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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

#461

Post by anon7725 »

caminante wrote: post #347
anon7725 wrote: post #69

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”.

The N=1 or handful of people that are your exception kind of prove the rule. Here's the thing...if you want to be pedantic, you need to explain how someone persists such alpha over time with examples. Not easy. edit: See my note below on RenTech.

I would think that the ways that people generate consistent alpha would include scale advantages, information asymmetry, execution advantages, geographical advantages and a strategic edge. Usually some combination of those factors.

Someone like Warren Buffet has a once in a generation skill combined with massive scale and information advantage (he sees deals in publicly-traded stocks before anyone else). You may claim that it’s not fair to cite Buffet here, but he’s just the most public example of market actors with a durable advantage.

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

#462

Post by iamthemonster »

yieldcrv wrote: post #147
iamthemonster wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every so often I receive commercially sensitive information about my company which I'm not allowed to disclose before it's formally communicated to the stock market. For fun, I try to predict what impact it'll have on the share price (though of course I can't actually trade!) I can successfully predict the direction of the share price movement 50% of the time and successfully predict the magnitude of the share price…

But in what time frame, can you predict that?

None.

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

#463

Post by mancerayder »

bluepizza wrote: post #449
mancerayder wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Which sounds similar to how gambling addicts report their thoughts on their addiction - that they are smart enough to learn poker, or they know enough basketball to be able to predict outcomes. Some people are smart enough to learn poker, and build careers out of them. And there are many books on poker. You picked a poor example.

A gambling addict thinks they can learn to play poker because there is a small elite of professional poker players. Which is exactly what an amateur trader thinks - I will learn to beat the market, because Ray Dalio did. I used the poker example precisely because of this parallel between a very small elite and an overwhelming majority of loss makers.

You're right in that sense that people think they can learn to be the best, and fail at it, as only few succeed. The game wouldn't have tournaments if that were true no one could consistently win financially.

You're also right that it triggers the addiction itch in some vulnerable individuals!

I play poker and would never be stupid enough to put real money on it. It's great as a social game for me where 25 dollars is the risk.

Don't hate the game...

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

#464

Post by ghxst »

hipadev23 wrote: post #433
ghxst wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This to me on a surface level this seems totally fine, however I can't help to feel conflicted when that money is being spent on some of the more "predatory" games like gachas, however I'm not sure if it's really too different from kids spending their money on pokemon cards either. Do you feel different about those or would you say it's the same thing?

There’s nothing to say it was predatory games. Roblox is a platform with a vast number of games from unaffiliated developers.

Oh yeah I should have clarified my post wasn't necessarily aimed at Roblox but rather generally speaking.

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

#465

Post by mancerayder »

jdefr89 wrote: post #454
mancerayder wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Dunno about everyone but my 9-5 salary is awesome. I do Vulnerability Research at an MIT lab. Working there is amazing. Much rather my situation than one where I am forced to “trade” and make it big in order to eat and or anything else in life. Great 9-5 jobs are out there and it’s funny because I used to think of them as “awful slave” jobs. Used to think having to do a 9-5 was something to avoid at all costs. Came t…

That particular job sounds amazing, I'd love a 9-5 doing research!

I've been working in the dreaded evil industry (non tech but I am in tech) for decades and gave up trying to find a job I loved. Corporate politics sucks that away.

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

#466

Post by Tade0 »

hollerith wrote: post #458
xxpor wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one had an opinion about Vietnam? I was 13 in 2003, plenty of people had an opinion about 9/11, civil liberties, and Iraq.

I don't recall any opinions about Vietnam and would probably have remembered if someone had expressed an opinion to me. And the war or whatever we call the situation in Gaza would be something I'd want to shield my 13-year-old child from having any knowledge of if I were a parent -- for basically the same reason I'd want to shield them from learning about sadomasochistic sex as long as possible.

I guess it's part of growing up when there's no longer any living memory of war on your soil.

Anyway I need to ask the same question I always do in such conversations: what's the plan when this hypothetical child hits legal age and immediately receives the legal right to learn about all of this at once?

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

#467

Post by netsharc »

hollerith wrote: post #441
Tade0 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's normal for 13 year olds to have strong opinions on such topics - they have plenty of time to refine them or even change their mind. I would be more worried about those who by this age didn't develop any interest in geopolitics - it affects them all the same but they typically don't understand why and pick whatever source tells a more compelling story.

When I was 13 (in the US in the 1970s) none of my classmates or friends ever expressed any interest in geopolitics or international relations.

That's probably the benefit of you not being 24/7 glued to the broadcast system called social media. I imagine in the 70s you spent your time mostly with friends in real life, and geopolitics was just 10 easily missable minutes on TV every evening.

Sure maybe there's a minority of kids with social media/smartphone bans nowadays, but they're probably as plentiful as 13 year olds interested in geopolitics in the 1970s.

I browse Instagram's TikTok clone ("Reels") when idle, it's rather dull, when that hurricane hit a few weeks ago, the stories were all about that, a few days later it was forgotten. Obviously, lately it's been about Luigi Mangione...

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

#468

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

CocaKoala wrote: post #320
mordymoop wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, the problem with market timing is it requires two decisions that for the marginal investor are inconsistent. That's why people who sell at a high fail to reenter at a low, and also why people who stay invested at the high remain fully invested long after prices revert to a much lower level.

This suggests the answer is... fundamental analysis, which neither camp is doing.....

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

#469

Post by netsharc »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #413
guelo wrote: 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.

[flagged]

If Ukraine's fighting back include indiscriminate bombing of the majority of Russian cities, cutting off their water and food supplies (letting Ukrainian civilians attack aide trucks), then, we'd have more equivalence in your ridiculously simplistic logic.

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

#470

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

fullshark wrote: post #270
JKCalhoun wrote: post #210

> 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 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.

There's more to assets than US equities, the Fed would be far more concerned with serious weakness in the Treasury market, and Treasuries often move inverse of US equities.
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