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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   432 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 1, 2026

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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