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“Buy and Hold” No More: The Resurgence of Active Trading

a16z.com

211–220 of 327 posts

Re: “Buy and Hold” No More: The Resurgence of Active Trading

#211

The only issue I take with this article is their seemingly blase take on the risky investing behavior of Gen Z. Sure, if that's the lay of the land then use it to your advantage. But it seems a bit predatory. Risky activities tend to hurt more investors than they help, and lead to a small number of big winners and many losers. You can't just increase risk and increase reward for everyone. Regarding the predicament Ge…

This was my reading as well. "They have a larger appetite for risk because the deck is stacked against them, and they've never seen a crash" feels like "We created a system where the young are desperate and are going to end up holding the bag" while containing no self-reflection on that.

Re: “Buy and Hold” No More: The Resurgence of Active Trading

#212

One thing active trading does is subject you to much higher short term tax rates. You'll also lose a bit on the spread every time you trade, even with zero commission brokerage fees. The longest stock I've held is Boeing (40 years).

unless you're trading in an IRA

Re: “Buy and Hold” No More: The Resurgence of Active Trading

#213

The only issue I take with this article is their seemingly blase take on the risky investing behavior of Gen Z. Sure, if that's the lay of the land then use it to your advantage. But it seems a bit predatory. Risky activities tend to hurt more investors than they help, and lead to a small number of big winners and many losers. You can't just increase risk and increase reward for everyone. Regarding the predicament Ge…

> demographics is working against asset values in the next twenty years or so. As someone who is about half way towards retirement, how is it best to work with this? My future retirement income seems to be mostly dependant on having the right selection of investments for my pension account to grow in time for when I stop working. It's currently split between a few low cost, broad indexes. But if we expect asset value…

As you get older and look for lower risk exposure, you start looking at simple annuity products.

Preferably wait till this period is over and rates rise. If there’s a salesman eager to speak to you, you’re looking at the wrong product.

Re: “Buy and Hold” No More: The Resurgence of Active Trading

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I watched some videos about dividend investing on YouTube that I would consider reasonable investment advice. Do you happen to have those links?

Sorry I don't remember who the videos were from, and to be clear I don't personally use either YouTube or WallStreetBets as a source of investment advice - I tend to just stick to a super simple passive investment strategy. I just remember seeing some videos in my feed on YouTube and thinking "wow this is actually better than a lot of what I've seen on CNBC". As an example, I did do a quick search just now on YouTube…

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Re: “Buy and Hold” No More: The Resurgence of Active Trading

#215

"A combination of illusory superiority bias—the belief that we are more financially savvy than we actually are—and a culture of financial optimism leads most retail traders to believe they have above-average trading ideas and strategies." Um, yes. Retail investors as a class lose money. Remember, you're betting against people for whom this is their day job, work in a business that drops the losers, and have far more…

And 84% of the stock market is owned by the top 10%. I try to remind myself it's not my sandbox.

Re: “Buy and Hold” No More: The Resurgence of Active Trading

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. What they are selling you is an asset allocation, this turns on it's head all the innovation since the early 90s...and the performance you likely get will be indistinguishable from what most people could achieve on their own. One of the big advantages that savers have today are open platforms (there was a time when fund managers ran their own platforms), low dealing costs, low spreads, and ETFs. All that inv…

They make claims of better tax efficiency via tax-loss harvesting [1]. I don't know or care enough to evaluate it, but maybe it's better for some people, even if the allocation is no better than an ETF? Even if it worked, I wouldn't bother to do it manually. This doesn't matter for a retirement account, though. [1] https://support.wealthfront.com/hc/en-us/articles/209348486-...

That is going to depend on what the rules are, and what rates you pay. But is tax-loss harvesting beyond the wit of everyone but WealthFront? No. If you aren't bothered to do it manually then it can't be a big benefit for you...it is always amazes me that companies manage to base their products around utterly pointless/marginal features that no-one uses, like why do you care? It is like people choosing an advisor because of their charts...yep, they got the charts from a third-party charting provider for $10/month, and you are going to pay tens of thousands (or more) over a lifetime. Smh.

Re: “Buy and Hold” No More: The Resurgence of Active Trading

#217
Frankly, I think passive investing has ruined the fundamentals of investing and in part responsible for the poor financial health of our economy.

While the idea behind passive investing may seem like a good one, people often forget it's a double edge sword. By this I mean, when you invest into an ETF or index fund, that money in turn goes into everything underneath it. All too often that money isn't invested in the underlying equities in any intelligent way, and so some of it ends up in ridiculously bad equities. Because of this, there are complete zombie companies that are worth multi billions today, which sell no more than 2 widgets a year and haven't seen growth for nearly a decade... They are only worth so much because money keeps flowing into them from being apart of a hot ETF.

Re: “Buy and Hold” No More: The Resurgence of Active Trading

#218

"A combination of illusory superiority bias—the belief that we are more financially savvy than we actually are—and a culture of financial optimism leads most retail traders to believe they have above-average trading ideas and strategies." Um, yes. Retail investors as a class lose money. Remember, you're betting against people for whom this is their day job, work in a business that drops the losers, and have far more…

I see this as more favorable. With the internet, and with like-minded online communities, the average retail trader is way more informed and skilled than one 20 years back. The level of hubris may have corrected accordingly, not be based on illusiory superiority bias.

Incorrect risk management from investment bankers, treating highly-variant finance as deterministic physics, and a fanciness of extremely smart people to invent extremely complex solutions, which obfuscate the ever-increasing assumptions and are less robust to black swan events. This illusory superiority bias over the common man, giving too much authority and decision-making power to a set of mathematical functions, and a culture of financial optimism and realization that you are too big to fail. This is what caused the big crash of 2007-2008.

The common man, as a class, lost money from that crash. In response, Bitcoin and fractional stocks were introduced. New markets emerged, where wearing a suit or MBA seems a negative, not a value add. Now, as a class, you at least have the possibility to win money. Else you always lose (but maybe that's the natural way it is supposed to be, not everyone can be the queen ant, or has the adaptation capacity to become one). BTW: every hedge fund that opened their data to the public, saw better, more accurate, models being build on that, than any of their elite quants in-house was able to beat. The masses, when harnassed, are no match for even the biggest hedge funds.

Re: “Buy and Hold” No More: The Resurgence of Active Trading

#219
This seems to be conflating buy & hold with passive investing. What is it called when you don't invest in index funds you pick stocks and then buy and hold them for the long term? Seems to me there is passive and active investing and the opposite of buy & hold is day trading.

I'm also not sure that I buy the argument made elsewhere in this thread that you need active to make passive work. Indexes upon which funds are based often have a system of rules for how individual stocks are added and removed from the index that are based on the companies financial performance which is what ultimately drives the stock.

Re: “Buy and Hold” No More: The Resurgence of Active Trading

#220
post #217

Frankly, I think passive investing has ruined the fundamentals of investing and in part responsible for the poor financial health of our economy. While the idea behind passive investing may seem like a good one, people often forget it's a double edge sword. By this I mean, when you invest into an ETF or index fund, that money in turn goes into everything underneath it. All too often that money isn't invested in the u…

Could you give us examples of those zombie companies? What are the ticker symbols and which indexes include them?
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