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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

#561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing a key word: informed consent. Both are lacking that.

The gap between consent and informed consent is narrow. The gap between consent and threat of violence may as well be the grand canyon.

Interesting. For me, while I don’t love the idea of being forced into something I don’t want, psychologically I understand that my choice is being taken away. In the case of deception or fraud, I would feel complicit and stupid, and that would stick with me and burn a long time.

I’m thinking about how people who are raped by force often feel ashamed, but also that people who are defrauded out of their money are also often too ashamed to come forward.

Of course neither should be the case, but I don’t think there’s that much difference between the two, at least for me.

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

#563
post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Israel is not the product of "the latter end of colonialism". It was the product of the Holocaust, which occurred just three years before its founding. Should Europe have used Palestine for this purpose, that is debatable. But to lump it into the same colonial endeavors such as England's occupation of India or Belgium's occupation of the Congo just doesn't add up.

That is an oversimplification of history https://www.britannica.com/event/Balfour-Declaration

Yes, there was a lot of factors, going back years before WWII, but I still believe that the aftermath of the Holocaust was major contributing factor to the creation of the State of Israel.

https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/holocaust-factor...

The Holocaust created hundreds of thousands of European Jewish refugees and international sympathy which had an effect on the UN vote for statehood.

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

#564
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed this sort of advice is standard - but many people don’t follow it because it’s boring. One way to make this sort of advice “not boring” is to apply the advice to 90% of your net worth (or cash flow), but then give yourself permission to “gamble” with the other 10%. For me, that has fulfilled my personal interest in playing around in the markets for fun while still building/growing a traditional “safe” portfoli…

This is the way. Boring is, well, boring. Slice off some small percentage to do high risk investments with to sate your FOMO. Buy GME, sell it for Doge, and short TSLA with that pool after inhaling too much r/WSB because you want to think you're a genius.

Why do I need to get my ya-yas off gambling any part of my retirement? There is zero coherent nor compelling reason to tie your enjoyment of gambling to the size of your portfolio.

To be clear I’m not opposed to gambling. I enjoy occasionally going to the local poker room and have an established bankroll. I have plenty of fun at $1/$2 tables even though the buyin is a fraction of a fraction of my net worth. I am mildly profitable in the long run, but nobody sane would suggest I’d be better off at the $100/$200 tables even though my Vanguard balance could easily support it.

All of this advice to keep it at 10% also ignores what happens when you lose most of that. Do you restart with a new 10%? Ideally no, but that’s really unsatisfying to somebody who’s enjoying their new day trading hobby.

Honestly just save yourself the headache. Put your nest egg into index funds and find some other way to make your life exciting. Gamble with pocket change from your entertainment budget. Or maybe even just don’t.

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

#565
post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an oversimplification of history https://www.britannica.com/event/Balfour-Declaration

Yes, there was a lot of factors, going back years before WWII, but I still believe that the aftermath of the Holocaust was major contributing factor to the creation of the State of Israel. https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/holocaust-factor... The Holocaust created hundreds of thousands of European Jewish refugees and international sympathy which had an effect on the UN vote for statehood.

I don't take issue with the creation of Israel as a means to put all the displaced Jews somewhere. I take issue with that the land provided for this project was taken without the consent of any of the nations from which it was taken, which is colonialism and why it's impossible to separate Israel from the colonialist roots that helped create it. Just as it's impossible to not see it as an act of Western dominance towards the middle east to whom it was done. Like, there's no reason at all (apart from latent, extremely quiet antisemitism on the part of the Allied powers post WWII that they didn't want to discuss) that all those refugees couldn't have been subsumed into any of these countries, especially America, who at the time was boasting not only the only economy not obliterated by WWII, but also shit tons of open land. We could've absolutely made room for all the Jews that would be sent to colonize Israel (yes I chose that word on purpose).

However localizing it in an area none of them had any stake in was better politically, and yeah it meant pissing off basically every neighboring country to Israel, but that was also in line with the other priorities the West was holding: a strategic, permanent emplacement in the middle eastern region that would not ever oppose Western interests in any way, because it owed it's existence to the West.

It's a brilliant strategy overall as long as you ignore how it treated entire swaths of humanity as beneath consideration for what their own futures looked like, as long as those swaths of humanity were darker in complexion than yourself.

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

#566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you're saying is you avoid timing the market (which doesn't work) by timing when you buy shares? What?

No. You invest the same amount of money at a regular cadence throughout the year. The end result is that you obtain less shares when the price is high, and more shares when the price is low. It's explicitly not timing the market.

It's implicitly timing the market. If you have all the money available at the beginning of the year a better strategy is to just invest everything asap.

If you get the money monthly (e.g. from salary) then that's just normal investing and you don't have a choice anyway.

If you think that is some clever strategy then honestly you probably should get professional advice because you have some fundamental misunderstandings of the stock market.

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

#567

I’m old enough to remember when you couldn’t just buy one share (you had to by a “lot” of 100), and when I actually received a paper stock certificate that I had to sign and mail to my broker. Rubes will try to beat the market and one in 1000 will succeed. Ignore them and follow the basics. I’ve been investing since the 80s and all my peers that did the boring thing are retiring comfortably.

The boring thing being buy and hold?

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

#568
post #99
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey look, it's Ryan from The Office

I had to google it, but I guess you're insinuating that I've done crack? Fact is, it's smoked cocaine, and the level of scaremongering about it was pretty absurd compared to powder cocaine, amphetamine, or opiates, all arguably just as bad.

That's not what I'm insinuating.

https://youtu.be/eDiU2p2uzVI?feature=shared

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

#569

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…

This is the reason dollar-cost-averaging works. You buy less (shares) when the market is high, and more when it is low, without thinking about it and without trying to "time" your transactions (which almost always fails unless you have inside info).

Please everyone note that there is a long-standing and somewhat pointless argument over whether or not DCA means “regular monthly contributions” versus “taking a lump sum contribution and dividing it up into contributions over time”.

Strictly speaking time in the market beats timing in the market. If you have a lump sum, the theoretically best option is to put it into an index fund today.

Most people in most situations don’t have one lump sum to invest, so recurrent monthly contributions to retirement accounts is the way to go (and what OP here is advocating).

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

#570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because most assets have unlimited upside and unlimited downside. A stock or asset can go ballistic for decades like Apple or Bitcoin, or it can fall to zero value Spot equities and crypto have limited downside. You put in x, most you can lose is x as you observed. Unlimited downside is not a thing outside certain exotic derivatives.

Even if zero is the bottom, an asset can have unlimited downside. It can go from $0.1 per share to $0.0001 per share and so on without end. Or, with the rational perspective, after 0 the downside does not matter anymore. An asset cannot go below zero, at least the assets I know of. An investment can go below zero and beyond, when you use leverage. But that's a derivative and not an asset, as you've pointed out. What…

>> Even if zero is the bottom, an asset can have unlimited downside. It can go from $0.1 per share to $0.0001 per share and so on without end. Or, with the rational perspective, after 0 the downside does not matter anymore. An asset cannot go below zero, at least the assets I know of. An investment can go below zero and beyond, when you use leverage. But that's a derivative and not an asset, as you've pointed out.

This is drivel. Being able to tag on infinite 0s after the decimal doesn’t make an asset have unlimited downside, the limit is $0 as you yourself apparently know.

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