Hacker News Reader

Comment by irjustin | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those "everyone who dies, breaths air" statements.

It's frustrating people who parrot it think they're smart by saying it to others with no basis and finally when it does happen they're like SEE SEE!?

> Until then, history teaches that we'll just keep going up and up

And this is the more important part. As long as you're <40 you SHOULD always buy SPY or VOO, even at the very top.

People have been saying the crash has been coming since 2022. If you believed this and acted on it, you would've missed 3-4 +10%/yr returns.

As Buffet says: You can't time the market; be in it.

View on HN

It doesn’t seem Berkshire is that much in the market right now.

Just to add some color using real numbers: Berkshire's Q1 cash pile was $397.4 billion, which is nearly 60% of its investable assets.

One of my favorite phrases is “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

Even if all signs point to impending doom, at the end of the day if people are still buying, stocks will hold their value.

>And this is the more important part. As long as you're <40 you SHOULD always buy SPY or VOO, even at the very top.

But why? The US population is set to dramatically shrink in the next 30 years. Where does all the money come from?

The US population is projected to 385M in 2055. [0] What makes you think the population will dramatically shrink?

Even if it did, the money would come from global investors who find the US more attractive than their home markets.

[0] https://database.earth/population/by-country/2055

The birthrate across all western nations has been below replacement levels for quite a while. All nations will see population shrink in the coming decades (aside from labor importation)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11537490/

Right now SPY not be such a great idea with SpaceX launch upcoming since it will be included into it immediately. Retail investors will be bearing that particular flop's cost.

> SPY not be such a great idea with SpaceX launch upcoming since it will be included into it immediately

S&P has not announced a methodology change yet.

They haven't approved a change, but they have released proposals, which are tentatively to go into effect on June 8:

https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/indexnews/announ...

no one is going to get wealthy buying SPY/VOO. you might get rich, but not wealthy. things have changed now in a sense that handful of companies are large percentage of the stock market to the point where one has to question why invest in “s&p 500” vs “s&p 25-ish”

while going with the tried&true makes some sense, I think we have to open our eyes to a different reality of our stock market… and this market concentration into few companies is going to get a lot worse…

> things have changed now in a sense that handful of companies are large percentage of the stock market to the point where one has to question why invest in “s&p 500” vs “s&p 25-ish”

A small number of companies have always driven most stock-market gains. Betting on size isn't fundamentally a bad bet. But it is a bet against value and the historical tendency for small companies to be higher risk and higher reward.

you may be technically correct but today’s concentration in say top 10-15 companies is historic and by significant margin. I have been self-employed for a long time and somewhat “forced” into being “an investor” and starting in 2021-2022-ish I took my money out of all the “funds” … while I do not disagree that it is “a bet” - it is a calculated bet. things are different now even if historically you are right, no question

> you might get rich, but not wealthy

What do you mean by this? It seems pretty likely to be wealthy by investing in these indices. Certainly a “normal” worker who started investing $10k/year in SPY when it started in 1993 has enough wealth to allow them to retire now.

I was old enough to remember the 08 crash. Then the market starting recovering in 2011/2012 and the sentiment was that the system would crash again soon like 08. Turns out, it was an amazing time to invest.

Post 08 crash, all sorts of conspiracy websites like Zero Hedge were popular saying how the world economy would keep crashing.

The only reason this happened was due to taxpayers bailing out financial institutions. This only exacerbated an insane amount of moral hazard already present in the market following previous bailouts.

Unfortunately, the US Government continued to run themselves into the ground spending-wise and may have a difficult time with another bailout, unless everyone pretty much agrees that we cannot have a USG failure, so they all pretend like nothing happened.

Eventually the merry-go-round stops, I'm just not sure what the catalyst will be, and it might be 100 years from now.

I am old enough to have had multiple career changes since starting on a major firm’s rates floor in 2008. These IPOs are tiny compared to the overall stock market and the stock market is absolutely tiny compared to debt markets. People consistently underestimate the size of the world economy or even their local economy. The world may look small from an orion capsule near the moon but almost every aspect of human society is bigger than most people can reason about. It is possible these IPOs have an outsized impact on sentiment for weird reasons. But it won’t be an actual outsized impact on capital markets.

Edit: I should add the AI bubble can absolutely burst but there is no reason to believe these IPOs are the end of the ride. If I knew I would be…

The thing is that the IPOs necessitate a full release of their actual costs for inference and training. This by itself should be enough to pop the bubble, if the occasional bits of it we get are anything to go by.

There is a reason anthropic is still hiding those details:

> key details typically included in that form about a company’s operations — like potential risks to its business, executive compensation, and other financials — won’t become public until later on in the process

Source: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/941016/a...

We'll see, maybe they trigger some new rule change to be allowed to keep it hidden. Wouldn't be surprised about that at all.

Without massive government intervention it probably would have

It would crash if not for massive public debt that went mostly into capital markets and huge inflation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com