Hacker News Reader

Comment by bonesss | Hacker News Reader

It’s such an odd time investment wise…

We have a blooming oil war that could take chunks of the global economy with it, booming and teetering credit levels threatening collapse, the “AI” companies have a lot of tinkerbell magic and impossible returns needed to justify their stocks, major cash rich tech giants are suddenly hands-out pockets-out for big money, and … well: Elon is the worlds richest man/CEO who also shamelessly lies in public about being super great at a no-life action RPG he’s paying other people to play for him so he can look cool to his Twitter fans; Twitter is now maybe better understood as a market manipulation device; and Sam Altman seems distinctly truth challenged as a people pleaser who will tell you whatever numbers your wallet needs to hear… They are our 2026 IPO lords, trusted corporate leaders acting like extra shady manipulators.

I’m struggling because on the one hand, it seems like the time to hop out of the market, but on the other, whatever shady crap these guys do after it all goes ‘boom’ to save their wallets is only gonna reward people in the market.

It feels like gambling on whether they’re more incompetent or successfully corrupt.

View on HN

In a world where Tesla has stayed at "severely overvalued" stock prices for about a decade, with occasional crashes to just "overvalued", I'm not so sure the big AI companies really need returns that justify their stocks. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both in their own ways trying to capture that same lighting in a bottle where the company is evaluated solely on the CEO's vision

Yeah. This is the whole “market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” thing. I think there’s almost always a plausible bearish case to be made. Hence: permabears.

I feel like this is dot com 2.0. The dot com's valuations eventually were proven to be true, only way too early. With investing Timing is everything, if you invest in Pets.com you lost, if you invested in chewy.com you won. If you invested in Broadcast.com you lost, if you invested in YouTube.com you won.

AI is going to transform things but these current prices are crazy.

> With investing Timing is everything, if you invest in Pets.com you lost, if you invested in chewy.com you won. If you invested in Broadcast.com you lost, if you invested in YouTube.com you won.

During bubbles valuations are driven by growth at any cost.

During crashes businesses are kept alive by their ability to function profitably.

So if trying to separate winners from losers, then central question is "Do I believe this company has an ability to pivot from growth to profitability without torpedoing itself?"

Which ultimately gets to unit economics and cost vs profit scaling trends.

For how long can the gamble be detached from real life?

It's an honest question. In the real world, resources and people are finite. Things have to make sense, the bills have to be paid.

In the stock market however, a company can be completely worthless in the real life, but if the money blobs all agree to pumo money into it the stock price goes up anyway.

Wealth is not in fact finite. If you take a piece of lumber and carve it into a dresser you've just generated wealth. Resources kind of are but not really, extraction takes it from unusable to usable and essentially creates it (also, trees literally grow out of the ground). Similarly Tesla has made a lot of cars that people drive and AI companies have created products that have hundreds of millions of DAU.

Whether that "justifies" the market prices is orthogonal, all the market price says is that people want to own a piece of the pie at the current price being offered. It can stay that high as long as there continue to be people interested in owning shares of the companies.

Wealth is not finite, but it does have to obey physical limits and real world implications. If person A takes a piece of lumber and carves it into a dresser, and person B, seeing that, buys up lower quality lumber that cannot become a dresser, is that wealth generation? What then, of the guy who buys up lumber futures and dresser futures, on something that won't actually ever happen (say, those lumber futures are for trees that are completely not viable) and then claims to be creating wealth? And asking the stock market to value him on the basis of hype?

There's real wealth and there is all of the manipulation to drive up prices.

> If you take a piece of lumber and carve it into a dresser you've just generated wealth.

I'd make the note that you've converted raw materials and labor (and maybe some capital machinery/tools) into a finished good.

Whether the market will value that finished good at more than the sum of what you paid for its parts is a fair question though!

It's entirely possible to have net-unprofitable economic activities, especially in a bubble.

Well the question is what's a more appealing place to put your money? Because in the absence of one the stock market by default is viewed as an appealing place which drives up demand for it. You might say well folks should just spend their money and enjoy it instead of putting it in the market but that's a whole different strategy. You might say folks should buy real estate well that's a whole different strategy. You might say folks should sit on cash and bonds and other low-risk assets well that's another strategy. High interest rates actually make cash or at least bank savings rates more appealing than they were 5 years ago... yet folks are still seeking those double digit returns. Can you blame them? What will trigger the downturn will be folks who've overextended themselves on margin forced to sell in order to liquidate assets

> What will trigger the downturn will be folks who've overextended themselves on margin forced to sell in order to liquidate assets

Curious question... do the ultra wealthy ever get margin called on personal loans secured by unsold equity?

I'd assume the folks we're talking about doing that have sufficiently small loan to value (a year's expenses vs all their stock) to avoid, even in a downturn.

Maybe at the more upper income segment where LTVs on smaller equity totals are higher?

Absolutely anyone can get called if thr bank deems there's a payment risk

The problem is, the last two decades were marked by extremely low, zero and sometimes outright negative interest rates plus a ton of outright printed money that got blown up the arses of the big banks. Worldwide.

That money sought returns and found them in hypergrowth of increasingly dumber nonsense. First it was Meta (or back then, just Facebook), then Tesla, then during Covid cryptocurrencies and NFTs, and now it's AI... but now, there seems nothing to be the "next big thing" to sink money into when the old thing dies down in growth and expectation and matures. Maybe gambling, but that's not sustainable, the number of whales/marks to make money from is finite.

IMHO, we're headed for a very big worldwide correction to deflate the markets and hand back a lot of the money to the central banks where it can be taken out of circulation, and it will be an event larger than the dotcom bust plus 2007ff combined. But, unfortunately, the markets can stay irrational longer than a good short-seller can stay solvent...

Right now it seems like space, defense, robotics, and in the fullness of time quantum computing are very clearly positioned as the next big things. Let alone bio and healthcare stuff which is always humming along especially after ozempic shakes things up

Almost all of these fields has some sort of regulation attached that makes hypergrowth very unlikely though.

In terms of tech, the Mecha Comet was funded in 6 minutes on KS. After it ships in October, will be interesting to see the doors it opens up for people. Comet to where?

A 1-device to rule them all could be very empowering. Sodium batteries will be big. True wireless power would be huge for solar energy generation from space and sent to Earth. Any power breakthroughs are very noteworthy as the effects cascade.

Lots of 'next big things' (and people) likely 'shelved' on purpose as too disruptive. Welcome to Earth. It's not so much 'what' will be big, but 'who.' Headshots and lineage still matter. Heart and soul is really the only big thing.

A bulls### detector (and repellent in an aerosol) would also be a timeless classic. As would a latent human superpower training and attunement school - until it gets shutdown.

In 2022, Tesla had a P/E of 34 and a growth rate of 50%.

But it’s 2026 now

It's a reply to OP's "for about a decade".

In 2022 we still had ZIRP, so a P/E of 34 was relatively low. (Interest rates are E/P for cash).

Ah sorry. I thought it was just saying tesla wasn’t overvalued.

How I view the market:

Short term: high volatility and uncertainty, feels more like gambling at a casino

Medium term: the world is too unstable, best to hold cash

Long term: dollar cost averaging and time in the market always win so depending how long your horizon is, it’s a good time as any to invest

Longer term: we all die

Good advice. Ironically most long term folks that just buy low cost index funds and take a nap outperform most of the market stressing out daily on their next move. That’s the cruel reality of investing.

When you factor in the opportunity cost of all that stress and managing an active portfolio the percentage of successful active portfolio managers likely falls down to single digits.

Invest early, invest consistently and often in up or down markets, and the math says you will do very well.

Though I keep wondering if the ‘invest consistently whether the market goes up or down’ defeats the point of a stock market in the first place.

People effectively keep throwing money at mediocre or failing endeavours, which magnifies any structural problem, and everything seems to keep going up whether it’s good news or bad news, until the bottom falls out.

My reading might be wrong, but since 2020 there is no bad news that seems to faze the market by an iota.

Well, that is what markets do: behave. Rationally or not.

The 1929 panic was also irrational but it happened. There is no way to solve that.

Panics happen and bubbles too, and in the meantime, very long term investments tend to grow (in average), as long as the economy works as expected (improving in average, long-term).

Of course, catastrophes are not impossible (the Black Death, the French Revolution, World Wars...).

> My reading might be wrong, but since 2020 there is no bad news that seems to faze the market by an iota.

Or maybe - because it's the bad news that sells - there is much more of the good (or neutral) news that outvalue the bad news, that is just unknown to you?

Always bet on black at the roulette table, over and over and over again.

This has been my investment philosophy as well, but I'm starting to realize that this is forgetting that "past performance does not guarantee future results". It only works when the index goes up, and I don't see any fundamental reason that should be true on the long term. I don't know of a better alternative though.

Well the fundamental reason boils down to the idea that these companies that you're investing in employ a bunch of sophisticated professionals who wake up everyday aiming to grow the success of their businesses. In other words you're really investing in their potential. Compare that to for example something that's purely speculative like gold.. a useless piece of metal that just sits there. Buffett has really helped me see this difference

Does it follow that the price of the index should go up in perpetuity because workers are motivated?

I would expect the earnings and or growth of those companies to go up at the very least. Whether that translates to higher valuation for ownership shares in those companies is probably more a question of whether there's anything else more appealing out there to invest in. What's your take? What's more appealing?

I wish I knew! My money is still mostly in index funds and real estate.

My sneaking doubt is whether the index can keep growing, because doesn’t that depend on infinite growth based ultimately on mostly finite natural resources, manpower, and land? But maybe we can always extract and produce more with new technology, and that manpower may get leveraged or extended by AI and robotics. Or maybe just financial magic beyond my understanding.

Regardless I have been thinking a lot about what aging and declining populations might do to the economy in the medium-long term. I only know that I know nothing.

The way I look at it our economy has already decoupled from its physical inputs. That's what cyberspace and a Services based economy really enables. It's kind of cool. That's why I find the focus on climate impacts of data centers to be backwards since they're actually enabling the economy to grow without it being centered on physical input

> ...doesn’t that depend on infinite growth based ultimately on mostly finite natural resources, manpower, and land?

There is no practical limit to the price of the index. Shares may represent some claim on those things you mentioned, but shares outstanding have been steadily shrinking for decades, essentially since the dot-com boom [0]. Meanwhile, governments have been printing money like it's going out of style, and most of it has been ending up with the wealthy, who, lacking any practical way to spend it all on consumption, use it to bid up asset prices. It is no wonder that the price of a shrinking pool of actual resources [1] has risen dramatically when measured in a growing supply of money (which is only a relative resource, not a real one).

One could certainly look at the rise of the 401k as a retirement vehicle, and conclude that at some point those flows are going to reverse. One could also look at the US SSA statistics on the number of workers per retiree, and its trend over time, and paint a pretty grim picture, but is that enough to offset the combined forces of inflation and the compounding wealth of the ultra-wealthy?

Man, I don't know, either.

The good news is "nothing" is all you need to know to invest in an index fund.

[0] This has actually reversed recently with the AI boom, but it is the first time in a while that companies have tried harder to raise capital to grow the pie than to buy back shares to return cash to shareholders.

[1] Rather, a shrinking pool of claims on those resources, each claim increasing its value measured in real resources as companies buy back shares, an effect Buffett famously loves.

It's almost the inverse of a cruel reality? Just stick it all in low cost index funds and go to the beach. You'll do as good or better than 99% of actively invested funds. That's not cruel at all, that's actually a pretty comfy reality.

> always win

That's not true. It's only been true on American stock markets, and we only have ~100 years of data.

Many other major stock markets in the world have had ~20 year periods where you would have been better off with your money in bonds than in stocks.

I think the average world stock market is a much better predictor of American stock markets over the next 100 years than past performance of American stock markets. The last 100 years have been exceptional for America vs the world -- it seems very likely that the next 100 years won't be.

The most extreme example is Germany 1914. If you would have invested in the German stock market in 1914 it would have taken you 100 years to break even. I'm not saying that American stock markets will be that bad, but it's an example that disproves the thesis that long term stock markets always win.

You do, your children will live. Or, if you don't have children, your non-profit does not.

I wish people would stop using this "we all die" slogan when it comes to their financial lives, and think a bit about the people who will be left after you retire.

I hate that having children is apparently the only purpose anyone has in life because I don't have children or a purpose in life and I'm pretty sure I would be even more depressed if I had children.

Note that I am not arguing that children is the purpose in life for everyone. For some it is, for others it is not.

I believe that the majority of child bearers are "on program" driven by their biological imperatives. I believe that among the voluntary non-children people (of which I am one) there's plenty of values, goals, hopes and aspirations. In fact, for me, life is so rich that that is why I do not want children.

There's billions of people all over the planet to carry the burden for me. Sure, if we were in an extinction scenario, I might reconsider, but we're far, far from it.

So while I continue to enjoy life and full freedom, I'll let the people who are "on program" deal with the poop and worry for their offspring.

That does not, however, mean I do not have to care about people. If anything, the fact that I do not have children, gives me the opportunity to care _more_ about people in general, than the people who are busy with raising children.

Hence my idea about a non-profit, that will outlast me for some time.

Yeah, I used to feel life was rich too, and then I very suddenly became aware that it was finite and anything I could possibly do is just leading towards the same fixed point ending. I think mentally healthy humans have ways to avoid thinking about this.

Religion, children, and legacy are the ways people cope with this. For the vast, vast majority of human history, 99% of people believed either in an afterlife or reincarnation or something of the sort. Having children, who were molded in your image and expected to take over your life's work, doing the same work you did. Or otherwise leaving an impact in the world, hoping that your legacy would be remembered and to pass on your teachings and experiences to future generations even if not to your own children.

I think advances in scientific understanding may have unfortunately been detrimental to mental wellbeing at scale. Knowing that there is no higher power or grand purpose, knowing that our civilization is probably cooked in the near term, and knowing that even if our civilization isn't immediately cooked, Earth and eventually the universe is, are all not greatly emotionally satisfying.

Why is this downvoted?

It probably doesn't help that every scientific advance gets co-opted to make the rich richer and civilization worse.

I guess the world oscillates between good times and bad times. Those who are born in bad times get to see the world improve drastically and helping that along is a purpose. Those who are unlucky enough to be born in good times get to see everything crumble. At best they can inspire the rebuilding just before dying of old age.

We shouldn't be so sure about the fate of the universe. If you were born after 1980 you probably feel more certain about the eventual fate of the universe than people born in 1940. A lot of scientific advances that enabled us to even predict the universe isn't steady-state are less than 100 years old. They may change, and our predictions accordingly, in the next 100 years. In fact they did change several times. There was the steady state, then the big crunch, then the big rip, then the heat death. We can't be sure about heat death either - dark energy adds more energy into an expanding universe, which may be exploitable forever.

Find purpose which aligns with "progress or wellbeing of our species". Making kids is one, making inventions is another, helping poor or sweeping roads fits too. If you see that your "way of living" will affect people positively, typically you will have a "good life purpose".

What happens when you have kids? You leave something that will last after your death. Then you make sure that they are properly raised and have enough resources, so that your "mark on the world" is more appreciated by other people. Ultimately all the "good life" have one thing in common. Improving life of our species.

I understand this is childish, but nobody asked me if I wanted to be on this rock hurling through space at 230K/s. Thanks, parents :)

This is not childish. It means you have no purpose in life. If you feel life is not worth living, find purpose and you will feel better. "Make more life", "make life more bearable for me" and "make life more bearable for others" are good universal ones, to have a starting point. If you don't like them, find a better one. Of course, if you DO want to be unhappy, please continue as is :), accumulated unhappiness sometimes leads to big things.

This wasn't about me, more about a "one". I am sure most have had such thoughts. I know what you are saying, but my point is that none of us are voluntarily here. I was told by my grandma I was an accident :) Accident our not, you hatched from the egg, now go find purpose.

Many people feel they live on through their children. Or through the people they've influenced. It's all a question of how you think about things

Yeah, like having kids.

Living only for yourself gets really boring. Children give you a life-long purpose. That and the evolutionary purpose, or drive, of life is reproduction.

I wouldn't describe existential panic/despair as a form of boredom. More like a form of cosmic terror.

There's a gradient between boredom and existential dread

Holding cash is a terrible strategy, the US dollar is going to get devalued by the end of the Orange Troll's term due to money printing/bond market repression/trade hijinks.

We're in the pump of a pump and dump by the richest people in the world, who are trying to engineer exit liquidity in a way that doesn't immediately crash the market. They're going to cycle their holdings several times before things go to shit to avoid the brunt of it, we'll be able to see the wave on the horizon. I don't think just the SpaceX dumping will trigger a broader loss of confidence, but Anthropic + OpenAI dumping post IPO will ripple through to the neoclouds, which will ripple through to the semis, and probably tank things. In the short term (pre AI IPO) the market is volatile but pretty safe IMO, so just trade techically.

In the medium-long term I'd hold a mix of mining/industrial equipment/etc stocks in Euros, and Chinese AI/renewables stocks in Renminbi. The Euro stocks are safer and a significant portion of their increased valuation will come from currency shifts, and the Chinese stocks are riskier but have a big upside and are likely to benefit from Renminbi revaluation as China onshores "finishing"/final assembly of products (which much of the world is going to push them to do).

If short term is high volatility and the medium term is too unstable, why is the VIX as low as it is? Am I missing something, or is the VIX mispriced?

Instead of cash, I like debt like mortgage funds. High single-digit returns with low volatility.

The thing I worry about is: what happens when an actual set of adults get back into the White House?

That could well be the trigger for the crash of all crashes because they might actually bring some reality pins with them, which are the antithesis of the growing, in size and number, fantasy balloons of hot-air the current cough leadership cough is facilitating.

> what happens when an actual set of adults get back into the White House?

Not just White House though, it's all the leaders of various government organisations, and private companies too. Nasdaq didn't need to change the rules for SpaceX IPO, rotten at the top.

The opposition in the US doesn't believe in anything except "stability". That means they'll probably keep most actual Trump administration policies. Probably even the war on Iran, though they might stop pretending to call it off every weekend.

To people who think I'm cynical (and are presumably downvoting), I present this nice example which just turned up: "Kirsten Gillibrand wants to save crypto - but Trump windfall is a political obstacle"

https://theintercept.com/2026/07/13/gillibrand-crypto-trump-...

I am not exaggerating.

The problem with Democrats is that they believe in too many things, not that they believe in only stability.

You can find a Democrat on both sides of every issue. It's a big tent party, and houses a lot of oddballs.

The ones with power, like Gillibrand, are not "oddballs". They must be seen as exponents of the central idea of the party, which is basically just stable interest on capital. They might once have opposed the allocation of capital into crypto, but if capital is invested in crypto now, then crypto must be defended. Marx's quip about the Tories in England feels appropriate:

"The Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent."

Which will trigger even more wealth transfer to the top .1%, which the 99% will blame on the administration, and put the corrupt lot back in a few years later

Eventually though the world moves on and China takes over

China's got its own set of economic problems that they're masking. Their domestic economy is stagnant and they're trying to keep factories pumping out stuff. Since their domestic economy isn't biting, they're flooding the world with exports. This isn't sustainable, especially if and probably when the rest of the world decides that they're done with government backed Chinese companies killing theirs (and you're starting to see that).

> This isn't sustainable, especially if and probably when the rest of the world decides that they're done with government backed Chinese companies killing theirs (and you're starting to see that).

Well... China's foreign currency reserves are practically infinite and the rest of the world knows they can't push back on China too hard or lose a lot of important imports. For Europe for example, India and China together make 80% of the foundational ingredients for medicine [1]. Our supply chains are gone, even if we wanted to, it would take years to have fabs ready that could produce the domestic demand for stuff as simple but vital such as painkillers and antibiotics.

[1] https://www.diepresse.com/17552998/80-prozent-der-wirkstoffe...

I don't subscribe to the "China is just to big and important to fight" arguments. Countries that peg their currencies distort markets, mask problems, and eventually that comes crashing down (see also Asian financial crisis, the Bank of England pegging in the early 1990s, etc).

I think China isn't exactly a good example of corruption-free administration...

I took their implication as China is essentially next in line to be the dominant superpower.

(I would say that, within that implication, it would be understood that corruption is not a problem that is being solved in that transfer of power)

There’s always money to be made in a bubble implosion. The challenge is there’s a very thin line between major bank and losing your shirt. Because of that most long terms smart investors just sit it out which is likely why you see Berkshire sitting on treasury bills.

> “It feels like gambling on whether they’re more incompetent or successfully corrupt.”

What you say has a ring to it. A good idea held in tension—provided ‘incompetence’ is the true opposite extreme.

Though it’s difficult to see the picture clearly, because to all _appearances_ Musk is doing well. US Culture collectively believes incompetence will not succeed for long, and this undermines my assessment.

“Twitter is now maybe better understood as a market manipulation device.”

And there’s the obfuscation. If you can manipulate at large scale and your followers somehow profit by following you, then it’s not competence but “confidence”. It’s all a game and our group is waiting for their turn, their opportunity to profit, get a great tip, win big.

> on the other, whatever shady crap these guys do after it all goes ‘boom’ to save their wallets is only gonna reward people in the market

Yup. That's kind of my feeling. Are we in a bubble? Obviously. But the people who have the most to lose have never been more intertwined with the rule makers and have never been so shameless about it.

"Don't bet against the house" has never been more appropriate. We may well be on the verge of the 2nd Great Depression, but you can be damn sure that the last ones to lose will be the billionaires hanging out in the new ballroom. We'll be burning poor people for warmth before they allow the asset prices to collapse.

This is their 14th straight quarter of piling cash. Will the same article be written on their 15th, and 16th?

Fall was upon a remote reservation when the Indian tribe asked their new Chief what the coming winter was going to be like. The modern day Chief had never been taught the secrets of the ancients. When he looked at the sky he couldn't tell what the winter was going to be like.

Better safe than sorry, he said to himself and told his tribe that the winter was indeed expected to be cold and that the members of the village should stock up on firewood to be prepared.

After several days, our modern Chief got an idea. He went to the phone booth, called the National Weather Service and asked, "Is the coming winter going to be cold?"

"It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold," the meteorologist at the weather service responded.

So the Chief went back to his people and told them to collect even more firewood in order to be prepared. A week later he called the National Weather Service again. "Does it still look like it is going to be a very cold winter?"

"Yes," the man at National Weather Service again replied, "It's going to be a very cold winter."

The Chief again went back to his people and ordered them to collect every scrap of firewood they could find. Two weeks later the Chief called the National Weather Service again. "Are you absolutely sure that the winter is going to be very cold?"

"Absolutely," the man replied. "It's looking more and more like it is going to be one of the coldest winters ever."

"How can you be so sure?" the Chief asked.

The weatherman replied, "The Indians are collecting firewood like crazy."

They are one of the best value investors ever to do it. If they see no value, that is actually information about the state of the market.

I'll believe Musk is a trillionaire when the free float of spcx is 95%, not 5%

He's not even a trillionaire with a free float of 5%. Now that SPCX has almost returned to IPO prices, Elon is "only" worth $0.9T.

Yeah but that is likely the normal state of things - high status people are human too, we're all shocked. And on Twitter comment - mass media has been a tool of propaganda since shortly after it was invented. Twitter is substantially better than something like a newspaper or TV channel.

The difference in the modern era is the internet is such a robust communication channel that the ultra-wealthy can't pay money to have the negative stories suppressed any more. If anything the current crop seem to be unusually well behaved by historical standards because there are so many eyes on them. Scandals like the whole Epstein thing or #metoo would simply have vanished into silence before the 2000s unless they were being used to lever out someone uncooperative for political purposes.

The information control meta has evolved from suppression to distraction.

Na. Its just the status quoe with diffrent charectors, same game. Jobs/musk. Altman/gates. Etc

Reply on news.ycombinator.com