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Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

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Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#281
post #17
post #4

I'm curious if this is demonstrably an optimal strategy for individual investment too... I haven't had much success getting any clear data about whether active management demonstrably produces better results.

The common refrain is that "time in the market always beats timing the market". The implicit assumption in that refrain is that, despite periodic dips, the U.S. stock market always goes up over time. This has been true since the Great Depression (see graph of S&P 500 since 1929) https://www.officialdata.org/us/stocks/s-p-500/1929 The implicit assumption behind that is that the American economy always invents a way to…

> the American economy always invents a way to grow

I suspect American economy grows slower than stock market. Last 25 years its about printing debt and money supply.

Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#282

Disclaimer: I'm not a financial advisor. Whenever I'm tempted to buy individual high performing tickers (e.g. NVDA, TSLA, AMD), I restrict the purchase to no more than 2% of my portfolio and I only allow myself to bet on 2-3 "race horses" at a time. I think this fulfills the desire to gamble a little and see 100-200% YoY returns. NVDA cracked 300% cost basis when I finally sold, which is wild. The reason I can do thi…

This is great advice. You follow the best rule of thumb for individuals, ETF w/ dca and set it and forget it, but allow a bit of fun to scratch the itch.

I do something similar but honestly allow too much to go towards the latter. I need to pair back. I am thankful and lucky that my returns have been similar to index funds and not far below (thanks NVDA and NET)

Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#283
post #277

Disclaimer: I'm not a financial advisor. Whenever I'm tempted to buy individual high performing tickers (e.g. NVDA, TSLA, AMD), I restrict the purchase to no more than 2% of my portfolio and I only allow myself to bet on 2-3 "race horses" at a time. I think this fulfills the desire to gamble a little and see 100-200% YoY returns. NVDA cracked 300% cost basis when I finally sold, which is wild. The reason I can do thi…

Every share of an S&P 500 index fund you hold is already 6-7% NVDA, so a lot of investors already have substantial bets on some of these "race horses".

True but this misses the core point about agency. Some of us would like too think we know something more and ‘gamble’ on that knowledge.

Having 5% to personally assign can scratch that itch without resulting in an overexposed or vulnerable position

Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#284
post #277

Disclaimer: I'm not a financial advisor. Whenever I'm tempted to buy individual high performing tickers (e.g. NVDA, TSLA, AMD), I restrict the purchase to no more than 2% of my portfolio and I only allow myself to bet on 2-3 "race horses" at a time. I think this fulfills the desire to gamble a little and see 100-200% YoY returns. NVDA cracked 300% cost basis when I finally sold, which is wild. The reason I can do thi…

Every share of an S&P 500 index fund you hold is already 6-7% NVDA, so a lot of investors already have substantial bets on some of these "race horses".

Whenever I kick myself a little about not owning any/enough of the "race horses" I content myself that there's probably a lot scattered around my portfolio. So you missed out a bit but your index funds actually benefited.

Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#285
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every share of an S&P 500 index fund you hold is already 6-7% NVDA, so a lot of investors already have substantial bets on some of these "race horses".

True but this misses the core point about agency. Some of us would like too think we know something more and ‘gamble’ on that knowledge. Having 5% to personally assign can scratch that itch without resulting in an overexposed or vulnerable position

Yeah, if you have an itch to individually invest, set a budget and play without doing anything too stupid. I've actually done pretty well with that approach especially when I've avoided capital gain with a charitable trust with a few relative home runs I have hit.

Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#286

Disclaimer: I'm not a financial advisor. Whenever I'm tempted to buy individual high performing tickers (e.g. NVDA, TSLA, AMD), I restrict the purchase to no more than 2% of my portfolio and I only allow myself to bet on 2-3 "race horses" at a time. I think this fulfills the desire to gamble a little and see 100-200% YoY returns. NVDA cracked 300% cost basis when I finally sold, which is wild. The reason I can do thi…

> As a retail investor, it's good to remind myself that if I actually had the skills to invest professionally, someone would probably be paying me to do it for them.

Don't discount the knowledge you have from being deep into an industry. The higher quality of the CUDA toolkit compared to other SIMD languages, combined with it's increasing relevance in compute (gaming, followed by blockchain, followed by ML, followed by GPT) would have made this an NVDA an easy pick for anyone (of the increasing number of people) that worked in parallel computing from 2006-2023.

Sometimes you can see a company is positioning itself for a great long term position before the entire wallstreet herd takes notice. That's when you add a single stock as part of your diverse portfolio. I keep up to 5% of my stock portfolio as these single stock picks, judged entirely on the product the company sells.

Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The level of discussion that HN is a good medium for has absolutely no bearing or causal relationship with whether or not the actual stock market is normally distributed. Imagine really thinking that the nature of a discussion forum can somehow influence the distribution of stock prices, as if stock prices examine comments on the Internet to determine their behavior.

I dont have a dog in this hunt but that seems like a strangely aggressive response. Perhaps the comment meant nothing more than that plaintext HN is a difficult place to start having a discussion that really requires some mathematical machinery, and therefore, since we cant throw around sigmas and integral signs here, we will make some assumptions. Attacking the comment with sarcasm isn't in the spirit of HN even if…

>I dont have a dog in this hunt but that seems like a strangely aggressive response.

Well I do and as someone who has seen his other posts on this subject as well, he has a tendency to try to dismiss differing points of views on the basis that he has 20 years of experience and knows better than everyone else but can't be bothered to explain it.

Someone who has experience and wants to flaunt that experience should do so by coming up with good arguments, pointing people to good resources, and making a good effort to inform rather than pulling rank as a way to dismiss the conversation under the guise of sophistication and pretention.

I too have decades of experience working at a quant firm, and guess what... many people who post on HN have subject matter expertise and frankly I don't think many of us would agree with the idea that the stock market is normally distributed, or that you need a great deal of mathematical machinery and sophistication in order to demonstrate that fact.

Math models reality, reality does not model math. Whether or not stock prices or portfolios, even the portfolios of those on Hacker News, follow a normal distribution has nothing to do with the nature of the discussion of those portfolios.

Also, policing people's tone is also against the spirit of HN as well, but here we are. If you want to police how I speak, flag my comment and/or downvote it.

Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#289

It was Richard Thaler's Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics book that finally broke through my thick, anxiety ridden skull and convinced me to stop reading economic news everyday and just forget the the retirement accounts existed. If I'd read that book earlier, I'd be up 3X on my positions.

It depends. I had a pension plan that grew x2 in 17 years (don't know what they invested into). My own investments grew much faster than S&P though.

I should have clarified, this is a 401K, not a pension plan. So it's just passive index funds. I don't even think of pensions as a thing anymore.

Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tradeoff is you lock some of those gains down in safer assets. Probably the wrong choice for retirement earlier on, but if you need money during an economic crisis, say you got laid off, then that might change how it's viewed.

That’s very true, but he’s had the account for 30 years and assuming that means he started it young, 50% in bonds is borderline insane. It’s a lot more likely to cost you a large amount in retirement than bail you out in your 30’s.

Well, what’s done is done. I was planning to bail, back in my 30’s, but changed my mind, and stayed for almost 27 years.

It still makes more than I spend, but we’ll see what the future brings.

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