51–60 of 156 posts
So what you need to work on is how you define "success" in life. Money is a high variance objective, whereas self-improvement is a low variance objective. I think finding a good balance of variance and tolerance to risk is a key to happiness.
I'm a serious but hobbyist player with ~15k hands last month. The thinking like a poker player is mostly about being upfront about your risk tolerances and then having a culture supporting people who make the best risk adjusted decision, even if it doesn't work out. Expected Value is complicated because a 50% chance for $100 is the same as a 10% chance at $1000. It's the variance, not the EV that makes a lot of decis…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are ETFs that invest in international stocks. VT for example. That way you're not betting it all on one country.
That's a good point, betting on the world is a more viable strategy. That is at least, if the world is growing in an economic sense. With that said, since the world population will grow, I'd be willing to make that bet. In this case, I'd say the example holds up.
I've found that frequently bluffing in life pays off. Generally you don't get caught very often and the cost of getting caught generally isn't very high, even if the stakes are. You have to be prepared to take your way out of sticky situations though.
Could you give an example of this?
As much as "fake it till you make it" is a much hated approach, there's a grain of truth to it. Many people only got the chance to prove their merit by bluffing (faking?) it first. Sure, they had to ultimately deliver on the expectations, and perhaps there are more of those who faked it and then failed to deliver. It doesn't change the fact that often you don't even get the chance if you don't project an aura of confidence.
Generally speaking, being confident gets you to places. This really applies to every aspect of life.
If you act like you belong somewhere and that there can be no questions about you belonging there, people in general will not question your presence. If you seem lost, or confused people will be curious why.
Walk into a private event acting like you belong, and there are good chances nobody will realize you shouldn't be there. Walk around looking all confused and you are likely to be asked to validate your presence.
Naturally, this doesn't apply only to places, but also groups, communities, companies...
The author sounds like a losing poker player. If my calling frequency is based entirely on pot odds, a good opponent would just start bluffing me out of every pot by increasing their bet size to a point where I can’t profitably call.
> The author sounds like a losing poker player. Annie Duke has cashed 39 times at the WSOP and has won at least four million dollars at tournaments alone. Any good poker player would understand that the example was simplified for a non-playing audience. It’s so obvious it didn’t need to be stated.
This statistic is almost certainly not counting tournament buy-ins. It doesn't represent net profit. If you want to evaluate somebody's performance as a poker player, you want to look at net profit (among other things). Literally every poker player will have some wins, so if you only count the wins without counting losses, it will sound impressive but not actually mean anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not investing in ETFs after being burned by past downturns Helloooo Japan! ETFs are great, it will never happen to the US economy :) In other words, based on market behavior from multiple countries, it is definitely a possibility that ETFs won't return much in a period of 30 to 40 years.
And what's your alternative? Cash under the mattress gets killed by inflation. Gold has its runs but usually underperforms. Bonds also get killed in a downturn.
I've found that frequently bluffing in life pays off. Generally you don't get caught very often and the cost of getting caught generally isn't very high, even if the stakes are. You have to be prepared to take your way out of sticky situations though.
Other life pro tips:
- Stealing is a way to get money
- Murder may be useful
- Fraud is profitable
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think like a poker player, I skimmed the article. What they seem to fail to mention is that variance is important as well. In poker you need to play at least 10000 hands in order for variance to average down a bit. 10000 hands is still very little. So, if you have a 95% chance of going 10x that's great, but the question is: can you handle a 5% chance of having being potentially ruined for at least a decade? If not,…
> Put more extremely, if I offer you a 99% chance to take make one billion dollars (legally) and a 1% chance of being killed, would you take it? I definitely wouldn't. I would even if it offered 50+% of getting killed. The small chance you strike a billion is worth the risk.
- Right now we spend 33% of our life working, nd the stress of work impacts another 33%.
- A billion is also way more than out life expected income, but there's a big marginal reduction of value to money. But you also get it now when you're younger rather than parsing it out.
- As a random 25 year old male, you would only have a 1 in 16 chance of surviving to retirement age at 60 on your own.
I personally would only take the deal for 2.5% chance of death though.
I'm a serious but hobbyist player with ~15k hands last month. The thinking like a poker player is mostly about being upfront about your risk tolerances and then having a culture supporting people who make the best risk adjusted decision, even if it doesn't work out. Expected Value is complicated because a 50% chance for $100 is the same as a 10% chance at $1000. It's the variance, not the EV that makes a lot of decis…
mmm, you mean 5% at $1000, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value#Expected_values...
Probability distributions are complicated. Even determining what kind of distribution you are look at is difficult in many cases. Such distributions are also skewed in real life by things like insider information (in poker, that would be cheating). Even so the list is rather intimidating, assuming fair play:
Bernoulli, Binomial, Poisson, Geometric, Uniform, Exponential, Normal, Standard Normal, Pareto, Cauchy
If financial institutions (and crypto players) are using these kind of approaches to make their bets, then isn't the individual investor hopelessly outgunned in the vast majority of cases? Plus, not having a big pool of capital to absorb temporary losses makes that situation even worse.
Investment capitalism, in other words, is just a casino for the uber-wealthy. Letting it rule the economy is a serious mistake.