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More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market

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Re: More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market

#151

Post by Ologn »

dismalaf wrote: post #51

The most difficult part about the stock market is that stocks don't move for the reasons people think. People think fundamentals, news, financial performance, or chart patterns matter. But none of it does. Markets are driven purely by supply and demand. And in this case, supply and demand for the stock itself. Fundamentals are already priced in. Financial performance is already priced in. Expectations are priced in,…

> Expectations are priced in, and others probably have more information than you anyway.

I have always made money on the stock market. I bought Nvidia in December 2022 and then again in April 2023. Yes the information was out there - anyone reading this board back then could see it. Or who saw Emad Mostaque's tweets that Stable Diffusion was trained on Nvidia, or who knew the semi-public information that OpenAI trained on Nvidia. I bought and it quadrupled in two years when averaging out. The expectations on this board were not priced in the market then.

When FAANG and more b2b tech companies (Salesforce, Oracle) tanked in 2022 I poured money into tech indexes like IYW and IGV. Not as much as into Nvidia, but they were good companies and finally and unusually cheap. They went way up too.

I was making money in the 1990s buying SGI, Sun Microsystems, Netscape, Cisco etc. No brainers for me.

Only two losses I recall - Cascade, a router company whose stock dipped and was bought ny US Robotics on the dip (1990s?). Also some ad company which was crushed by competition with Google.

I completely disagree with your premise. I don't even know how to make a neural network in Pytorch, nor can I do matrix math with NumPy. But in December 2022 Nvidia seemed worth the risk, and by April of last year a lot of that risk evaporated with a huge potential upside. I knew the stock was cheap and all the PhDs on Wall Street did not. Also, they are stuck in a bureaucracy - I used to work in IT for a major investment bank in Manhattan. Watch the Big Short on the pressure the people who were right got from their management and investors. I don't have that pressure, it is my money.

We, the people here, do get insights which are not priced in. It's not that there is no risk, but the coin flip sometimes goes 51% in our favor. Sometimes even 52% (or 53%...or 60%). This is how Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch etc. made money.

Read the Wall Street analyses from the middle of last year on AMD being a big Nvidia competitor, then read the posts here this week about how AMD engineers don't have boards to fix bugs. "We the customer had to mail the AMD engineer a spare board to fix the bug". The cobbler's children wear no shoes at AMD. Then go read some Wall Street report about the stiff competition Nvidia faces from AMD. The information is here, not in the Wall Street analysis report by people who know less than me about how transformers work.

Re: More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market

#152

Post by marcosdumay »

dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #148
jaco6 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Child rearing is a possible solution—it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce, after all, and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.

>Child rearing is a possible solution—it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce, after all, and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it. I doubt it, that's because to most people it does not feel purposeful, it's a chore. Most people who say it's purposeful are generally the most vocal ones, and I suspect the minority.

Whatever purpose you decide you have, do you think it will come without chores?

Re: More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market

#153

Post by whateveracct »

CliveBloomers wrote: post #7

The regular 9-to-5 is seen as a last resort now—it’s almost like you’ve failed if you don’t have a side hustle. That’s the vibe. With AI and machine learning platforms making waves, especially for traders, the game has completely changed. The barrier to entry? Practically gone. These platforms have made it so easy to get started that anyone with a bit of curiosity can jump in. It’s not the exclusive playground of the…

It's funny because 9-5 is still a great way to actually enrich yourself. The best way to grow your wealth is to increase your income, and a salary+benefits is the juiciest way to do that.

Sadly, I've seen many male friends of mine obsess with the stock market but not have anything going career-wise. They just hope they hit big and "make it." Better to just stack salary for years the boring way and save yourself the time it takes to micromanage investments.

Re: More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market

#154

Post by tokioyoyo »

jaco6 wrote: post #37
jshpool wrote: post #5

Lot of people are becoming more knowledgable and skillful. But purpose is the missing ingredient. Without purpose or a motivator in life people end up getting trapped in mindless rituals. It keeps the reward circuitry in the brain from decaying.

Child rearing is a possible solution—it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce, after all, and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.

A bit off-topic, but it’s interesting how this became the de-facto answer to any question related to “meaning of life” in the last 2-3 years in HN/tech circles. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but it’s a bit weird. Like I’m sure everyone knows that? If a person isn’t having a child in their 30s, they either can’t because of multitude of different reasons, or they decided they don’t want to.

Disclaimer: I’m as pro-kid as you can get, just haven’t met a partner who would be on the same page as me yet.

When I was talking about it with my friends, our guess is, people with kids are getting worried. If others aren’t having kids, then their kids might suffer big time in a long run, thus the renewed pressure to keep suggesting the idea to others. Obviously this doesn’t relate to you, just weird how it started in the last few years.

Re: More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market

#155

Post by chowchowchow »

dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #148
jaco6 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Child rearing is a possible solution—it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce, after all, and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.

>Child rearing is a possible solution—it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce, after all, and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it. I doubt it, that's because to most people it does not feel purposeful, it's a chore. Most people who say it's purposeful are generally the most vocal ones, and I suspect the minority.

Beg the question that a purpose can’t involve chores or unpleasantries much?

Re: More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market

#156

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

malux85 wrote: post #26
epolanski wrote: post #9

I remember a controversial scamming figure in Italy that made millions by selling lucky numbers for lotteries or exploiting people's stupidity to part them with their life savings. Her motto was "idiots _have_ to be scammed". While this figure was morally and ethically deplorable, it always made me think how her motto essentially implied that there was an element of pure natural selection happening and she saw hersel…

One of the justifications that psycopaths and sociopaths use is exactly this - If their victims weren't so stupid, they wouldnt be victims. (Often mixed with the "if I didnt exploit them, someone else would"). Its an excuse to rationalise and try to justify their bad behaviour. NATURAL selection is built to deal with NATURAL problems, and they move and change and evolve at the same speed, natual selection changes at…

>One of the justifications that psycopaths and sociopaths use is exactly this

>NATURAL selection is built to deal with NATURAL problems,

Human psychopaths essentially evolved (meaning they are generally hardwired) to exploit the niche of stupid/gullible people. You will see this in various species, i.e a parasite/host behavior. ( eg cookoo laying eggs in the nest of other birds).

No saying that it's a justification for psychopathy, but just stating the way things are.

Re: More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market

#157

Post by foldr »

iamthemonster wrote: post #88
matt3210 wrote: post #38

At one point I knew I could beat the market with l33t software skills. I was wrong and only realized it after donating about 3k to Wall Street.

Every so often I receive commercially sensitive information about my company which I'm not allowed to disclose before it's formally communicated to the stock market. For fun, I try to predict what impact it'll have on the share price (though of course I can't actually trade!) I can successfully predict the direction of the share price movement 50% of the time and successfully predict the magnitude of the share price…

>I can successfully predict the direction of the share price movement 50% of the time

50% performance when there are two options is chance, no? So that just means that you can't predict it at all.

Re: More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market

#158

Post by atulatul »

thrance wrote: post #149
epolanski wrote: post #9

I remember a controversial scamming figure in Italy that made millions by selling lucky numbers for lotteries or exploiting people's stupidity to part them with their life savings. Her motto was "idiots _have_ to be scammed". While this figure was morally and ethically deplorable, it always made me think how her motto essentially implied that there was an element of pure natural selection happening and she saw hersel…

I fail to notice anything natural about this selection.

Exactly. We seem to refer to these ideas somewhat casually, don't we? For example, selfish gene, natural selection, entropy, etc.

Re: More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market

#159

Post by matwood »

hindsightbias wrote: post #140

What’s old is new again. If you worked in a tech office in the late 90’s, every other guy had Ameritrade or similar up in a window. It was the gaming/porn you could get away with at work. Dot com roasted them all.

> If you worked in a tech office

Office? ;)

I was trading stocks in between my CS classes in the late 90s lol

Re: More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market

#160

Post by dismalaf »

dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #148
jaco6 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Child rearing is a possible solution—it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce, after all, and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.

>Child rearing is a possible solution—it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce, after all, and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it. I doubt it, that's because to most people it does not feel purposeful, it's a chore. Most people who say it's purposeful are generally the most vocal ones, and I suspect the minority.

As someone with a young child, it definitely feels purposeful. Also the opposite of a chore, it's lots of fun and what I look forward to after a day of work.

And I'm someone who, for most of my adult life, thought I'd be childfree...

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