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Comment by JohnnyMarcone | Hacker News Reader

Are you confident enough in that prediction to short the market?

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." - John Maynard Keynes

You're the second person to make that quote in this discussion. It's such a lazy sentiment. You do know that there are people who have long careers in options trading, right?

Not everyone is a gambling addict.

It's a reasonable response to the commenter saying "yeah well if you think so you should go tie your financial wellbeing to you being right".

Just because it's someone's profession doesn't mean is is or should be everyone's profession.

Of course it shouldn't be everyone's profession. Most people would and do fail miserably as options traders. A tiny minority though does make consistent long term money as option traders. What this tells us is that the qoute is refuted, because we have a counterfactual. There is indeed some rational system to the market that some people are able to figure out.

Just because the quote doesn't apply to everyone, does not meant the quote does not apply to anyone.

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" is true for me, for you, for the person who quoted it above, and for the median person reading it.

The fact that some people make a living off of attempting to beat the market, with...mixed success, doesn't mean that the quote is false.

Yes, but in any market you need to realize that you are predicting the market, not the underlying reality. If the market is detached from reality you won't make any money by being right about reality unless you can predict when the market will move closer to reality. That's the crux of the quote and why it's generally a good counter to this kind of 'put your money where your mouth is' retort to predictions about reality.

(And in general, the market sentiment seems to be "There's a decent chance this all just blows over", so shorting is likely as ill-advised as plowing in long, unless you happen to have better insight into the decision-making in the white house than the average participant)

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