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

wsj.com

351–360 of 640 posts

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

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“It’s impossible for me to beat the market consistently” does not imply “nobody can beat the market consistently” or “nobody can beat the market consistently for a long enough time to become filthy rich”.

I didn't say it's impossible for just me, it's impossible for anyone.

RenTech's magic comes from their tax attorneys and creative accounting like their ploy to get long term capital gains treatment on daily trades! They've had to pay at least 7 billion in fines, which is an astronomical fine [0] and probably means they were doing even worse.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/renaissance-executi...

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

#352
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God my teeth wish i had just stopped drinking soda a decade ago. It wasnt even that hard to kick

How much of that was soda, and how much was it access to preventative care?

If you're drinking soda daily, your teeth are coated in acidic liquid for hours a day. This is incredibly damaging to your enamel.

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

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried for a long time with stocks, then I tried stock options. I eventually moved off to index and treasury futures. No money to be made in stocks, shitty leverage, high fees, LOUSY TAX TREATMENT and to complicate matters further shorting can be problematic. Also no "real" market is open 24h so you really just get to trade open-to-close standard hours. Stocks just have too many things going against you to make any…

> No money to be made in stocks, shitty leverage, high fees, LOUSY TAX TREATMENT and to complicate matters further shorting can be problematic. Historic evidence does not support this statement in the strong sense. Whether it is true, in a weak sense, into the future, is debatable.

There is only one truth: Monthly account statements.

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

#354
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've all been there. The house always wins.

Actually, we haven't all been there. Some of us took to heart the lesson from War Games (1983), and apply it liberally: "An interesting game Dr Falkon: The only way to win is not to play."

I don't know if the stock market is really the same as Global Thermonuclear Warfare

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

#355
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some folks' elementary or middle schools had stock picking lessons with fake money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21642395 From mine, all I remember was getting the impression that putting money in particular stocks without knowing what you're doing is a bad idea. Pretty valuable lesson, I guess, as I've never bought individual stocks since then...

You might have learned the wrong lesson there, if your goal is to build wealth. But it’s a good idea to prevent losses

Not really, indexing beats hedge fund managers over something like a 12 year stretch.

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

#356

The supposed "survey" or whatever the hell this is was taken from a bunch of amateur people who started trading out of boredom which depicts an entirely non-real picture of the people who have been doing this for a living since quite some time. Like with everything else, using your brain cells can quickly make you realize it's a lot more than "gambling"

> a bunch of amateur people who started trading out of boredom Former options market maker. The industry was dead for a decade until the pandemic. It’s now more profitable than ever. Lots of negative-alpha orders that can be predictably sorted from the flow. Market makers are seeing casino-like margins on some subsets of flow; that signals a problem.

It's hilarious watching the r/Superstonks subreddit live in a pretend reality. Supposedly Citadel is their sworn enemy but they've spent the past 4 years purposely buying badly priced shares from them.

How do you educate someone so confidently and consistently wrong in their world? Someone who INSISTS that "No, this letter from BBBY that says that we are going to see massive share dilution when 500k new shares are printed and sold to pay down debts before the company is shut down, is a lie because they actually are going to magically transform into a new competitor against Amazon because Ryan Cohen (a man who was only part of BBBY for like a month) is going to be the new CEO and make us all rich"

When those shares dropped at an obviously stupid price with zero future value, they bought them by the hundreds and LITERALLY wrote "thank you for the tasty dip"

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

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a pushback against the emphasis on individualism in our culture, which many find does not lead to real fulfillment. When you start a family, you're giving up your own glory, but in doing so you become deeply integrated into something greater than yourself, which makes you greater by extension. And I say this as someone who doesn't have kids either, and as someone who used to not be so excited by the pros…

But why now, and not like 5 years ago? That’s the weirdness I don’t understand. Is it just very loud people had a bunch of kids and trying to push the same on others? Trying to change the culture from the start? “Meaning of life” is like the oldest question that has ever existed. Both people with and without children have pondered about it for eternity. It just looks funny when you see a sudden shift in the discourse…

I think there's two shifts that play a major role in explaining the timing that you're referencing:

- The 2010s represented a progressivist left-ward shift in America and the excesses of that movement are provoking a reactionary conservative shift in the populace in the 2020s: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/seven-reasons-america-is-heade.... This is cyclical is the same thing happened from 1960s to 1970s.

- The concept of population collapse entered mainstream discourse in the early 2020s and is now being accepted as the major concern for humanity moving forward, a 180-degree turn from the previous concern of overpopulation. This is something unprecedented in human history as no human has ever existed in an economy or society where the population was decreasing so all the "rules" we know about life are suddenly subject to change unless birth patterns change significantly.

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

#358
Coincidentially today I've just finished reading: "The Little Book on Common Sense Investing" by John Bogle. What's described in the article is exactly the opposite of what people should be doing if interested in serious investing. The book mostly focus on index funds and I highly recommend its reading to anyone who wants to understand and embark on investing seriously. The book is short, extremely easy to read, full of examples, wise advices and quotes from remarkable people of the investment sector.

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

#359
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

DCA in my understanding is automatically investing a fixed amount at fixed intervals. E.g. $100/month, or whatever. The amount and interval aren't all that critical. The point is to do it automatically and not try to time the market.

Yes I also have heard the advice to dollar cost average a lump sum, not so much in the scenario of a rollover of an existing investment, but when a large amount of cash has become available for some reason. I guess the theory there is you won't risk putting it all in at a market high point. If you average it in over a year in a declining market, you're better off. If you average it in to a rising market you're worse off than if you had invested it all up front. Trying to guess which of these scenarios is going to happen is trying to time the market. I'm sure people have done the research -- intuitively, if you're investing for the long term, better to put it all in at once. But there are probably risk tolerance considerations.

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

#360
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't have decades of built up propaganda But how are you so sure that doesn't apply to you?

I'm saying it doesn't apply to my 10 year old

Properly propagandized parents have no issue letting their perspectives flow to their children.
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