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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   3129 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 8, 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?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Open an E*Trade account and trade your own capital first. Show that you’re good at it.

Piggybacking: i actually do have a personal account where I have been significantly beating the overall market for about 10 years now. Is there any way I can leverage that to get a good job in finance?

In terms of 'rock up at an interview with your account', unless you've shown spectacular overperformance or have generated a meaningful social media following somehow it's pretty unlikely to be able to get recognition. If it's more along the lines of 'Have been sitting in a big financial community for a few years, made friends with somebody high in the industry and they put a good word in for you' that's more likely to be productive but that's more complicated than pure performance.

Depends on whether earning roughly double the S&P for most of the past 10 years counts as "spectacular" enough to compensate for me not having a social media following lol. Didn't realize I needed to be live streaming trades on twitch for to a horde of teenagers.

No, that's probably not spectacular enough. 30% CAGR or whatever you're talking about isn't all that rare. An individual investor can realistically do that. It'd be harder with a fund's size. Speedboat vs cruise ship.

Well, it's just funny to me. Growing up, it was pounded into me that it's incredibly hard to beat the market, it's all hyper-effecient to the point where almost every active investor underperforms, etc. Then it turns out that I can, in fact, outperform, but no one in the industry cares because I'm just too small. Maybe someone should offer an outperforming fund for small investors, to take advnatage of all these "speedboat" factors that apparently Wall Street doesn't care about.

There are many persistent myths about investing. The whole market efficiency thing was overstated. Yes there's some efficiency but never full efficiency in all areas. The myth that you can't time the market is perhaps just as pernicious; started by some fund managers in the 80s who failed at doing it and got people to believe that everyone else should and would fail at it too. "If I can't do it, no one else can do it either, and they should be discouraged from trying to keep me from looking bad" type logic.

But how do you expect to keep your speedboat factors when people and their money pour into your fund? Before long you'd have to space out your trades over days and weeks to keep from moving the price too much, just like the bigger boys. You'd have to cap the money at a pretty low set point, and if you take let's say 1% annually from each client you wouldn't become filthy rich by doing this, given that you'd probably have to employ some people to help you out. Idk.

Can I ask if you actually in the finance industry? It's OK if you don't, I just want to calibrate whether you're speaking from experience or your personal opinions.

My background is programming, where it's relatively common for people to come in without formal CS degrees, but having experience in other ways. Someone who built their own app that's "like an existing big name service, but better" would be very impressive! Even if it doesn't scale up, that's OK, we all know that scaling is a difficult problem and that's why we have huge engineering teams. Just the fact that someone could do that on a small scale is still impressive and would at least get them an interview, or possibly some funding to try a startup if they apply somewhere like YC. It's very odd to me that the big finance industry seems to take the opposite view, where first-hand experience and small startups count for nothing, it's much more about "who you know" and "where did you go to school."

I'm just an amateur investor. I haven't worked in the field.

I didn't say that personal experience is not valuable. I'm sure it is. But the bar is much higher for what's impressive when you're investing your own small amounts of money. The very best private investors manage to earn more than double the index, sometimes a lot more, although beating the market by 2x is really good in itself!

If you do run a fund you'll have to deal with all sorts of dumb rules meant to provide safety, like not having more than, I think it was 5 or 10 percent invested in a single stock. You can't go big on a few well chosen bets. Try getting great returns when you're forced to hold 20+ stocks at all times and you can't jump in and out when you feel like it. It's a different ball game, that's what I'm trying to say.

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