Live data from Hacker News

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

wsj.com

71–80 of 640 posts

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

#71

I remember a controversial scamming figure in Italy that made millions by selling lucky numbers for lotteries or exploiting people's stupidity to part them with their life savings. Her motto was "idiots _have_ to be scammed". While this figure was morally and ethically deplorable, it always made me think how her motto essentially implied that there was an element of pure natural selection happening and she saw hersel…

> how can it be anything but natural selection doing it's thing? Does it affect their reproductive chances? If not, then natural selection has nothing to do with it.

It absolutely does

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

#72

At one point I knew I could beat the market with l33t software skills. I was wrong and only realized it after donating about 3k to Wall Street.

I too don’t understand why technical analysis isn’t classified as a genre of fiction…

I think some make money trading just that or am I wrong? I’m not talking about youtubers

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

#74
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s peanuts! Congrats for realizing it early

I don't know OP but 3k can be a significant amount of money for some people esp when younger. I realise people often lose more, but that can also be because they have more money padding to lose.

The stock market is an expensive addiction. If you read subreddits like r/wsb, you’ll frequently see people losing hundreds of thousands of dollars, mortgaging houses, gambling their future on another 0dt option bet. It’s a good thing he only lost 3k!

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

#75
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a position commonly referred to as "Social Darwinism." The same logic can get you to "drunk women out by themselves _have_ to be sexually assaulted" and so on. No, it's not OK to victimize people just because they're vulnerable. It's an absolutely odious caricature of moral reasoning.

I disagree with the comparison. A "drunk woman out by themselves" is, at the end of the day, just a person exercising their right to exist. A stock-market gambler, on the other hand, is literally betting on the bad decisions of whoever is on the other side of their trades. It's a predatory position to be in, and deserves a whole lot less sympathy.

That same logic says the rapist is betting on stupid women.

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

#76
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how can it be anything but natural selection doing it's thing? Does it affect their reproductive chances? If not, then natural selection has nothing to do with it.

Take a wider view - the people with economic power are generally the people who use it for economically sensible things. Someone who spends irrationally is going to end up with no money. This is a similar process to natural selection - because the unviable strategies are removed, everything that is around is using a viable strategy. This woman was forcing people with unviable financial beliefs (that led to them being…

No, the resources diverted to people with "unviable financial beliefs" were done so in a proper market-efficient way, and would have been spent in perfectly ordinary ways no different from the average person of modest means, if it weren't for the scams.

Diverting people's resources to unproductive, antisocial scammers based on arbitrary educational criteria is the only "ruinous" thing in this picture. They are the economic inefficiency.

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

#77

The most difficult part about the stock market is that stocks don't move for the reasons people think. People think fundamentals, news, financial performance, or chart patterns matter. But none of it does. Markets are driven purely by supply and demand. And in this case, supply and demand for the stock itself. Fundamentals are already priced in. Financial performance is already priced in. Expectations are priced in,…

The market is not efficent. The fundamentals are only partialy priced in. However finding the times when the difference is significant is not easy.

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

#78

If you have the math chops, you should really try to get into it just so you can realize you are not going to make a money making algorithm. I got knee deep into it out of boredom during Covid and was able to have the "aha" moment where you realize the best you can do is buy index funds or just long hold companies you believe in that are in your area of expertise.

Isn't that how RenTech got started? From what I understand, that fund still does huge gains, and can't get too big.

RenTech was founded by legit signals processing guys who cut their teeth breaking codes for the NSA and basically invented ML for the stock market. They also built the best dataset in the world (at the time) for stock info as a competitive advantage. There's no real way to duplicate what they did today when everyone else is already doing quant trades to take advantage of suckers.

Note: There's a great podcast on RenTech by Acquired: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/renaissance-technologies

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

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of sneering about "idiots" and inventing pseudoscientific gibberish about natural selection is to wash one's hands of moral responsibility for scamming naive young people, the elderly, or adults with psychiatric or cognitive disabilities. "It wasn't me robbing your college-age son out of a new car, that was just natural selection doing its thing! So long, losers!" My mom was a very crappy person who stron…

There's a difference between a grandma losing money to a phone scam and this kind of "hustle economy" gambling. I've talked to a lot of people who participate in this stuff, they always know the odds exactly . They're fully aware. It's a combination of greed, thrill and attention seeking that doesn't deserve sympathy. Everybody who participates in hawk tuah coin crypto rug pulls knows how stupid it is, they just thin…

Addiction takes over rationale. Everyone knows crack cocaine is bad. They know “the odds” too, yet they can’t stop.

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

#80
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. Money represents resources, and it’s objectively better for society for resources to be in the hands of people who are not fools, instead of those who are.

You sound foolish, I’m gonna need to take all your money. Don’t worry, I’m being objective.

We don't need to take money from the fools. They'll give it away.
Post reply on HN