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Comment by btrettel | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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)

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