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The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

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Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#111
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope this works out for you in the long term; BTC isn't the most stable platform, but it could certainly be more stable than some national currencies.

According to legendary quant Nassim Nicholas Taleb so called cryptocurrencies are so fundamentally volatile that they cannot be considered currencies: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.14204

Parents didnt call it a currency..

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#112
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to win at life, you “save money” by purchasing non-cash assets like stocks. Except when you don't. Between 1995 and 2000 I lived in a student house in the UK and one of my housemates (who was also a student, and from my recollection almost as broke as I was back then) was really into investing into the stock market during the dot-com boom. He bought both Lastminute.com (IPO March 2000 @ 380p/share[1], s…

I’d suggest that for most people, buying diversified index funds are a more appropriate strategy. Nothing you do in life is risk free, even keeping cash under your mattress: the fact that there is risk involved does not change that this is how you make money. When you know that you’re guaranteed a loss of ~2%, at best, on cash, and that your expected real return on stocks is positive, well… That’s the point.

> I’d suggest that for most people, buying diversified index funds are a more appropriate strategy

At least in the UK, buying into index funds was substantially more expensive back then. I held shares in a retail bank for a time not long after that, for which I had an actual paper certificate! No wonder trading was expensive....

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#113
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand why so many people “save money” but then just keep cash under a mattress or in a savings or checking account. If you want to win at life, you “save money” by purchasing non-cash assets like stocks.

Because investing is non-trivial and nobody tells you how to do it.

I recommend “A Random Walk Down Wall Street” for a safe/conservative, no-bs and simple introduction.

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#114
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to win at life, you “save money” by purchasing non-cash assets like stocks. Except when you don't. Between 1995 and 2000 I lived in a student house in the UK and one of my housemates (who was also a student, and from my recollection almost as broke as I was back then) was really into investing into the stock market during the dot-com boom. He bought both Lastminute.com (IPO March 2000 @ 380p/share[1], s…

Well, you don't buy individual stocks; you buy slices of slices of everything to dissipate your risk towards variance. And you definitely don't hold cash. Holding cash has a lot of risk as well

> And you definitely don't hold cash. Holding cash has a lot of risk as well

(Sorry, genuine questions) risk of what and compared to what?

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#115
post #2

Ah, the magic of interest: http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/at-the-bank

Why exactly do we want to reward already rich people at the expense of poorer people? Somehow, people convinced themselves that giving money to those who don't need it is efficient.

You don't have to reward anyone. Just don't borrow. But if you want to borrow the lender will expect a reward. Simples.

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#116
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you don't buy individual stocks; you buy slices of slices of everything to dissipate your risk towards variance. And you definitely don't hold cash. Holding cash has a lot of risk as well

> And you definitely don't hold cash. Holding cash has a lot of risk as well (Sorry, genuine questions) risk of what and compared to what?

Risk of loss, theft or physical degradation. Then there’s the costs of holding cash, which are known to give you a negative yield due to inflation (nevermind bank fees or insurance costs, etc)

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#117

Thinking about money and its hypothetical worth in X years is a waste of mind resources, at least for me. Instead, I'm going to just save 20-25% and spend the rest on being happy. If things go south, so what? I've got an expiry date and one day these things won't be a problem.

That's a pretty decent savings rate. When you say save, though, do you mean putting it in the bank or a diversified portfolio of factor tilted global index funds?

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#118

1228 pesos in 1976 was worth about $4.50 in 1976 USD [1]. ... and if he'd bought into the S&P 500 (Vanguard launched the First Index Investment Trust now the Vanguard 500 Index Fund in 1976 [2]), it would be worth about about $190 in today's USD. Which you could sell to buy about 2.99g of gold today (3 trillion times as much as reported). While obvious you'd have to be extremely prescient to put your money in a compl…

For comparison if he bought gold directly - $4.50 would have bought about 1.13g of gold

[1] https://sdbullion.com/gold-prices-1976

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#119
post #92
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made that comment because I know people are going to use the linked example of what happened in Argentina as the predicted fate of what will happen in the US. That seems to be what you are implying here by drawing parallels between the two. But I simply want to make it clear that the US is at 8% inflation for the last year while Argentina spent decades with the average annual inflation rate measured in the hundreds…

> But I simply want to make it clear that the US is at 8% inflation for the last year while Argentina spent decades with the average annual inflation rate measured in the hundreds. The two aren't close to the same. “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

With all due respect, I feel the quote is a bit pithy here. Not all things which are gradual become sudden, and the quote doesn’t give any proof that this is one of those things.

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#120
post #9

Argentina has experienced multiple rounds of hyperinflation due to failed monetary policy. Saying this story is a "lesson about the power of inflation" is like saying "the sun is hot". Yes, it certainly is, but it is so far beyond normal definitions of "hot" that people will have a hard time understanding it. This is more a story about the failures of Argentina's governments over the last 50 years than a story about…

There are a lot of people that think we can print spend endless amounts of money without consequences. Heck an alarming amount of people don’t understand that bonds need to be paid back.

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