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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

#331
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

10 year olds can figure out that killing children for 14 months is evil . That everyone can't see that is the power of propaganda.

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

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

9-5 is definitely not the way to enrich yourself, that's an unfortunate message. Have you noticed how housing costs have consistently beat inflation for decades? At least if you live in a VHCOL area. It's easy - check the FRED report on the median salary and compare that with a graph showing the median housing price. OK so the most important thing is out of reach with 9-5, independence from rent. The next set of fact…

Most of the country does not live in very high cost of living areas, so what you said isn't true in most places. And at some point, if your location is so bad that you just can't make it work financially, move. Yes, moving sucks for many reasons. But people are not powerless victims who just get stuck somewhere and can't do anything else, they have the ability to take themselves to another place where the opportunities are better.

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

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really elitist. Picking individual stocks is essentially saying "I have brand new insight that nobody else has, and I'm going to earn profit by incorporating that knowledge into prices and be rewarded forgetting it right". This is clearly a very specialized activity, you shouldn't expect to be able to bring brand new, accurate insight, and out predict everyone else in the world, without a deep understanding…

> without a deep understanding of economics, finance, and expertise in the specific industry and the company you're trading in. is in contradiction to >It's not really elitist. It's not wrong . But elitist is absolutely is. We're saying, only these people can do these things correctly. Is it true? It's subject to debate. You can be in IT, discover a software product at work and decide you think the company is worth i…

> You can be in IT, discover a software product at work and decide you think the company is worth investing in.

And then you can be still be wrong because you didn't appreciate that the company is operating a low-trust environment/switching costs are high/they didn't have enough industry contacts/competitors outmarketed.

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

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd have to guess the demographics of HN lean rather Millennial, and I don't have to guess that they lean heavily male. I think it's probably just a collective biological clock thing; it's something I've started to feel myself. Intellectually, I want kids less than ever (so it's for the best I never had any), but emotionally, I do sort of understand the urge.

Could be! I share the same emotional feeling as well, but the ones telling others to have kids, already have them. They keep going above and beyond trying to portray the idea of “everything is amazing when you have a kid!”, when it’s objectively not true. It’s just a bit off-putting when you have all the information readily available and try to push an ideology to a circle that’s commonly known as skeptics. Anyone wh…

Perhaps it is becoming more clear that the current reproduction rates are unsustainable if they persist.

Anyway, I have a bunch of kids, and I think from a motivational perspective, yes, kids give you meaning for some years.

But they can also help you with something else due to the necessary self-sacrifices, which is getting a out of egocentric thoughts, such as what you're going to do with your life. Read a book on biology. You are a bunch of cells put in the world to cooperate to feed and reproduce before they self-terminate to leave space for the offspring. That's it. Stop fretting. :)

(Helping society and thereby the offspring of other bunches of cells is pretty noble too, by the way.)

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

#335

People want a chance to get rich. They also want excitement. Doesn't that say more about our jobs that are a) dead-end for most b) financially limiting, with a salary that goes up slowly, if at all, unless you find a new job People want the chance to win, and some meaning, and some daily purpose. No one cares anymore about the stats of "stock pickers" "day traders" and other arguments for DCAing into index funds and…

You describe the psychological motivations for gambling.

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

#336
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.

Well he didn't have decades of propaganda but still roots for Israel... I didn't mention this subject there because I have better things to do with my time than ruin Christmas by talking politics with teenagers so I can't tell you where he got that from

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

#337

> 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 SPY and QQQ charts zoomed out are starting to look like the biggest parabola of all time in markets. 1999 is just a blip on this monster.

Seeing all kinds of warning signs from family members who never traded or got into crypto until just this past 6 months.

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

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works in a sense of not timing the market. Lump sum beats dollar-cost averaging - because you have more time in market.

Sure, if you have a lump sum to start with. But dollar-cost-averaging beats saving up a lump sum and then investing.

I think the phrase you're looking for is "automatic investing" or something, not DCA. DCA is usually framed explicitly as a counterpart to lump sum of an existing pile of money

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

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do you believe anonymity is "much-needed"? Human society was built for tens of thousands of years on "stay away from Ben because he has a bad habit of not paying back what you loan him"

Anonymity is new and probably not something the human brain, which isn't meant to handle more than a few hundred familiar faces, can manage reasonably.

If you want anonymity 200 years ago, you had to print your own pamphlets and hand them out on the corner in a costume and hope nobody recognized you. Then you would go to church on sunday where the entire community would gossip about everyone's "sins" after the service.

Human history was radically more transparent about who was doing what, and who was saying what.

Nobody standing on a sop-box ever wore a mask, and while most used pseudonyms or pen names, there were only so many printing presses in the colonies, but that didn't stop the American rebels from spreading their claims.

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

#340

> 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 will resolve itself if (when?) the market crashes.

Someone said something like, Everyone thinks they're a genius, when the market only goes up.

Although, one thing different now is the heavy throughout-the-day manipulation of retail investors, effectively making strong social groups and identities around it.

That wasn't a thing when, say, ETrade started, and lots of people dabbled, and found it was hard to lose money, just trading around different companies, with little understanding of how things even supposedly work, much less how things actually worked.

Today, from what I occasionally glimpse, you've got all these supposed skills you're applying as a retail investor/sheep/pawn (including various degrees of snake oil, or thinking you're going to be one of the smarter people on a pump/dump scheme that leaves others holding the bag), and constant social groups where people even self-deprecatingly celebrate huge day-trading losses. Like a wholesome support group that actively encourages you to stick with the bad habit, rather than encourages you to stay sober.

So maybe, when the next big culling comes, you'll have lots of people who can somehow still get margin accounts, and will say, "Blood in the streets, and I'm missing 3 limbs, but, hey, stocks are on sale!" And a thundering chorus of other addicts, and their manipulators, encouraging them.

(Disclosures: S&P 500 ETF with low expense ratio in tax-advantaged, plus an emergency fund that goes nowhere near the market. :)

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