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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   2379 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 7, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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How are everyone’s stocks doing? Market was obviously overvalued, but I thought the fed would be even more anemic than it has been, so inflation would devalue it, not straight-up losses. I tried to crash-proof my portfolio with gold miners, but they’re the worst of a bad bunch. You’d think with the inflation and gold’s historical reputation, it wouldn’t move 1-to-1 with the stock market (or the printer, same thing). But it’s not a loss until you sell, so in for a penny, in for a doubloon.

Fortunately, the oil stocks I bought during covid have been keeping my head above water. Now I’m just waiting for spy to go lower to I can lever it to hell, either through leaps or 3x etfs .

And thanks to the guy on here who recommended tobacco based on historical overperformance, that’s been good. I’ll crash-proof it to the (black) gills with cancer next time (it’s okay, I used to smoke).

I do a combo of Roth IRA + the lazy portfolio 3-way split. I'm avoiding looking at the numbers as of late so as not to stress out since they're investments for the very long term. I don't really do individual stocks or options since I don't value my financial predictive ability that highly. I recently broke that rule and tried crypto trading and wound up with universal losses, though fortunately I only used a relatively small amount of play money to buy in. This has only reinforced my personal rule to stick to long-term stuff and not try to beat the market.

Buy and hold is comfortable and has good expected returns, I recommend it to friends and family. For me though, even though I know it’s a tall order, I attempt to beat the market, because I enjoy the time I spend thinking about it. Even if I fail, as long as I keep transaction costs low, the expected return should be the same, minus my time, which is worth zero.

My go-to example for how beating the market can be done, and after which I decided to become more active, is covid: rats saw it coming, we had a discussion where people suggested puts on cruise companies, which would have 15xed a few weeks later. The main opposition to buying those puts wasn’t because we didn’t believe covid would be bad, but an ill-placed faith in the all-knowing market.

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