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

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311–320 of 640 posts

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

#311

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…

Anyone selling the retail investor an "edge" via ML platforms or AI is selling snake oil. Sure the barrier to entry is low, but profits are never guaranteed.

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

#312
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Broad brushstrokes incoming and pure speculation but I wrote it out anyway… Today’s youth are more proactive with their identities these days than we were. We were and remain reactive with our identities. That preference influences what triggers the dopamine hits needed for life. The drugs of a reactive identity culture are sugar, alcohol, narcotics, work, anything that’s a trope in movies made by boomers. These drug…

Gen Z uses a lot more steroids which tracks with your analysis. But also I think you're falling for sample bias. The ones who don't have a billion followers are overweight and generally less healthy than previous generations.

And more depressed since massive quick/instant success is seemingly everywhere, apart from their own hands. Cancer if social media at its best, spreading depression like chemtrails.

This breeds greed for status & perceived success and 0 patience to get there. You see it here on HN all the time when talking economy and real estate - young people complaining how they they cant own some well located nice house right now, how everything is shit and their future stolen, despite stats saying exactly the opposite. Where the fuck is at least a bit of decency to wait a decade of hard effort for such a success? Thats shit for losers, nobody got time for that.

How I feel sorry for them, all the added value of technology is nothing compared to what they 'lost' or more like never experienced. At least many of them, the vocal majority, the rest goes on just like we did

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

#313

> They expect the problem to worsen. The stock market has climbed 23% this year... The problem will resolve itself if (when?) the market crashes. I remember the run up to the dot-com bust. I was too much of a bumpkin at the time to even know how I would trade stocks — but I listened to an acquaintance go on and on about how much he was making on the market. At the time I guessed that he was much smarter than me — tha…

The problem is that I have been seeing some version of the “crash imminent, sell everything” thesis for my entire life. Almost nobody who “saw the crash coming” in the case of the dotcom bubble, or covid, or the subprime crisis made any money, because almost nobody gets the timing or magnitude of the crash right. You can find YouTube channels that have been warning people that a crash is imminent for the last two yea…

This is the reason dollar-cost-averaging works. You buy less (shares) when the market is high, and more when it is low, without thinking about it and without trying to "time" your transactions (which almost always fails unless you have inside info).

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

#314
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the patterns are more or less the same but the cycles are getting shorter and more pronounced. I met the son of a family friend today, he's 13, already has an opinion about the Israel/Palestine war and spent $500 in roblox so far, they're not wealthy at all. Back in my days I was stuck in the free to play parts of mmorpgs (or had to beg for months for a $5 monthly membership), playing tf2 (free) and had 0…

If you don't have decades of built up propaganda it's pretty easy to see that Israel is the bad guy. The condescending "it's complicated" line is part of the propaganda telling you that you're not allowed to come to the obvious conclusion for yourself. My 10 year has figured out that Russia is the bad guy in Ukraine and that Israel is the bad guy in Gaza.

Must be nice if politics is just good and bad guys for you.

It should give you some pause that a 10 yo has the same level of understanding of global politics.

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

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Gov't / Federal Reserve has made it clear they will not let the value of assets drop significantly ever again. The entire planet's capital is now betting on US equities going up and to right forever, and all levers will be used and invented wholesale from nothing to keep that going.

Yea, except the inflation we encountered in the last 3 years were directly from trying to keep asset values from dropping. They are at their ropes end. There really isn't that much room between mass inflation vs. the rich keeping their numbers infinity growing.

Exactly. The "crash" can happen via exploding inflation, or falling markets. Either way results in the same thing.

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

#316
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically what you’re saying is that the healthiest society is the one whose population is growing the fastest? I would think life expectancy would be a better measure of a healthy vs unhealthy environment.

You're talking about individual health. Regardless of what specifically makes a society healthy, a necessary condition is that it doesn't die out. A society with a 120 year life expectancy and 0 birth rate isn't healthy. A society with 20 life expectancy and 6 birth rate is unhealthy but for different reasons.

It’s pretty easy to find high birth rate countries with low life expectancy.

While it’s much more difficult to find countries with high life expectancy with low birth rates (assuming we define “low” as any birth rate lower than necessary for the society to not die out)

I agree with you the 2 need to be balanced, but I assume any society with high life expectancy would also have a sustainable birth rate.

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

#317

At this point I’m just watching a slightly younger cohort of men repeat all of my worst digital addiction mistakes like getting inserted into the online video game -> toxic online behavior pipeline (or worse, fascism), ideologies (Musk), crypto and options gambling (thanks Reddit a la 2013 for all of the crypto communities and WSB) too much computer (ouch, my neck, arms and back.) I’m not doing particularly well, esp…

online games aren’t the problem imo, it’s disposable identities and ~zero repercussions for bad actors.

The remedy is far worse than the problem

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

#318

At this point I’m just watching a slightly younger cohort of men repeat all of my worst digital addiction mistakes like getting inserted into the online video game -> toxic online behavior pipeline (or worse, fascism), ideologies (Musk), crypto and options gambling (thanks Reddit a la 2013 for all of the crypto communities and WSB) too much computer (ouch, my neck, arms and back.) I’m not doing particularly well, esp…

I feel like the patterns are more or less the same but the cycles are getting shorter and more pronounced. I met the son of a family friend today, he's 13, already has an opinion about the Israel/Palestine war and spent $500 in roblox so far, they're not wealthy at all. Back in my days I was stuck in the free to play parts of mmorpgs (or had to beg for months for a $5 monthly membership), playing tf2 (free) and had 0…

When I was 13 I had a paper route and mowed lawns, and with those earnings I spent about $75 per month on video games and comic books, easily exceeding $500 over a year.

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

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

online games aren’t the problem imo, it’s disposable identities and ~zero repercussions for bad actors.

The remedy is far worse than the problem

Yeah I don't know how you preserve much-needed anonymity, while also binding humans to their personas and holding them accountable for their actions.

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

#320

> They expect the problem to worsen. The stock market has climbed 23% this year... The problem will resolve itself if (when?) the market crashes. I remember the run up to the dot-com bust. I was too much of a bumpkin at the time to even know how I would trade stocks — but I listened to an acquaintance go on and on about how much he was making on the market. At the time I guessed that he was much smarter than me — tha…

The problem is that I have been seeing some version of the “crash imminent, sell everything” thesis for my entire life. Almost nobody who “saw the crash coming” in the case of the dotcom bubble, or covid, or the subprime crisis made any money, because almost nobody gets the timing or magnitude of the crash right. You can find YouTube channels that have been warning people that a crash is imminent for the last two yea…

I remember at one point a couple years ago, I saw a thread on the Bogleheads forum where people could basically call their shot on market crashes; they would post and timestamp when they exited the market and when they re-entered, so that people could go and calculate if the timing was correct or if they lost money by missing out on market growth.

I might not have the dates correct, but I remember the general strokes of one guy who decided in like 2017 or something that the market had topped out, the crash was coming any moment now, and he sold everything and called his shot. He missed out on three years of incredible gains, and then the market absolutely _crashed_ in early 2020. He got it right, by a very small amount; he had gotten more selling his positions than he would have gotten selling in march 2020. He buys back in at what ended up being the absolute nadir of the market in like april 2020 or something. The rare success story of timing the market, you love to see it.

And then a few days later, he decides that actually, no, the market still has more to drop, and he sells again. Oh well.

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