9) Time is money. So by reading lot of irrelevant posts on HN and commenting and not doing your own job > wasting time > leads to loss of money.
Strangely enough, HN was a lot more attractive before I retired :-)
How to Lose Money
41–50 of 300 posts
Re: How to Lose Money
#42>The nice thing about options is that there isn’t just one way to lose money. No, you can lose money in many different ways – far more than I can write on this page. This is the most important lesson of options. It's never just a coin flip. You have an unimaginably huge number of factors riding against your success. It's not even remotely close to a 50/50 win/lose scenario. There are a million ways to lose, and just…
It's not 50/50 but you can win 10x sometimes..
What people can't accept is that there IS some people who have made consistent gains on options. You just don't have play all the time and you should always have many factors lined up to you.
Re: How to Lose Money
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and no. A Comp Sci./Eng. degree is pretty much guaranteed to get you a decently paying job. My ROI has been > 20x. Learning a 3-5 yr curriculum on your own is a surefire way to get you demotivated and/or depressed.
> A Comp Sci./Eng. degree is pretty much guaranteed to get you a decently paying job. This has been the case in the recent past and is probably still true right now but the trend won't last forever.
In the 1980s/90s, a medical degree was the “sure bet” way to a six-figure income.
The result was a huge flood of doctors that were...not the best, and some fairly dodgy medical schools.
Of course, this also ended up pushing malpractice insurance (and tuition) into six figures, so I guess we achieved balance.
We’re starting to see some similar stuff, going on, now, in software development. There’s some...not the best, engineers, out there.
I know that E&O insurance isn’t cheap, but it’s a tiny fraction of medical malpractice insurance.
That may change, as Big Data, terrible security practices, and ML/AI are starting to make the old adage ”To err is human; but it takes a computer to really screw things up.” kick into overdrive.
Re: How to Lose Money
#44> I have over 40,000 students taking my online courses and they have generated a few thousand in gross revenues.
I have 400, and I made a living out of it for the past couple of years.
Sure, I was earning more when I was a freelancer. So, I guess his point stands, I am losing money in that sense. And if money was the only metric, he would be spot on. But money is not the only reason.
It's also true that most people just wing it, thinking they will make easy money online. And then, fail.
But well, guess what. Business is hard work. Any business. Creating educational material is not any different. A lot of work goes into positioning, copywriting, marketing, and sales. I would like to see his.
I know many people making excellent money with online courses. A couple of them are in the bi-weekly business mastermind I attend. Heck, if Apple didn't introduce SwiftUI two years ago, forcing me to re-do my courses from scratch, I too would be doing great, instead of just OK. But well, that's just "cost of doing business".
So, saying "you are going to lose money with online courses" is the same as saying "you are going to lose money if you start a business". I don't think that's a sentiment shared here on HN.
Re: How to Lose Money
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would an option ever be 50/50? You are getting the odds you pay for... On a double zero roulette wheel, you have about a 47% chance of hitting red. There's options I'd buy at that price, and options I wouldn't. With options in particular you also have your various calculations regarding time, volatility and so forth. But you can be pretty sure if an option is being bought and sold, that the buyer and the seller a…
I think the OP is pointing out that many people think of options as a bet on stock price movement with the probability of success being the probability of the stock moving. When in fact volatility, time decay and many more factors are really shaping the success probabilities.
Agreed all those factors go into the value and it's important to understand what you are purchasing.
At the same time it is a leveraged position. If winds tilt in your favor you have the option for 100 shares of the underlying for only the cost of the premium.
Re: How to Lose Money
#46Shorting call options also has a nice feature: there is no limit to how much you can lose.
But really, what this article misses is a tip about leverage!
Whatever your plan to lose money is, make sure you're leveraged. So that you can lose X time the amount you would lose if you only put your own money on the line. Eventually, you'll quickly lose much more than you had in the first place!
Re: How to Lose Money
#47> Buy some $GME swag from me right now to lose money instantly.
Paper hands, smh.
Re: How to Lose Money
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might also be true that neither the buyer not the seller, in any transaction, are happy about it as such . It could, or even probably should be, argued that one should remain dispassionate about the outcome of any specific transaction in particular. If you can't do that, then you probably are gambling, and that's probably a bad thing.
> It might also be true that neither the buyer not the seller, in any transaction, are happy about it as such. "Happy" here is used in a very specific sense: If two parties engage in a transaction without coercion, it must be because they are both made better off by the transaction or they would both be less happy without the transaction. This is where "gains from trade" come from. The ability to make this statement…
Thanks for clearing that up. Obvious now.
Re: How to Lose Money
#491. Trade Options
Cries
That was a 10k lesson I wish I didn't take.
Re: How to Lose Money
#50Aside from being a great look at the back hand of the make money online world, this was comic gold. Bravo. I laughed right out loud several times.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees it that way.