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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2830 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 1, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Someone recently claimed that people here would greatly outperform the market given their higher-than-average intelligence. So let's run a hypothetical - you've got $1m and your goal is to 5x it (pre tax) in the next 2 years. Perhaps we can look back at replies to this post few years later and see how everyone does. Anything goes, from investing to leveraging your unique skills or connections if you have any.

My plan would be this: 900k into a leveraged Uranium long. 100k dry powder for any other opportunities - long Korean hardware stocks (Samsung, SK Hynix) right now, then rotate to INTC leaps and/or lithium, then try to time crypto bottom and buy a few good coins on spot (LINK, HYPE). I think Uranium position does a 3-4x so would have to do a magical 14-23x with that $100k.

I recommend investing in ASML and in the public companies which are part of supply chain for memory. I have not done any research on this but this video says https://youtube.com/watch?v=mDG_Hx3BSUE?si=rSt0Czli9tTA6kzo that they are not making as much profit as they can be given the circumstances. I have no idea about investing, this is all just my blind guess.

I just don't see people losing money on this, except for opportunity cost. The potential for a nvidia like spike is there.

I do greatly outperform the market. I'm also not crazy enough to aim for several hundred percent a year returns. That is how one under performs the market.

Someone recently claimed that people here would greatly outperform the market given their higher-than-average intelligence

I am not seeing why. It presumes the market is some kind of rational mechanism, akin to a puzzle, that needs to be figured out for guaranteed superior return. I know I have higher-than-average intelligence, and I am shit at predicting markets. I know many people who are way smarter than me and still are shit at predicting markets. OTOH, some people with pretty average intelligence become millionaires on the market. I don't think it works the way it's implied here.

My genuine expectation is the next explosion/bubble (if AGI isn't cracked circa 2028 as seemingly expected) is robotics, specifically automated robotics.

I expect quadcopter-style autonomous drones, human-form-factor robots, and non-humanoid robots are about to see a surge in usage. Elon announcing that they'd literally shut down Tesla production lines to build more Optimus robots seems like one of those screaming sirens indicating what the future brings if he's positioning himself to dominate the production of physical robots NOW.

And this and other indicators have not percolated through to the mainstream awareness yet, so we're absolutely still 'early' to the game. And with the looming population crisis, robots are going to be a NECESSARY tech tree branch to explore.

So what are some companies in that branch of the tech tree that stand to gain from the 'intermediate' phase of the robotics industry?

Do I know specifically which stocks are best to aim for a 5x? Hell no.

Tesla would be a good one... but hard to see it genuinely 5xing in a short period given how inflated its value already seems.

Otherwise, make a few bets on some pharma companies to discover something even cooler than magical weight loss drugs (likely with AI assistance). Problem there is FDA approval being slow.

There's already been a pretty crazy runup in valuations of robotics companies plus China being market leader makes it harder to get in

Agreed, but even aiming at the companies manufacturing intermediate parts can work.

(I just have an ETF that holds robotics and automation stocks)

The Chinese dominance is concerning.

Personally I'm bearish on Chinese industry in the medium term, so I'd still prefer holding what few U.S. options exist.

Unfortunately I believe that all US based robotics companies are overvalued, so it's too late for outsized returns. 1X raised last round at $10b valuation... FigureAI raised at $39b... and Tesla is at 1.35t market cap... I think elon can juice it up 2-3x in the coming years given his impeccable marketing skills, but that's about it. Not to mention that China is so far ahead on this in every way, gonna be a while US companies catch up. Unitree IPO at $7b valuation seems compelling though.

Yeah friends of mine have made some great returns on robotics investments in the last couple years but current pricing for Western domiciled robotics startups seem massively inflated.

I feel like this is just punting on stuff and not how I would professionally trad to achieve that goal.

Here is what I would do. Study every product offered by wealth advisors or etf sponsor etc and try to figure out how to use those as timing tools.
Two recent ones

  1. At the end of the year I look for trades that have losts to position for January rips. Why? Direct indexing is growing as a product and now has 100’s of billions in assets. What does it do - its takes losses to offset taxes. Especially at the end of the year. This year I bought a lot of chemical stocks. CLX, Dow plus a few more that were in the down big camp. Index on markets has not down much to start the year. All these names rallied 15-20% between Dec 30 - Jan 15. There is some art to timing the longs but this edge seems repeatable yearly and does not take a lot of tech.

  2. The double levered etfs all need to rebalance daily. The low in silver was basically 1:25 pm. When does the double levered silver etf do its rehedging? You guessed correct 1:25. I believe you got a $8-10 pnl from 1:25 to 2:00. You can pretty much do this trade in a retail account. If you were Jane St and wanted to do these arbs and do real size then yes you would need a tech stack to minimize slippage. I’ll be honest i missed the timing on this one. But I should have known this.

If you only did these trades at 100% account value. You now are up 25-30% in January. Keep searching for edges that will pop up in large retail products and I think you could turn $1m into $5 min in 2 years if you really focused and went all-in on these things.

Leveraged uranium long sounds stupid to me. If you mean doing something that is an etf and leverages for you. The daily rebalancing kills performance. I guess it’s fine if you are taking out the margin yourself. Everyone wants to have some brainy macro thesis right to brag about, but the real way to make money in markets is to figure out a bunch of edges to work and grind out pnl monthly.

Leveraged uranium long sounds stupid to me. If you mean doing something that is an etf and leverages for you.

I should've clarified. In this case, by leverage I meant stock picking uranium miners. Miners outperform spot = leveraged uranium long. Perhaps getting some leaps on miner stocks if liquidity is there, would effectively be a 3-4x leverage on spot uranium.

Be careful. Miners can be hard. Lots of fraud and poor governance in the sector. You can get the price right and lose because some African Warlord stole your uranium or insiders ripped you off on related party transactions. A lot can go wrong.

Someone recently claimed that people here would greatly outperform the market given their higher-than-average intelligence.

IMO the way to beat the market with your higher than average intelligence is to either bust your ass and build something great that people need or join a quant fund and work in a mentorship with other traders and use their capital and proprietary technology stack. Everything else is just spinning a roulette wheel.

If the time horizon were a little longer, I'd try to secure a congressional seat in a backwater district and use a mix of insider trading, shady book deals, and campaign finance embezzling to hit the target.

My financial advisor is routinely shocked that my personally managed stock portfolio outperforms all the managed funds. It consists mostly of commodities, tobacco, blue chips, and mining(which I buy and sell to try to get ahead of metals price changes).

But 5x in two years? That's ambitious.

I'm also long commodities and mining, the hilarious explosion in gold was good for me. I've sold some even though my fundamental thesis remains sound.

This:

Someone recently claimed that people here would greatly outperform the market given their higher-than-average intelligence.

ie “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” was a favorite discussion topic both on the SSC open thread and on this forum in the early days, and still comes up occasionally.

I don’t think it’s a hugely useful conversation. Almost nobody beats the market in the long term, and if you can consistently beat benchmark by a few percent a year for a decade or two you’re a star fund manager.

To make the kind of return you’re describing you need to gamble or cheat (or both, as the latter generally amounts to the former).

If I was gambling, I’d try to ride the comedown of the emerging markets bond boom of the last couple of years (which is inevitable whenever larger cracks appear in the global credit market).

if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?

but I did eat breakfast am rich

ie “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” was a favorite discussion topic both on the SSC open thread and on this forum in the early days, and still comes up occasionally.

I've always rejected the question's premise. One can always do a No True Scotsman as to what really counts as rich, but I'm fairly certain the average SSCer or Mottizen was and is well above average in income and net worth, especially age adjusted. Common exceptions might be some of those still in graduate school or otherwise in some early-on-shit-gobbling phase of their career like being a medical resident.

I don’t think it’s a hugely useful conversation. Almost nobody beats the market in the long term, and if you can consistently beat benchmark by a few percent a year for a decade or two you’re a star fund manager.

To make the kind of return you’re describing you need to gamble or cheat (or both, as the latter generally amounts to the former).

Agreed, it's not a useful conversation. Any individual investor able to double $1M in two years just got lucky from gambling.

ie “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” was a favorite discussion topic both on the SSC open thread and on this forum in the early days, and still comes up occasionally.

The problem with trying to profit off of being smart is that

(a) Prices are set by the marginal trader, not by the average. There's a lot of stupid people pushing prices every which-way. It's true that dumb people create what could be opportunity, but other dumb people also ruin the opportunity

(b) Related but different, is there often isn't enough liquidity to exploit your information.

Sort of tangentially, something that comes up a lot of the time in like, any real business I've looked into, is that local competition is crazy and desperate enough to disregard regulation. They get away with it most of the time, but I'm just not comfortable risking six figure fines (or worse) just to make a go at house flipping.

If I had 1m$ I wouldn't bother with investing in markets. Way too many good ideas to pursue in the military industrial complex that will pay off handsomely.

What ideas are those? Every big Euro and most US VCs and a lot of other private equity is super into early-mid stage defense now, the big private companies like Anduril and that German drone company are valued lik AI firms, and the big public companies are trading at tech-level multiples priced to perfection for insane earnings growth over the next few years.

Right now the bom for a sniper style turret is quite cheap. You take couple of 22cal to .50 and the rest is core xy. And combination of AI + classical algorithms could make the governing software both capable and able to fit into modest hardware. Throw couple of sensors for the wind and rain and you should be able to throw a bullet quite far away with nice precision. The west was moving in direction to have dumb guns and smart munitions. I think that the opposite approach is better.

I used to work with some guys who did a related project ~20 years ago. I think you’re slightly underestimating the difficulty of reliable, real time image processing, but more importantly, I think you’re seriously underestimating the culture around automated weapons. Even in peak COIN years, there was an obsessive focus on “human in the loop”. You could only point, not shoot. Couple that with the regulatory and reliability hurdles, and your project bogs down pretty easily.

Those qualms probably go away in an Ukraine situation, sure. Until a Western nation starts planning for that, you might have a hard time with funding.

The west was moving in direction to have dumb guns and smart munitions.

That's partly because smart guns (or rather, what smart guns enable, which is "can technically fire automatically") are illegal in the West. That's not so relevant in wartime, but is definitely relevant in peacetime.

And by "smart gun" I mean systems that actually improve the gun's performance- adjustable full-auto rates of fire, computer controlled triggers and optics, ammunition counters (though that's mostly a meme), etc. You see the explosion in development for guns that were functionally banned 10 years ago in the US (short rifles and shotguns with stocks, pseudo-full-auto that's not meaningfully distinguishable from the real thing, etc.); if we went further than that we'd have a better outlook on what the tech can actually provide.

Samsung has made automated turrets for the Korean DMZ for a long time, and armed uncrewed ground vehicles have started popping up in Ukraine. I think you're right about Western moral qualms about such things, but they have started popping up. In applications where they're more clearly defensive and not typically anti-personnel (autonomous CIWS, for example), they have been accepted for decades at this point.

Smart munitions are going to win at longer ranges where gun accuracy starts falling off, though. That isn't always the case, but I think it's another factor in the decisionmaking there.

Yeah but you're not accomplishing that for 1M plus the art of producing things as a defense supplier is just as much knowing the right people to go to in order to sell to the required specifications than just 'make a doohickey and they will come'

I think it's enough for a seed, considering @Lizzardspawn want to do 1-2 funding rounds before the 2 years are up anyways (otherwise you'll never 5x your 1M this quickly).

Sure, you can't do the entire R&D up to (or including) production for the first order on that budget, but 5 guys can cook up something good enough for the first round of funding after a couple of months.

I'd be more worried about the idea in general. A sniper turret will not take out most types of drones, and it will be extremely vulnerable to airborne drones. I don't think most western states are in the market for something like that right now. They worry about drones and counter-drones, not anti-infantry. That leaves mostly autocrats looking to suppress civilian unrest, which is morally abhorrent and also not a huge market.

That leaves mostly autocrats looking to suppress civilian unrest, which is morally abhorrent and also not a huge market.

Oh come on - this is what near IR lasers with eye tracking are - can be cobbled in a week.

Valid, leveraging your know-how in specialized niche is a proven way for outsized returns

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