigrated from a developing country.

I think the kind of men (probably in their late 20s/early 30s onwards) that can afford to gamble on stock market apps aren't in the running to begin with.

In that case it's just another symptom of the thing that is naturally selecting them

By this logic nobody wins, because humanity will go extinct eventually.

In reality the winners of natural selection are those who were born and are still alive. If life is a game, they are winners in the most literal sense.

We struggle for existence against entropy, not against other humans or animals.

The purpose of sneering about "idiots" and inventing pseudoscientific gibberish about natural selection is to wash one's hands of moral responsibility for scamming naive young people, the elderly, or adults with psychiatric or cognitive disabilities. "It wasn't me robbing your college-age son out of a new car, that was just natural selection doing its thing! So long, losers!"

My mom was a very crappy person who strongly believed in the "sucker born every minute, separate a fool from his money" mantra. I think it's become a core American ideology.

I've adopted the sucker born ever minute attitude since it's all I can do. These fools have the tenacity to be scammed at a rate faster than we can ever hope to do anything about and it's depressing otherwise. Society ends up bearing the cost.

I mean you can also not scam these people

I don't.

There's a difference between a grandma losing money to a phone scam and this kind of "hustle economy" gambling.

I've talked to a lot of people who participate in this stuff, they always know the odds exactly. They're fully aware. It's a combination of greed, thrill and attention seeking that doesn't deserve sympathy. Everybody who participates in hawk tuah coin crypto rug pulls knows how stupid it is, they just think they're the smart ones fleecing everybody else. Those people deserve the "sucker born every minute" treatment. That is their worldview, they just think they're the exception.

Addiction takes over rationale. Everyone knows crack cocaine is bad. They know “the odds” too, yet they can’t stop.

I would prefer clever people have resources instead of any of those groups you listed.

I have this preference even if I am not the one being clever (so, via the veil of ignorance).

I would prefer kind, honorable, useful, people have them.

Take a wider view - the people with economic power are generally the people who use it for economically sensible things. Someone who spends irrationally is going to end up with no money. This is a similar process to natural selection - because the unviable strategies are removed, everything that is around is using a viable strategy. This woman was forcing people with unviable financial beliefs (that led to them being easily scammed) to give up their ability to exert economic pressure. In that sense, the same processes as natural selection are at play and we can call it the same thing.

Although I don't buy the logic in a lot of edge cases, it is somewhat necessary that these tactics are legal. Diverting resources to people who waste them is ruinous.

No, the resources diverted to people with "unviable financial beliefs" were done so in a proper market-efficient way, and would have been spent in perfectly ordinary ways no different from the average person of modest means, if it weren't for the scams.

Diverting people's resources to unproductive, antisocial scammers based on arbitrary educational criteria is the only "ruinous" thing in this picture. They are the economic inefficiency.

Well sure but you could make similar complaints about a bacterial infection killing a human. It is still natural selection even if it is arbitrary, pointless or destructive.

> and would have been spent in perfectly ordinary ways no different from the average person of modest means, if it weren't for the scams.

That is a pretty big leap.

There are plenty of ways, plenty of “unviable financial beliefs”, that can lead one to unwisely fritter away their resources without being exploited by a scammer.

You are basically asserting that most people who get scammed are otherwise Rational Agents who would invest their capital wisely, if not for the scammers deceiving them.

I would argue that, on the contrary, this set of people is very small.

Think of how many stories there are of people pursuing “investments”, or just directing their resources, into flat-out bullshit.

To pick some examples off the top of my head:

How much time, money, thought, effort (e.g. capital) has been wasted by people pursuing the Flat Earth theory? I would guess that there aren’t very many scammers involved in the Flat Earth movement. Most of the people involved are crackpot true believers.

As opposed to, say, homeopathy. Which certainly has a not-insignificant number of exploiters/scammers, people who know that it is bullshit but gladly exploit the uneducated.

Both of these movements involve a significant number of “uneducated” people spending their resources on a fantasy.

But, most of the resources poured into the Flat Earth movement are pure waste, with very little benefit whatsoever to the “Body Economic”. There are not very many “trickle down” benefits from the resources being spent.

When the “uneducated” people give their resources to a scammer, it is usually ending up in the hands of someone who is at least somewhat economically rational. And those resources will be spent in more rational ways.

Even if the scammer buys a bunch of gold chains and sports cars that they don’t really use, those resources are “participating” in the economy in a way that the wasted investments that don’t involve a scammer are not.

I’m not on the scammers’ side. I’m not saying they are good people. But it is not clear that “they are the economic inefficiency”.

> But, most of the resources poured into the Flat Earth movement are pure waste, with very little benefit whatsoever to the “Body Economic”. There are not very many “trickle down” benefits from the resources being spent.

> Even if the scammer buys a bunch of gold chains and sports cars that they don’t really use, those resources are “participating” in the economy in a way that the wasted investments that don’t involve a scammer are not.

Are you saying that people in the first case are taking their money and burning it? Because if not I don’t see how you could make that statement without more research - if the flat earthers are printing books, selling videos, hosting conferences, going on “fact finding” missions, etc. then they’re generating economic value as well. Much less of it in absolute terms given the relative population sizes but you can’t just assume everyone is Scrooge McDuck sitting on a huge pile of money.

It absolutely does

This is a position commonly referred to as "Social Darwinism." The same logic can get you to "drunk women out by themselves _have_ to be sexually assaulted" and so on. No, it's not OK to victimize people just because they're vulnerable. It's an absolutely odious caricature of moral reasoning.

Not at all. Money represents resources, and it’s objectively better for society for resources to be in the hands of people who are not fools, instead of those who are.

You sound foolish, I’m gonna need to take all your money. Don’t worry, I’m being objective.

The argument is that the objective test is whether you can actually convince anyone to hand over money.

No, they are making a moral argument, and claiming their view is the objectively moral position. It’s “better for society” was the phrase.

We don't need to take money from the fools. They'll give it away.

You can get like minded people and go roleplay feudalism with guns somewhere else, please leave people with empathy out of it.

PS: don't forget to document your inevitable failure, just like every libertarian "non-fools" community previously.

I disagree with the comparison. A "drunk woman out by themselves" is, at the end of the day, just a person exercising their right to exist. A stock-market gambler, on the other hand, is literally betting on the bad decisions of whoever is on the other side of their trades. It's a predatory position to be in, and deserves a whole lot less sympathy.

That same logic says the rapist is betting on stupid women.

No, how?

WSB users are doing that to themselves. You can't possibly compare them to a raped person.

most rapes are not stranges in dark allies they are people who know each other. Thus a not choosing better friends can be argued to do it to yourself.

Horrible example of victim blaming here.

like I said this logic is victum blaming. Doesn't matter if it is stocks or rape there is a victum that some are not acknoweleging

Don't believe what you read on WSB. Most of those clowns are getting Internet karma points by making up stories, not by losing real money.

I can assure you that many of the posts there are real. If you have market data you can verify the transactions yourself.

One of the justifications that psycopaths and sociopaths use is exactly this - If their victims weren't so stupid, they wouldnt be victims. (Often mixed with the "if I didnt exploit them, someone else would"). Its an excuse to rationalise and try to justify their bad behaviour.

NATURAL selection is built to deal with NATURAL problems, and they move and change and evolve at the same speed, natual selection changes at the speed of genetic mutations of large populations, we didnt have smartphones even 1 generation ago - so how the hell is natural selection supposed to adapt to that?

When you have an electronic device thats beaming in risky behaviour at millisecond latency, what's the difference than having a big pile of cocaine in the kitchen and then blaming the addicted person saying "Its just natural selection, that enourmous pile of drugs thats just sitting there - you took it willingly", this is hyperbole but its illustrating my point - immediate availabity of dangerous risky addictive behaviour is a problem that will seduce a lot of people that otherwise would not have had the problem.

Im definitly someone in favor of personal responsibility but "ne quid nimis" and this must be balanced by a strong culture with good leadership to help the people who cant do it by willpower alone, so saying "Its just natural selection" is pure sociopathic / empathy-less answer and is unacceptable in a world where we should be helping and guiding each other and not saying "sounds like a you problem" while cranking up the exploitation dial.

>One of the justifications that psycopaths and sociopaths use is exactly this

>NATURAL selection is built to deal with NATURAL problems,

Human psychopaths essentially evolved (meaning they are generally hardwired) to exploit the niche of stupid/gullible people. You will see this in various species, i.e a parasite/host behavior. ( eg cookoo laying eggs in the nest of other birds).

No saying that it's a justification for psychopathy, but just stating the way things are.

Yup. It’s just an excuse for their awful behavior.

Humans are slow, weak, eminently munchable.

Lions, tigers, bears, etc., can really chow down on humans.

The issue with humans, though, is they gang up, real good. Eat one (that others care about), and twenty come after you with belt-fed machine guns.

Psycopaths may consider themselves to be predators, and "suckers," prey, but they tend to suffer the same fate as maneater lions, if they eat the wrong prey.

Descriptively not obvious at all.

There are hunters even for predators...

> And there's no third party scamming them.

Sure there is. Retail investors are prey for more sophisticated investors. Getting people on WSB to make bad financial decisions is cheap and easy. I would be astonished if it isn't thoroughly astroturfed by hedge funds and other financial professionals.

I can think of one such example where the populace emphatically said retail investors were getting screwed, and AFAIK, conclusive proof was never found.

The claim was that Citadel was frontrunning Robinhood's retail investor order flow, which Citadel's market making arm paid for. The masses claimed that this was an extreme conflict of interest, and Citadel "must" be scalping the retail investors. However, the suspected reality is that Citadel was merely providing a market making service that (a) Robinhood couldn't do as well as a non-core activity and (b) for cheaper. Here's a Matt Levine overview [0] from 2021.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-08-31/what-h...

Shitty people always have ways to justify their behavior to themselves. One of the benefits of the market is it launders this justification so nobody has to feel guilty for the destruction it wreaks on human society.

Edit: Social Darwinism and justification of the private market economy are inextricably linked. I do think there is some merit to, well, divvying resources by merit, but our current world sees such an exacerbation of resource division the idea it reflects actual merit is absurd.

  The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. -- Herbert Spencer

I like this

Does anyone have evidence that these so called “idiots” have fewer grandchildren as a result of being scammed? If not, this “natural selection” mechanism isn’t working

Whats the difference between "idiots have to be scammed" vs "people who can't fend off a knife fighter while en route to the grocery store have to be stabbed"?

Some people are gullible, or trusting. This doesn't mean they don't have other gifts, or most of all good intentions. Applying an evolutionary pressure against people who can't fend off knife attackers is ultimately useless for human wellbeing

The real issue in the world isn't people not being smart enough to fend off attacks, but greed and ego

And besides, what is the root of such a 'idiot' person's deficiencies in the first place? Is it genetics? Or is it education, upbringing, early life traumas that stunt development?

Besides, the whole point of having fit genes in the first place is to bring about human happiness. If we use this to make people miserable it then shows that there is no substance to our perspective

> O CHILDREN OF MEN! Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other. Ponder at all times in your hearts how ye were created. Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth and dwell in the same land, that from your inmost being, by your deeds and actions, the signs of oneness and the essence of detachment may be made manifest. Such is My counsel to you, O concourse of light! Heed ye this counsel that ye may obtain the fruit of holiness from the tree of wondrous glory.

> ~ Bahá’u’lláh

There’s obviously a huge difference between a scam and a violent attack. The person being scammed doesn’t ever lose their agency and willingly participates. That’s very different from a knife attack, where the victim would leave at every moment if possible.

Scammers target people who can be easily manipulated so that they can mostly remove targets’ agency. The victim doesn’t know that it’s a scam, so why would they run?

Informed consent is missing in both cases.

The person in the knife fight also doesn’t lose their agency. The choices they made just led to an outcome they didn’t expect.

It's always easy to think that until you will be the one being manipulated and scammed.

This all ultimately boils down to "the attacks that I believe I'm immune to are okay, the attacks that I'm not immune to are not okay."

The victim in your knife attack had the opportunity to leave by never going to the grocery store. The fact they couldn't foresee that attack is solely because they lacked the information or cognitive ability to foresee it, just like an 80 IQ gambler with a Draftkings account lacks the information/cognitive ability to foresee the attack on him.

So many people walk around with the implicit ethical system that 80 IQers don't deserve to have a decent life in the modern world. That is obviously despicable once it's stated explicitly.

No, your argument is basically “all bad things are equivalent to knife attacks.” Look, I’m not saying deception and scamming are “ok”, I’m just saying comparing them to knife attacks is stupid.

When it comes to suitability of blaming the victim for said crime, they are equivalent.

True, but I think the main issue is that neither is beneficial to society, genetically or otherwise. The main purpose of the knife attack analogy is to demonstrate that protecting against that involves skills that are useless if we can just eliminate the threat in the first place

Many of us experience that knife attacks are not part of life, but perhaps we take for granted the existence of scammers?

Granted, being able to protect against one self against a scam may include talents that carry over to other useful aspects of society building, but same with being able to fight off knife attacks

And again the point is that, 1: those aren't the only beneficial aspects to society. someone without those talents may be brilliant in other ways, thus evolutionary pressure on that is not helpful. And even if someone isn't brilliant in other ways, we are all still valuable. Just ask a parent who raises a highly disabled kid, they will know this far more deeply than you or I do

> There’s obviously a huge difference between a scam and a violent attack.

I do not agree with that statement. You're just justifying anti-social behavior.

Would you rather be scammed or stabbed? According to you, you should be indifferent. Personally, I’d prefer to be scammed.

I'd rather be mildly stabbed rather than scammed into an inescapable human trafficking pipeline

>Whats the difference between "idiots have to be scammed" vs "people who can't fend off a knife fighter while en route to the grocery store have to be stabbed"?

Consent.

You're missing a key word: informed consent. Both are lacking that.

The gap between consent and informed consent is narrow.

The gap between consent and threat of violence may as well be the grand canyon.

Interesting. For me, while I don’t love the idea of being forced into something I don’t want, psychologically I understand that my choice is being taken away. In the case of deception or fraud, I would feel complicit and stupid, and that would stick with me and burn a long time.

I’m thinking about how people who are raped by force often feel ashamed, but also that people who are defrauded out of their money are also often too ashamed to come forward.

Of course neither should be the case, but I don’t think there’s that much difference between the two, at least for me.

Social Darwinism is the cornerstone of protofascists, their main moral justification, so I'm not surprised to see it comeback tbh.

That's where you make your fundamental mistake. We are not programmed for self preservation.

Inside us, there are different drives that shape our behaviour.

Now do drug-development.

Is the person from Naples, perchance?

No, her name is Wanna Marchi.

> Her motto was "idiots _have_ to be scammed".

So all Americans in context of health insurance? All Italians in context of their byzantine bureaucracy and taxation system? All Europeans in context of social and retirement systems? All developed world in context of housing market? It turned into dog eat dog "eat the sucker" attitude. On top of the hierarchy we got really nasty predators, they look at YOU and see an idiot sucker.

> All Europeans in context of social and retirement systems?

Can you please explain? You probably know something I don't

First demography of native populations, second the population from last decade's migration crisis don't seem to be contributing into the systems. Employed suckers think that 40% deduction from monthly paycheck is waiting there to help and save them in case of any troubles in the future or in the old age.

Yeah, you probably into something. Very possible the social systems collapse at some point

I don't know of a single case where a person actually got the retirement money they were promised along the way.

Most of the social protections and regulations underpinning life in the 'developed world' came about due to the horrors of the Great Depression and World War II. States knew that without a social safety net, availability of jobs and housing, national unity would be impossible to have, especially with an expansionist Soviet Union next door.

All of these lessons are being rapidly forgotten. Casino capitalism wrecked people's retirements in 2008. Almost 2 decades on, housing costs are out of control for millions of working people, because private equity can buy homes with cash at 0%, while families have to show all sorts of creditworthiness for the privilege of paying 6%.

On top of that, businesses that are already profitable (Google/FB, oil and gas, banks) are now charging even more because they can get away with it.

Moreover, when this kind of attitude prevails, there are costs to the society at large. In a low-trust society, everyone needs to invest in walls around their house-compounds, and to avoid going out at night. You need to keep your wits about you to avoid scams and pickpockets -- mental energy that might otherwise go to other purposes. These small costs then compound across the whole of the society: There is less economic growth, there is less technological development. More individual wealth is required to maintain the same overall quality of life. Would you rather be a middle class person in 2024 or a medieval king? In those societies you're, at best, more like the medieval king. It's not as good.

The solution to these kinds of game theoretic issues is strong social norms, and punishment for violation. If this woman is scamming people, she needs to face consequences -- ideally within the official legal system, but perhaps also informally.

https://www.paulgraham.com/cornpone.html

I fail to notice anything natural about this selection.

Exactly. We seem to refer to these ideas somewhat casually, don't we? For example, selfish gene, natural selection, entropy, etc.

"I'm not gambling! I'm smart." [proceeds to repeat this mentality, as it all dwindles away]

I make enough trading to live off of. Sure, I lost small amounts of money for about 15 years to get good enough at it to do well the last 4 years, but now I spend a lot of time looking at the market because it's basically my job. If I had a real job, I'd spend all my time peeking at the market, and probably make less money, lol.

I'd say it's a great job for generalist news junkies. Also, now with AI you can have it grind through hundreds of pages of stuff. It's like having your own hedge fund research department. Getting over the psychological difficulties to becoming a good trader and unlearning bad conventional thinking takes a while though. It's why good traders are such non-conformists. They have trained themselves to not trust crowds and instead determine the truth themselves in controversial matters and then ride the crowd as it slowly realizes things.

The hardest thing about investing is to not turn it into gambling.

Lots of luck involved, even if someone think skill was involved. You will see many hedge fund have down years and go bankrupt, all of these hedge funds have “skill” like every one else

There’s something to be said about our economy that doesn’t seem to value hard work and long term planning anymore for the prospects of a middle class life. It’s not enough to study hard, work hard, climb the ranks of a company, etc. Those days are over. For most people, buying a house and raising a family (normal, healthy aspirations) are out of reach.

We live in a ruthlessly “meritocratic” society. Not that we have a meritocracy but we very much value the idea of merit earning wealth. But the corollary to saying that people with merit will do well is that people who aren’t doing well must not have merit. In other words they are useless.

For a person (especially young men) without the luck or credentials to be considered to have “merit” their only chance to make it is to bet it all on black. I would suggest that’s not a very healthy or sustainable way forward.

Gambling addiction is so unrelateable to me. Likely real drugs sure, obsessive gaming, done that too. I think I'm to anxious to enjoy gambling with like that or something.

Likewise! I can understand drugs and such… But gambling? At least with drugs you have a guaranteed reward. You purchase heroin and you use it, you’re high. Task accomplished gambling it like “here’s money so I might possibly get high if I’m lucky.”

Gamification of trading is the trend that should be regulated! It blurs the line between investing and gambling.

At some point the US will have to come to terms that the insane libertarianism that it shows to individuals is not a recipe for them living a good or meaningful life. Modern life makes it extremely easy for men to ruin their lives, with gambling, drugs, alcohol, screen addiction etc. We know what a good life looks like, we lack the will of forcing people who make destructive decisions into living the good life. Until that is done, things will keep getting worse.

TV adverts for day trading apps specifically target middle-aged men who think they know better than everyone else.

Surprise! You do not

Most people have a gambler’s mindset about the stock market:

> […G]ambling in financial markets often goes undetected […] because individuals confuse their actions [i.e., speculating] with investing.

The typical person speculates on the market — buying low during their working years, and hopefully selling high during their retired years.

That’s because that’s all we can do. Buffet is an actual investor. His stock position allows him to remake a company if necessary. My stock position might buy some chickie bugs at Wendy’s. I have no direct control over any company I “own” and my voting position and the position of all retail investors is functionally nil.

not a lawyer here but I suspect that exercising rights as a shareholder takes some legal education and some networking.. you are right that the DEFAULT stance is what is presented.. but somehow I dont think this the whole possible story in 2024

I don’t think this is the right analysis. One should generally expect a positive return over time from investing in equities: you are giving up money now and taking on risk, and you are compensated for it by the return on investment. The word ‘speculating’ is generally referring to a different kind of activity from the kind of investing a typical person gets through paying into a pension. I don’t want to make claims about what typical people are doing with brokerage accounts, and the structure of brokerages seems to have changed enough that it’s perhaps harder to describe long term trends or the lives of ‘typical’ customers.

Fair point. There’s a real difference in attitude between speculation and saving. Most people buy stocks to save for retirement, not to speculate that they’ll have enough money for retirement.

But most people aren’t investors, either. Typical people buy stock for their returns, not for their productive capacity. My point is that’s speculation.

Most people have a speculator’s mindset. They would be happy to make a windfall on the market. For example, who wouldn’t be happy to own a plot in downtown Detroit before an economic boom raised land prices? Or stock in a startup before an established company announced they would acquire it?

Although someone who puts money in the stock market for retirement may intend to save money, since a 401k seems like just any another asset, but it’s quite different from other assets: Bank accounts fund lending to companies for productive investments. Homes provide a residence. Bonds provide money to countries and companies for investment. But when individuals put money in the stock market, it’s because they hope the asset will appreciate.

Even worse is the 'air drop' craze of the crypto world. I also think the people that invested (and lost) their money in HAWK coin knew what they were doing.

They wanted to pump and dump the coin and couldn't get out fast enough. It's just another way to gamble.

Dunning Kruger IMO makes it quite likely that any substantial investment be a bit more like gambling than it ideally should be, as the difference really only exists in the amount of knowledge one has in the industry one invests in.

On the other hand, most financial advice also states that one should not keep more than X months worth of expenses in cash, otherwise one is still losing money on inflation and the likes.

EDIT: Then again, if you are staring at the tickers all day, that might still be a problem.

It may turn out that in the “next epoch,” our stock market will be understood as our civilization's greatest work of art - our greatest cathedral to capitalism.

The real elephant in the room is sports betting. Sports has mainstream appeal and accessibility that stocks will never have (primarily white collar with good jobs).

Every libertarian theory about legalizing gambling has been wrong. Marketing and ease of access increase use. It’s making sports worse and hurting young men.

Pure schadenfreude for retards who use Robin Hood thinking they are making money…

Wait until the WSJ discovers memecoins.

Capitalism-meritocracy= lottery. This feeling percolates deeply into society over time.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42473081

On HN a post only counts as a dupe if it got significant attention, which that one didn't (only 3 points and 2 comments - but we'll merge the comments hither)

When an article hasn't had significant attention yet, we let reposts through (after 8 hours) - this is on purpose, to give good articles multiple chances at getting attention.

Of course that leaves the submitters in a bit of a lottery situation, but it at least evens out in the long run if you keep submitting good articles!

Understood, thanks dang! I think sometimes I just get annoyed because I see something I posted earlier getting reposted. I’ll try not to let it get to me going forward lol.

The problem is, they are "trading" from smartphone apps. Remember this - no money will ever inflow into your bank account from scrolling and tapping.

There's a paper I saw a while ago that uses LSTM for some kind of technical analysis trading, and the portfolio grew from 115k to 155k in a year, but also consistently

Seems like there's clear patterns to the market. If only these apps would teach people these patterns and trading techniques in depth rather than just letting them trade

There's a paper I saw a while ago that uses patterns for some kind of roulette strategy, and the bankroll grew from 115k to 155k in a year, but also consistently.

Seems like there's clear patterns to how roulette tables operate. If only casinos would teach people these patterns and strategies in depth rather than just letting them play.

The sp500 did 20%+ over 12 months. Hardly worth trusting the llm

This title is stupid. Comparisons to crack cocaine should have stopped in the 90's or early 00's at the latest. They're never made by people who have the slightest idea about what idea crack was, and whoever wrote that is extremely out of touch.

About crack: The public discourse was racist, the CIA had a lot to do with creating the problem, and in general it's no worse than the cocaine my fellow white people seem to think is so much cooler.

You have to see real compulsive gambling in action. The comparison is not so far off (but still over the top).

I know what kind of havok a gambling addiction can cause, and it's no joke. It's powerful enough (for some people, at least) that a comparison to addictive drugs generally is apt, yet the traps are everywhere and usually legal. Exploiting the psychological weakness that underpins gambling addiction is something sought after and optimized for outside of overt gambling, like modern video game mechanics, social media, cryptocurrency, retail stock investment, and so on.

In reflecting on why it's so addictive, I've come to believe there's a sort of feeling of adventure in random outcomes --that people like the entropy as well as the wins.

That said, going back to what I said before, my issue with the title of the article is with invoking crack specifically as some especially scary super-addictive thing, which is an idea that was over-hyped at one time. They could have just said cocaine, or better yet, made a comparison to opiates, but they're playing to an old and incorrect bias.

You have to see real crack addiction in action. It’s not over-hyped at all. It’s just that not everyone gets addicted to it.

People get hung up on physical addiction, but the mental obsession is the real destroyer. Most folks aren’t wired for that kind of obsession. They can get physically addicted to opiates, quit, and never go back. I’ve seen exactly that. I’ve also seen folks become so obsessed with pot, that it makes your worst Central Casting street junkie look tame, by comparison.

True addicts don’t need physical addiction. It’s a mental disorder that doesn’t make sense to most people, but it’s definitely there.

Well I can't say I've known any crack addicts really, only met a couple people who have tried it. I've known some people who got into cocaine and were never quite the same, though. Also some people who started out fairly respectable, got into opiates, may or may not have robbed people and betrayed friends and family in service of the addiction, and then died to it.

But my criticism of the 'crack is scary' meme isn't coming from personal experience, really. From what I've read and from what I understand of the chemistry, and having lived through the era where crack was all over the news, and where possession of the drug got the harshest sentences... I do believe it was relatively over-hyped, and that a big part of what made crack scary is that it was something poor black people in cities did.

I lived in Downtown Baltimore, from 1980-83.

It was always a fairly gritty, blue-collar town, but crack moved in around ‘83, and that’s when it became The Wire. Before, I could walk through some of the toughest neighborhoods in town, and it would be OK (I was fairly scruffy, back then, but no Billy Badass). Nowadays, even the nice areas are a bit scary.

Crack was focused on, a lot, and there was definitely a racial aspect to law enforcement and hysteria, but the drug is still quite nasty. It’s more like the focus on cocaine was muted, as opposed to the focus on crack being overwrought.

That said, gambling can have extremely similar outcomes. You don’t want to stray too far from The Strip, in Vegas or Atlantic City.

Desperate people can get fairly rapacious; regardless of the source of their desperation.

Respectfully, it feels slightly rude to suggest that gambling addiction is due to psychological weakness. Perhaps that's your view, but I don't think it matches the modern medical perspective on addiction.

Well, I didn't mean it as an insult. More along the lines of our innate biases that take work to overcome, or maybe the optical illusions that the human visual system is prone to.

Hey look, it's Ryan from The Office

I had to google it, but I guess you're insinuating that I've done crack?

Fact is, it's smoked cocaine, and the level of scaremongering about it was pretty absurd compared to powder cocaine, amphetamine, or opiates, all arguably just as bad.

That's not what I'm insinuating.

https://youtu.be/eDiU2p2uzVI?feature=shared

By someone who tried both cocaine (snorted) and crack (smoked), the craving is much stronger with crack. That's because it is much faster acting, it also wears off faster, and he said that part of him was ready to get violent for an other dose as it happened. Other than that, the effect was similar, it is the same molecule after all.

It is common to smoked drugs in general. For what I know, smoking is the fastest route of administration. That instant gratification makes it more addictive than slower routes of administration, like snorting in this case.

It doesn't mean the laws weren't racist, but crack cocaine is more addictive.

It is worse than powder cocaine though, just as meth is worse than an extended release Adderall despite both being amphetamine variants. I believe meth (a "white people drug") carries harsher penalties than other forms of amphetamine?

Powder cocaine cannot be smoked at all (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_base) and smoking anything naturally carries additional risks.

If it didn't make a meaningful difference in the experience but only increased the legal penalties, there would be no good reason for dealers to prepare crack, yet they did.

Nothing about a the race of a cocaine addict compels that addict to prefer one form or the other.

The comparison is made as a metaphor for strong addiction exactly because of the old political connotation. Those don't just go away. There are almost certainly more addictive substances out there; that is completely irrelevant to how humans use language. I would argue, even the phrase "crack cocaine" has more sticking power because of the phonetics.

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