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tl;dr: It seems almost impossible to judge the validity, reliability and authenticity of the goals and states principles of those outside of your circle. Do they actually believe it, do they actually think it's true, will they actually do it? Eg, "No new wars" and the Kamala deadenders who run the D's to pick an example from each ruling tendency.
I come here to-day to humble brag about my money, but in a culture war way; and to share my sure to succeeded investment system. This is financial advice, and you can trust it! (This is not financial advice, do not trust me.)
I've recently made a bit of a small amount of a fuckton of money based on starting amounts; took my fuck around money and plowed it into you guessed it, oil futures and related industries before it became clear that no, he really is that stupid. I'm up a lot on top of my previous gains from betting (read: instructing my investment guy who tells me which southeast asian restaurants are for real) to bet as if the various Trump economic policies would:
Not meaningful increase productive employment in the US.
Not help the balance of trade issue.
Not hem china in in any way, and in fact increase their gravity as an economic center.
Not lower the debt at all, public or private; and in fact increase the debt massively. (This one didn't amount to much, there isn't much money to be made here until the US starts to go downhill for real, so it's just positioning for now.)
This compounding my gains during the Biden boom times, I am up quite a bit, so much in fact that It no longer is fun gambling haha stonks money and now I'm worried about what it does; so I'm taking it as far out of the US economic sphere as it is possible (which isn't that far) as a hedge. I would buy gold with it, but I kinda think that it might not be a good idea right now, I don't know.
As to the culture war angle: If by merely assuming that the ruling party will fail at all it's stated goals and betting against them no matter how flimsy the reasoning gets, I make a killing; how does it keep on rolling? How do people wake up and see the all the red arrows, all the "I'm warning you!"s becoming "I told you so!"s and stay hype?
It would be one thing if there was some sort of big social project that the party was ride or die for; but even it's most sacred commitment (deporting non-whites) was limited in scope (non white, but not the ones the boss or his friends or his allies rely on, H1Bs for all and Farm Scut work for everyone south of the border!) and on the optics chopping block after all.
Where is the there there? It is it all vibes, or do people really, truly believe that there is a plan?
And the actual point of the whole post: Would it be possible for such a person to convince me, even if they truly ment, and even if they were right? It's hard to imagine anything but events changing my mind at this point, especially since my fuck around money is too ballin' for the FDIC to handle anymore off of them being wrong so far.
I'm concerned I've fully closed my mind to my opponents here, but I'm also concerned that if I opened it an inch more my brain would fall out.
What's the actual position you can take that tracks any of this.
Investing in sin stocks that go up when everything else goes down; investing in companies that either provide or service debt until the recession hits, investing not in the RMB directly because damn those currency controls hit hard, but yes investing in chinese indexes and chinese growth growth stocks (fees are killer, but growth was really good so it evened out), gutting out of USD and investing in things that track weakening in USD relative to RMB and the euro, all the normal shit.
I know some things about it, but I have my guy do most of it. He has similar opinions to me and does this as his job instead of just doing it for fun.
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Congratulations! I am always happy to hear about a fellow Mottizen prospering.
There are several major administration priorities, including (1) beefing up immigration enforcement (such as by increasing integration between federal immigration authorities and local law enforcement), (2) going after racial and gendered DEI policies and set asides (e.g., the VRA's "majority minority" districts, which SCOTUS seems likely to strike down and federal contracting laws), and (3) clearing state voter rolls and voting policies of tactics amenable to machine-style vote banks (e.g. the practice of receiving mail-in-ballots after election day)
It's just that a lot of this stuff is being done in quiet backrooms with a lot of very unsexy administrative law wrangling, and so doesn't make headlines.
However, on the broader point about there not being some sort of "plan," I completely agree with you. Trump clearly plays things by the seat of his pants, and there simply isn't the personnel infrastructure around him, either qualitatively or quantitatively, to carry through some sort of grand bizarro-Great Society-level legislative initiative. Plus, Congress is very close to becoming a completely vestigial organ, and so is in no fit state to draft, amend, approve, and push through such legislation anyways.
I just don't believe any of that is real, I guess. DEI to me was always a pride flag on the lockheed martin float type of situation; the only population that REALLY got anything out of it was women, specifically white women, specifically white upper middle class women, and they are still going to get exactly as much preferential treatment (deserved or not; I'm not even making a value judgment here) as before.
On top of that, until I see movement on actually enforcing use of E verify with universal fines, It's all immigration theater. We know what actually stops people from coming, we simply choose not to do it because it hurts the bottom line for the people in the R coalition with the juice.
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Attributing one's own win in one of the many money lotteries that exist is a form of the fundamental attribution error. Most of the time, such a win is just a lucky windfall, although most people nonetheless claim they „deserve“ their luck due to being a „predictive genius“ by winning at gambling or a „hard worker“ by spending a lot of time buying figurative lottery tickets, which can take the form of oil futures, polymarket bets, or cryptocurrency. If money were distributed on a „deserving“ basis, the correlation between wealth and age would be near-zero, since existing longer does not make one morally better and therefore more deserving. But lotteries have entry fees and take time to play, so they produce a positive relationship between age and wealth.
I think centrally, the fundamental attribution error is more the inverse, the attribution of outcomes to character traits in others while blaming the situation for one's own outcomes. "He is late because he is unreliable, whereas I am late because I got stuck in traffic." Or, more on the theme, "She lost money because she gambled irresponsibly, whereas I had really bad luck with my stock portfolio."
What you describe here is something along the lines of "my good fortunes come from being hard-working and smart, whereas she merely got lucky."
That being said, I think this bias exists. Anyone can win a hand of poker, or double their investment with some financial instrument. Someone being good at investing would be them making many appropriately-sized bets over a longer period and winning enough of them.
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Wouldn't it be the opposite? People who have worked longer are deserving of more?
I don't see most work that is done in reality today as being related morally to its wage, and consequently to whatever savings are accumulated from it. For example, a lot of San Fransisco 50 year olds made way too much money in a software boom, often being head button style changer for Google for 10 years. I don't see this as entitling them to the $1 million they probably saved from that career. Yes, it's how they made their money and got it to be legally recognized as theirs, but morally they did nothing to „deserve“ it. Another way of looking at this is that I think the correlation between market wages for an occupation and deserved wage is zero, or maybe even negative. Someone who works for decades in cargo driving has done a lot to fuel the actual economy, but since their job pays close to subsistence wages, they will not have a lot of wealth at the end of a long career. But by the labor theory of deserving, they deserve a lot more than an ex-Googler.
But I reject the labor theory of deserving too, because it assigns preeminent value to people who happen to exist right now. The cargo driver may have fed his neighbors, but why do they deserve that? Why would that entitle the feeder to anything? Through the preeminent value of the people who are alive right now? How do we justify that?
If you do not take egalitarianism as an axiom, then people have different moral worths. And these worths precede anything they do, including labor. And also, serving the labor market does not actually fulfill a duty to people of higher moral worth, since the labor market is a mixture of random (in the case of the Googler's wage) and egalitarian (in the case of the trucker deserving a lot of wealth).
Either moral worth does not change with age, or it does. If it does, I think it seems the most sensible to say that it peaks during the reproductive window. This is when people need the most resources, so they can have children, and when they are the most capable in all aspects of life. So again, it seems off that old retirees would be the most deserving class of people when it comes to having wealth. They are definitely not the highest value age group, and whatever they spent their career doing probably did not increase their moral worth.
If we take a consequentialist libertarian perspective then wages are heavily correlated morally to wage. That is, whenever two people transact in a mutually consensual exchange, profit is generated and split between them in some way. That is
Total Value Produced = Consumer Value - Producer Cost
If producer can produce good X for $10 and consumer values it at $30 (subjective internal evaluation), then them buying the product generates $20 of value, distributed between the two depending on the price. If the producer sells it for $20 then both of them profit $10. If the producer sells it for $29 then the producer pockets $19 and the consumer profits $1 (in terms of getting a thing that they wanted more than they want the money they spend)
There is some ambiguity about what a fair/reasonable split should be, which is not automatically identical to the ultimate market price, but for any level of split the amount of profit someone earns will be proportional to the value created by their transactions. Which in turn means that the value someone creates is heavily correlated with the amount of money they earn. One exchange which produces 10x as much value as another exchange will result in 10x as much profit to be distributed, and likely result in both the producer and the consumer(s) getting approximately 10x as much. Google probably generates trillions of dollars of value for consumers (though the exact amount is subjective and hard to measure), and in turn earns billions of dollars of revenue. Which they deserve, because they create value. A button engineer who works at Google and does their job competently helps generate this value, in that Google would not be as convenient and usable without their work, and would have outages or errors if they messed up. The difficulty of their job is one component in the cost, but the dominant term in the moral desserts is the consumer value. The Google button engineer has done a LOT to fuel the actual economy, it just doesn't seem like a lot because the indirectness of the value they produce is hard to parse as a human, and the amount of actual labor they needed to leverage to this effect was low.
Working hard at a fixed task will create more value, so on average moral desserts will correlate with working hard. But it would be silly to Goodhart this by thinking that working hard IS moral desserts. Value created is what actually matters. Any system of moral desserts which rewards people for being inefficient is absurd.
Now, obviously there are tons of counterexamples where people get paid despite not creating value. If Google hires 30 employees for a team and one of them does the actual meaningful labor and provides $100 million of value while the others do stupid stuff, and each gets paid $1 million, then the competent one deserves more than they got while the other 29 deserve less. But somewhere in that system the $100 million is actually being earned.
Even a step up, you can have an entire company which is rentseeking, bullying competitors, squatting on legal loopholes, etc, and earns lots of profit despite not providing value to anyone. But by necessity this is rare because someone somewhere has to create the value for them to earn. I'm not saying the correlation between moral dessert and wages is 1. But it's high, even when the value someone creates is indirect. A lot of white collar work is incredibly important and impactful, which is why selfish greedy investors are willing to pay for it in the first place.
You're just assuming my trucker logic applies ten-fold to a Googler. But that begs the question of value and moral worth: the Googler only deserves what he has in that case if the trucker does too. But I was skeptical that even the trucker deserves it. Because why should economic productivity determine moral worth? This is implicitly egalitarian, because productivity is defined as serving anybody, and privileges people who have simply been alive longer, because they will have more total lifetime productivity. I think it's more fruitful to debate egalitarianism and elderly privilege directly, instead of assuming that economic productivity as normally defined in 2026 is a perfectly just way of determining who gets what.
Your total net worth is not equivalent to your lifetime productivity, because people spend and consume things. Your per-moment income is (or should be) equivalent to your lifetime productivity, because that's inherently fair. You do things for other people, other people do things to you. You get what you do. Your profit is equivalent to the amount of value you've provided to others that you have not yet been compensated for. If you provide labor which is worth $1000 of value when consumed by other people, and they pay you $1000 for it, the $1000 is literally pieces of paper. You have done good in the world and you haven't yet received a real reward for it. You deserve to have other people do stuff for you, because you've done stuff for them. Until you spend it. If you buy $500 worth of food, that represents farmers in the world doing labor on your behalf, in exchange for you having done whatever it is that you did, which is either directly on their behalf, or more likely on the behalf of someone else who did labor on the behalf of someone else who... eventually somewhere along the chain the farmer benefits from labor that someone did who benefited from labor that you did. But half as much. Because you earned $1000 and only spent $500. If you eat $500 worth of food and save $500 in your bank account, that means you have provided $500 worth of value that you still haven't been rewarded for. You're a net moral positive, in that you've created more than you've consumed. Money represents favors owed to you by society because you (or whoever legitimately earned the money you currently possess) did favors for society and hasn't received the equivalent reward in real material goods and services yet.
If someone legitimately* earns $10 million and then spends all $10 million on themselves, they're a net neutral. They produce and consume in equal measure. They do good by stimulating the economy by the consumer surplus that other people extract on top of what they themselves earn from their work. It's not an exact science, but it's proportional. On average, people who do this are probably fine, and we should consider them to be neither a saint nor a monster.
If someone legitimately earns $10 million, spends $1 million on themselves, and then donates $9 million to charity, that represents $6 million worth of real value they've provided to someone and then chose to give the rewards to someone else. This person is a saint. They create value and keep only a fraction of it for themself.
If someone legitimately earns $10 million and then spends $1 million on themselves and keeps the $9 million in their bank account to spend later, that represents $9 million worth of real value that they have provided to someone and have held the remainder in abeyance for the moment. They deserve $9 million worth of goods from society because they have done work that society has deemed to be worth $10 million, and society has promised them $10 million in exchange for their work, and they probably only did the work in the first place because they were promised this $10 million. And they've only used up 1/10 of that promise, they are entitled to the remainder. In truth, due to consumer surplus they have enabled more than $10 million to society as a whole, with the rest being captured by their employer, customers, business partners, and taxes. The $10 million is the remainder they've been promised themselves for their contributions.
If by "moral worth" you mean "is this a good and kind charitable person who sacrifices things for other people at their own expense" then no. But I reject that entire premise. Economics is not zero sum. If you are clever and efficient there's no reason you have to sacrifice your own good for other people when you can both mutually profit. A person who creates $10 million over the course of 20 years has done 10x as much for society as a younger person who has created $1 million over the course of 2 years. It's not that the former is a "better person" than the latter. Both are providing $500k to society every year, both receive $500k per year. It's that the former has chosen to behave like an intelligent long-term thinker and stockpile their rewards over time. Someone's net worth represents the total contributions they've made to society that they haven't yet cashed in. They've produced more than they've consumed. Someone who is older has had more time to do more good.
*Note that my use of the word "legitimately" is doing a lot of work here and almost begging the question. There are exceptions where people get paid money for not creating value. But, on average, as a rule of thumb, this is the case for most people. If everyone involved is mutually consenting and there aren't weird monopolies, government regulations, excessive taxes, government waste, subsidies, or rentseeking distorting things, the base case capitalist exchange creates legitimate profit for everyone involved, in which case people do morally deserve the fruits of their labor.
Two different issues are here, the nature of the economy and the moral question. Regarding the first, you take simple deterministic equations seriously. Balance = Promise Given - Promise Spent, Total Value Produced = Consumer Value - Producer Cost. I think this is a mistake. It's too simple. Econophysicists showed that random agents trading randomly will end up with exponentially distributed net worth. Income among people who are not in finance or entrepreneurship can be modeled that way. Those in entrepreneurship and finance play multiplicative games with their money, so they get a Pareto distribution which has an extremely fat tail. Those who end up at the far right edge of the Pareto distribution can just be repeatedly lucky; the model does not require intrinsic talent differences. In other words, the economy is largely a stochastic process, not a simple equation. So the person who ends up with more „promises from society“ probably just won a hidden lottery. Their luck in crypto, web software, their career, their business, does not at all trump a good moral claim to their excess wealth. You can see this in the person of Elon Musk. He ran twitter into the ground. He bought Tesla and got lucky. He originally made his money riding his wave on a fad with a company that went no where except to the typical old merger and acquisition murder-execution (t. Patrick Bateman) of a company. He won some hidden lotteries 2 or 3 times, which is expected given the size of the population, and that's why he's the richest man in the world. He's actually not smarter or harder working than a lot of FAANG developers who didn't get so lucky and who have 1/100.000th or less of his wealth as a consequence.
On morality you mention „fairness“ and „society.“ But this is more assumed egalitarianism. What if fairness and society matter less than the best individuals? Why not? I think fairness and society stand against the true, beautiful, and just. We currently have a very fair and society-approved system. Some people noticed it was not as fair as it could be, but it turned out trying to make all wealth equal, which was super fair and society-approved, actually made everyone worse off, because modest meritocracy with a lot of random slack actually brings up the median wealth a lot more than setting variance to exactly null.
What has never been tried is progressive redistribution of wealth. We currently have a moderate amount of regressive redistribution (based on progressive taxation). You know how IQ and income correlate at .4? What if we cranked that up to .9? Society would hate it, and it wouldn't be fair, but I think it would be just.
I aknowledge that there is quite a bit of randomness in the realized outcomes of money, but note that the expected value is still pretty close to average production. Lotteries in the economy are not the zero sum scenarios set up by a greedy casino in order give you negative expected value and enrich themselves in the process. They are a complicated mess of scenarios with different expectations. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. Someone who chooses good lotteries, invests in promising companies, dissolves unprofitable money sink companies, will on average end up winning more often than someone who chooses bad lotteries. Therefore the actual people with lots of money will tend to be people who had both luck AND intelligent choices that benefited the economy. Once again, this leads to a "money held" to "value provided to others" with a correlation solidly between 0 and 1.
Where did that come from? Money earned is money deserved is very unegalitarian, unless you're a blank-slatist who believes that equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are the same thing, which you clearly aren't. When I use the word fair here, I mostly mean something pretty similar to what you mean by just. This is a pointless strawman nitpick on language use, and doesn't matter.
This is absurd. Why would we favor intelligence like this? Intelligence only matters in-so-far as it allows you to make better choices and thus accomplish more stuff more efficiently. To that effect, making a meritocratic system that rewards economic output measures the actual thing that we care about. And is easier and more direct that some Goodhart measure of IQ. Your idea makes about as much sense as observing that cows eating more grass are correlated with producing more milk, and then selective breeding cows to maximize the amount of grass they eat and ignoring milk production. Why would you optimize a proxy for the thing you care about, when the proxy is actually harder to measure and select for, and only vaguely correlated with it. Someone of average intelligence who works really hard is more valuable to society than someone of great intelligence who doesn't do anything with it. The latter might as well not even exist. And it's not like high IQ people are necessarily good people who do good things, there are plenty of intelligent sociopaths who leverage their great intelligence to commit more evil. If an intelligent person is 3x as powerful as an average person, able to accomplish 3x as much at whatever they try to do, then an evil intelligent person sabotaging society is 3x as horrible as an evil average person. You might as well award the Medal of Honor to powerful enemy soldiers who were especially horrible and slaughtered your own side's soldiers. Good people do good things for other people. We want to incentivize more good things, so we should reward people proportional to how much good they do.
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Someone submitting code that broke the Google search button would cost the company on the order of a million per minute; it's only natural that Google would pay a lot to minimize that risk. Of course, there are automated processes in place to prevent and mitigate those kinds of mistakes, but that makes the work more complicated than messing around with some CSS. And even that doesn't cover all the work involved in something as seemingly simple as maintaining a button--accessibility, brand consistency, i18n, framework migrations, etc. This work is very lame but also very necessary, and not something a random trucker could do or even (unfortunately) the average CS grad could do.
Also, just informationally, as others have pointed out it's pretty much impossible for any SWE (not even the head button changer, who's probably some L7 taking home a million per year) at Google to take a decade to accumulate a million. Maybe five years or so, depending on your career progression, especially with the bull market of the past decade.
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The "I hate knowledge workers theory of value". You've said elsewhere that you are a libertarian, does that cash out to anything? You don't think people are entitled to the wage their employers have freely elected to pay them? You instead think, almost exactly, "to each according to their need"? You can make a case for communism, but this isn't really what it looks like.
$1 million? Were they a janitor?
This is untrue and easily checkable.
You read into it too much. This is not Marxism. I like knowledge workers at least as much as truck drivers. I am a knowledge worker, and I am trying to make Google-tier funny money. But I would never justify my entitlement to that money with the mere fact of acquiring it. A lot of people acquired it who did not deserve it, and some people who deserve it did not and will not acquire it.
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You seem to be using "entitled" and "deserve" interchangeably, but I think the distinction is very important. You can have your judgements about the desert of someone who got a lucky position at the right time, but if they had an employment contract they're damn well entitled to what that contract stipulates.
Are you operating under the assumption that our economic system should be set up to give people what they deserve? We have a system that (sorta) entitles people to the products of free exchange of goods and labor. This is a good system to have in place, as it provides prosperity and forms the foundation of a complex interactive society. I don't care if people deserve it or not. The reason the Googler makes more money than the trucker is because of the value they provide above the next-best guy they could hire to their employer, regardless if how much the truck driver "fuels the actual economy" (and you're kind of question-begging here: if people are paying for the Google guy's work, how's that less real than the cargo driver?)
Your argument is is one that proves too much, unless you are a skeptic about morals in general. Does a person who just happened to be taught good morals and suffered through just enough adversity and had the natural disposition to go out and be [your definition of a saint] deserve praise for the good they've done? Or were they just lucky in the same way the Google employee or even the cargo driver was?
They are interchangeable. You seem to confuse being entitled to with having. They certainly have what the contract stipulated. Are they morally entitled? Not necessarily. A lot of people are overpaid morally speaking, a lot are underpayed, a lot make money doing something morally wrong.
I suppose so, it seems to follow from the meaning of should. I certainly don't think it is set up that way.
Tangent; nobody is that good at hiring. Hiring is messy, noisy, arbitrary, feels based, not a science. Googlers were good enough, not the best just because they were paid the most. To think otherwise assigns supernatural abilities to hiring personnel, which they clearly don't have. They don't even use the best scientific techniques available for measuring talent, much less are they supernatural. But this isn't core to the main issue of moral economics, since software engineering skill isn't necessarily a moral quality anyway.
Why should a heroin trafficker go to jail if people naturally pay him more than the Googler? How is his work less real or important than Google's?
How did it prove too much? I'm not skeptical of morals in general, I'm applying morals to the economy. It seems obviously that the current system is not a moral one.
Yes, someone born with superior moral qualities deserves praise (and wealth) while somebody who merely wins a lottery does not deserve their winnings.
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Since this seems like the subthread for this sort of thing, I'll point out that if they only saved $1M from 10 years at Google, they were absolutely terrible with money.
But also, if you don't think people deserve the wages paid for their labor, you're basically at odds with almost everyone. Even Marx wouldn't say workers didn't deserve their wages.
I think Nietzsche would agree. But yes, I definitely hold a minority view. Isn't it the more logical view, though? It seems obvious to me why cognitive bias would lead most people to be wrong on this topic.
I think I agree with you; given my experience making basically nothing doing productive labor, then making lots and lots actively making the world a more hostile place to the average human, and now making at least a bit of my money eg from people ruining their lives gambling.
At no point in my life have a felt there was a meaningful positive connection between what I did, the societal value of what I did, the economic value of what I did, the moral value of what I did, and how I was compensated; if there was any correlation it was the anti-type.
A bitter pill for me, I got indoctrinated early into the cult of hard work and moral capitalism, it was a real shock to the system when I realized I was the only one who actually believed it.
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No. First of all, the idea that those with the most "moral worth" should be the wealthiest is bizarre. You then connect moral worth to "need", which is also rather strange (I guess this borrows from Marx). Then the resulting system is incoherent; as long as you're working you should be wealthy, but if you dare to retire you should not be. You could certainly build a (totalitarian) system based on these ideas, but I don't think the thing would be called "wealth" -- it would be a form of status granted by the state, not an accumulation of value.
It is need in the since of something being required for reproduction of moral people, so that there are more moral people afterwards. It's not borrowed from Marx at all. Not need in the socialist sense, as in feeding the hungry.
I did not say that, but it is also not incoherent. „He who does not work, neither shall he eat.“
It would not be any more totalitarian than the income taxes and old age pensions of the current West. It would simply tax different people and afford pensions to different people.
Actually it would be more like wealth than now. Many wealthy people today are weak and rely on the state to defend their wealth from the strong through granted ownership status. Under my idea, wealth would shift to a degree from the old and weak to the young and strong. My idea would be more libertarian because it would involve the state recognizing the natural order to a greater extent, which requires less energy to defend from exogenous shocks like individual crime and market crashes.
How so?
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Perhaps (past life)1 × (expected future life)3.
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whenever I see these "I got so rich now i'm retired" posts all can I wonder is not "how do I emulate you" but rather "what is your advise for the mass of peasants with some money to their name who are not you, and cannot become you"
Be born in a booming economy to wealthy families. Go to extremely cheap college when college graduates a rare enough to be valuable.
I don’t think most people really benefit from most financial advice simply because until you have enough generational wealth to invest, you’re stuck in the lower middle class or below where you have nothing but the income you can get from working for someone else. I just sort of laugh at retirement advice simply because if you have enough money to be able to invest a substantial sum of money, you already have enough experience with money to do okay. If you don’t, the advice of “just invest 10,000 dollars” kinda assumes a person having a spare ten grand laying around. Most would struggle to find enough to save for emergencies, and have no money to invest on the idea of retirement.
There are some pretty depressing statistics on "people who just leave money in their corporate 401k as cash", even amongst smart people. A lot of people really do need that advice.
Honestly that was me until like a year ago, and I'm a mid-30's lawyer. Not proud of it, but facts are facts.
I consider myself fortunate that my dad taught me "always contribute at least enough to get the company match; it's free money" and my first company automatically picked a target date fund as the default. Meant I was in a good spot by the time I finally did become a bit more financially literate.
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The ability to become wealthier or at least improve one's financial salutation is one of the few things anyone has some control over, unlike talent or traits (e.g. HBD). Anyone can invest in the S&P 500 or not waste money on frivolous purchases.
Sadly, as time goes by, I've become more and more convinced that finance is one of those realms that you either get or you don't, and alot of people - even ones that are highly intelligent in other fields - simply don't.
You just need to get your head straight. It's a game of probabilities. A casino may lose 5 rounds of blackjack in a row, but over the course of a month or a year they rake in the money. One bet or a few bets comes down to chance. A thousand bets? That's never down to chance.
If the results were random, there wouldn't be any consistent winners. But there are. Believing the market moves randomly gives individuals an excuse to not take full responsibility for their own actions and long term results. Those who take responsibility, and review their mistakes regularly and learn from them, will become consistent winners as long as they're willing to keep doing what 90% of people are unwilling to do.
Keep in mind I'm speaking as someone who actually 'gets it'. To a degree.
Maybe I'm expecting to much, but when you're hashing stuff out with an actual medical graduate on managing their college loan payouts and they're more than a little clueless while a friend of mine and I are just going 'No... this is easy', it kind of makes you re-think alot of things.
Granted, you seem to be less talking about financial acumen and more market management strategy. I would say they're a little bit different, and good market management strategy is alot harder than learning finance. IMO, and from my observations.
I’ve heard colleagues grouse about needing to do mathematics when “the reason [they] got into medicine was to get away from maths!” I’ve also seen frankly shocking levels of statistical ignorance in the doctor population.
One thing that stuck with me is an informal experiment a friend of mine did many years ago — he asked a few dozen consultants what a p-value indicates. I think he got a grand total of one correct answer. And these are people who are supposed to be regularly reading (and sometimes writing) academic papers!
That tracks with what I've been told. I've half-joked about somehow finding a medical Doctor Sugar Momma to get married to, in exchange for managing her financials.
The 'somehow' in that sentence is doing alot of heavy lifting, though. Among other things.
To be fair, you probably would be doing a lot of it too, if you managed to wrangle such an arrangement.
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Gellmann's amnesia comes to mind (possibly not quite the right term here). Most people have only studied a select few things in any depth at all, but we still assume that the smart doctor will know a lot about many things for some reason. Status and authority confers construals of wider credibility and competence in the observer's head. The actual polymath or renaissance man is rare, it seems.
Do you mean facts and foundational knowledge versus applied action here? Financial acumen = knowing what EPS means and how to read a balance sheet, the difference between price and value, etc etc?
What most people miss is how much of investing is a mental game, requiring an adoption of new beliefs and discarding many old ones. The person born into a family of highly successful investors would know this, while most of the rest of us chumps seem to pick up more misinformation and limiting beliefs than any sort of solid mentoring.
Pretty much. I've seen a bunch of egregious attitudes in regards to, for example, day trading, where alot of people fall into the attitude that they have to trade, despite the market not matching thier models, which turns what should be good tactics into basically betting on the market.
Or, for another example, people who flock in after a boom has occurred, asking if they should invest in your material of choice. (Looking at you, gold.)
Much like in comedy, timing is everything. That's a thing most people think can't be done. They'll parrot platitudes like "time in the market beats timing the market" and talk about how it's basically impossible to do it.
'Sitting out strength' is part of the mental game. I've come to believe that having patience before placing a trade is perhaps even more important than having the patience to wait for the flower to bloom afterwards. Trades are like farts: if you have to force it, it's probably shit.
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Are there consistent winners who (1) win consistently with short-term plays; and (2) don't rely on inside information? Based on my limited knowledge that such people are either extremely rare or non-existent.
I do think that there are people who win consistently with long-term plays. With "winning" being defined as either making a good return, like in the neighborhood of 8 percent, or outperforming the market indices in general. By all accounts, people who can consistently outperform the markets in general are very rare, but I am willing to believe that some exist.
People who consistently make money on short term swings? That's something I'm extremely skeptical about. If I hear about a short-term player consistently making money, I think he's either a liar or a cheater. But I'm open to evidence to the contrary.
And by the way, I myself made a bunch of money a few months back on a short term play. I bought QQQ right after it tanked due to a Trump tariff announcement and it seemed obvious that the market had overreacted. I've never tried anything like that before and it paid off very well. But I think that kind of situation is extremely unusual.
I think a strategy of keeping most of your investments in SPY, and then occasionally (every couple of years, but only when a real opportunity presents itself) making strong, reasonable bets during major events where you have high confidence can get you outsized returns (e.g. I almost doubled my net worth during the first couple months of COVID).
The issue is that psychologically, waiting around for those types of events is really boring. And success begets failure, as you really want to start looking for opportunities where your edge is smaller or realistically non-existent.
This seems extremely tempting to me (and in fact I kinda used this strategy) but ultimately I am skeptical. I would worry that inevitably, some small percentage of these "reasonable bets" will turn out disasterously, enough to wipe out the gains and then some. Look at it this way: In order to double your money during the first couple months Covid, it wasn't enough to buy into a general index fund. You had to use options; or buy on margin; or whatever. Which means that even if you were right, you'd still be screwed if your timing was off.
But then again, you may be right, I don't know.
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I'd add the qualifier consistent high volume winners.
It's one thing to take a chance where you see one, it's another to produce enough ideas to run a fund.
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Probably related to getting math, right?
Before I took my finance courses, I would have told you I was horrible at math.
Now, I'm just convinced that math teachers are horrible at their job.
And worse comes to worse, that's what excel spreadsheets are for.
Math teachers in general are bad at their jobs, because they're people who 'just get it' and don't need much teaching, so they assume everyone else is like that too. The best math teacher I ever had was a seminarian randomly assigned by his superior to teach high school algebra- clearly very intelligent, but had needed to actually study to learn the material.
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You don't need more than arithmetic.
You can't be dumb if you're going to become a consistent winner in the markets. But you don't need to be smart.
Eh, I'd say at least a decent grasp of algebra helps quite a bit
In what situations?
If you have a target retirement (or investment or whatever) amount you need to solve some fairly simple algebra to figure out how much you need to invest per month etc. But I also think algebra is generally useful in a lot of different circumstances and knowing it makes a lot of financial planning easier.
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It takes money to make money, as they say.
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I agree, but it's pretty hard to use that strategy to get to the point where you have "fuck you" money, i.e. enough money so that work is optional. Which makes sense, because having "fuck you" money means you can sit back and live it up while other people work for you. It's logically impossible to be in a situation where anything more than a small minority of the population gets to sit back and live it up while other people work for them.
Basically, for most people it will require (1) being born in a wealthy country; and (2) a lifetime of careful saving and investing.
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They should simply have been born a couple years earlier and gotten luckier; given that they haven't done either of those things by Working Hard (tm), they should instead fucking die.
For real though, I think all they can do is not waste money on things like new cloths, meat, restaurants, child care, medical expenses, any food that costs more than 3$ a pound, getting their car fixed, having hot water, etc etc. They must learn how to make everything, fix everything, where to buy everything cheaply, and live a buddha like existence of self denial until they reach escape velocity, which they probably will never reach.
If you want to get out of the low income section of the economy, it isn't enough to work hard and smart, you have to also be lucky and have the knowledge that it's all zero sum until you get about 75,000 in free, un-earmarked cash in the bank. If you can't buy yourself a decent car in cash RIGHT NOW / you don't have at least 1 entire years worth of housing lined up, either by owning or having the rent to hand, you are still poor.
This is why I think I should be taxed way harder; I make more money from having money than I ever did doing productive labor.
If you don't have the income you can't save yourself rich. Contrariwise, if you do, you don't need $75,000 or anything to not be poor -- though you CAN spend yourself poor at any income.
Income comes and goes, is the thing. Your income is never guaranteed, credit is an illusion of the false world which will disappear when you need it most, and expenses can scale infinitly.
I would say if everything you 'own' is leveraged and you are reallying on income/returns/debt to finance your life in exchange for having more exposure to the market; you are trading security for potential profit, and the thing that makes you not poor is security, not some arbitrary number.
75k in the bank + a decent income is a good level of security, enough to feel like you are no longer poor. That is ONE car blowing up and ONE roof blowing off and ONE leg getting broken without the need to sell the farm.
Nothing is guaranteed. Unless your wealth is in non-perishable food, weapons, and the loyalty of fighting men, you're already in a finance world rather than a primitive physical one -- anything dollar-denominated is. In that world -- which is fortunately the one most of us live in, because it's a lot less harsh than the primitive one -- you don't need any particular amount to not be poor.
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I know you mean this as snark, but also this, unironically.
To benchmark - I currently have enough in tax advantaged accounts that I can retire comfortably at 65 even with a great depression-scale market correction in between now and then, and depending on how things go, I might be able to retire in as little as two years.
I was born into a poor family. I grew up so poor that I got in trouble at school more than once for not wearing shoes because my existing pair fell apart and we couldn't afford new ones. Even food wasn't a guarantee.
I managed to get from there to where I am now by pretty much doing what you described above. I worked 15-20 hours a week all through high school. I smoked the SATs, which got me accepted into several different schools. I chose to go to a fairly pedestrian state school rather than a prestigious engineering college because they offered a much larger aid package. I chose a major that wasn't my passion because I estimated that it would represent my best chance at not being poor. I learned how to cook my own meals and fix my own car.
When I graduated, I took a job at a relatively "safe" employer and I've been there for over 20 years. I kept my head down during the global financial crisis and did what I could to be at the bottom of the layoff pile. For the first three years I worked, I lived like a monk in a busted-up apartment that didn't even have hot water half the time. I used every spare penny I had to pay off my student debts.
Once I paid off my debts, I started putting 15% of my income into a 401(k) and maxing out a Roth IRA. It meant that I couldn't afford a nice car and I wasn't going to go on a vacation every year, but starting early meant that my gains had a chance to compound.
Even today I try to live simply. I try to keep my entertainment cheap. I don't take extravagant trips. I only have beef a handful of times a year because it's expensive. I live in a low cost of living area and have kept the same small, simple house for the last fifteen years.
I did what you suggested above, and it's working pretty well.
It was snark but also real for me as well.
I did my own cooking, plumbing, car repair, everything; and if I couldn't do it myself it simply didn't get done. Can't fix the water heater? Simply take cold showers, you won't die.
I just think that isn't sufficient; you also need to get lucky.
That said like you, have that shit baked in. I have the same old 99 camry I bought when I had no choice, and I can't bring myself to get rid of it until it finally dies. I do have the hybrid second car because there are two people who need cars, so that softens the urgency.
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do you see 75k as "you now have enough money to avoid living wildly inefficiently, you can now start putting the extra into the market" or as "if you've already saved up to this point, 75k compounding with everything in VTI will keep you safe for the rest of your life. even if you're incapable of picking stocks"
A combo. The efficiencies that come from never paying interest, always being able to wait for your moment, having money to cover whatever happens when it happens instead of letting it become more expensive with time add up.
On top of that, once you get to a big floating cash pile, you have developed the mental habits that help you not lose it.
Also Also, the missing stress from knowing that if three big problems happen back to back you won't be on the street is worth any amount of money. You don't know the weight of that monkey till he's finally off your back.
Blessed is he who can avoid lifestyle inflation
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If you are telling the truth, congratulations. But of course anyone can claim after the fact that they predicted something. If you want the boost in credibility which comes from having made a correct prediction, I would ask you to (1) make your predictions in advance; and (2) share with the group some trades you made in which you lost big.
seconded. create a blog or post on twitter predictions
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1: the advanced predictions are displayed in my big pile of money and
2: I lost out big in AI boom stocks. I just refused to get on board half for ideological half for practical reasons, so I only made a lot of money with my weighted index funds instead of an unimaginable amount of money by going in hard.
Possibly sounding like sour grapes, but I wonder about the feasibility of investing in AI. Yeah, right now it's booming, but I do think a crash (or at least a readjustment) will come, and how do you predict just precisely which day the market wakes up and decides SELL SELL SELL and not BUY BUY BUY?
It's the same problem with crypto: some people rode it and timed it right and made a killing, some people held on too long and lost whatever they gained, and some people regret they got out when they did and didn't stick around just that bit longer when the price went even higher.
I think if you ended up with "made a ton of money but not the yuuuuuge amount I could have done", you ended up ahead of the game. That's a better complaint than "god damn it, I sunk every cent into AI and the bloody market crashed on me".
I'm just talking about my risky bet fuck around money, is the thing. My borring "Don't starve when I'm old" money is locked down for the long haul.
I'm out of it now because the pile got too big and I got scared; but this was the type of money I was willing to take a 100% loss on, so not having the stomach to bet it all on AI related areas before it took off was a major failure on my part.
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The key, like with silver booms, is probably not to try to ride it to the absolute peak- yes you don't make the most profit selling when there's still room to go up, but you get more than if it's started to decline.
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Ultimately, that's the rub. The greater the return, the greater the risk, and there isn't a reliable way to make high return investments without the risk. Only 10% of the best who best know the market on the planet reliable do better than them over a 20 year window, and most of those folks do worse the 20 years after that statistically. There is no non-luck way to hit a jackpot.
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My apologies, I have no idea what this means. Are you referring to some kind of online portfolio document? If so, can you link it?
That's pretty great if your big loss was that you "only made a lot of money" when you could have made an "unimaginable amount of money."
Most people who "go in hard" have the occasional loss.
Maybe you should consider opening up some kind of investment fund? It seems like you are right up there with guys like David Lynch and Jimmy Buffet.
I can only do it now when Trump is in office making everything weird, is the thing; and I'm not confident enough to bet the farm. If I keep making these bets I'm going to lose eventually; That's what I got out (as noted in the post). I don't have the sauce that dudes like Buffet do.
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I don't think he made his money from stock picking so much as guitar picking...
I think you are confusing Jimmy Buffett (the musician), with Jimmy Buffet, the legendary investor who partnered with Charlie Hunger.
I had no idea there were two Buffets in the investing business, so yes, apparently I was!
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Which one of them is Warren's cousin? 😁
You're thinking of the 29th president Warren G Hunger, who also appeared on Snoop Dogg's early recordings.
Ah, a spinoff of the comic "Peanuts", was it?
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The US has seemingly defied every prediction of its debt being unsustainable. GDP keeps going up,so the debt is inflated away. Those who keep predicting collapse or other crisis keep being wrong.
The second trump term has been a huge boon for me investment-wise: correctly shorted Bitcoin, anticipating Trump would not follow-through on the widely anticipated or hoped BTC reserve.
Bought dips during Liberation-day selloffs ('TACO' meme)
Continued to trade various dips and rallies by selling various option spreads anticipating quick recoveries from selloffs and inflated implied volatility, and rangebound markets
The anticipated post-tariff inflation surge never came to be, so I profited by being invested in tech stocks and the overall economy doing well.
Also made $ on polymarket betting against Trump mentioning Bitcoin (these are called "mention markets") and against the Bitcoin reserve.
I think it's possible to make $ following whales on Polymarket/Kalshi who possibly have insider info, but haven't looked into it much. I noticed on the 28th, the eve of the attack on Iran, someone placed a $20k bet on the contract "strikes in the next 24 hours", an hour before it jumped off. The contract surged from 14 cents to 20 cents almost instant and the stayed at 20 cents for 40 minutes until finally going to $1.
Looking historically, sovereign debt crises generally are less "things get gradually worse" and more "the fundamentals get worse without affecting day to day operations too much, then a crisis hits and immediate consequences are felt." Generally its multiple different factors gradually building up until you get a polycrisis that makes the debt unresolvable. Will this be the time the bears are right? Looking at their previous predictions, probably not. Without course correction, or a spanner in the works like AGI, will the US in the medium term face a debt crisis? I think quite likely.
The bears may be right eventually, but the market may have gone up so much in the interim it will not matter. If the Nasdaq gains 20% year for the next 10 years , that is a 6x return I am leaving on the table waiting for something which may never happen in my lifetime.
I'm a bogglehead, so I agree with the approach that in the end, the market will increase. My argument is there likely will be a debt crisis that will cause pain in the future. The pain it causes will be less than the benefits of market growth, however.
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To his credit, Trump is working on that. The oil trade was long denominated in dollars because the US had an outsized influence on it. Being readily convertible to fossil fuels is one of the reasons why the US$ made a good reserve currency, which is a reason why many countries are stockpiling it and thus subsidizing the US debt (as inflation slowly eats up the value of their dollar reserves).
Under Trump, the US has not been a good steward of the global oil trade. When Iran predictably closed the Strait (because this is the one way they can exert pressure on the rest of the world), Trump loudly declared that this was not his mess to fix. Let Europe deal with it if they want the oil. And I am sure that Europe will deal with it eventually, though not through military means. At the end of the day, we will probably just pay Iran to let the ships through. But at that point we might decide to trade the oil in yuan instead.
After all, China seems like a sane, reliable superpower. Sure, they are troublesome for their neighbors (Taiwan first and foremost, though Venezuela might claim that their regional superpower does not respect the autonomy of smaller states), but unlikely to invade Spain or Germany. So far, China has refrained to wreck the world economy in some military adventure.
Come on man, at least ask an AI if this is plausible before suggesting it. China exercises capital controls, if they allowed free convertibility then Chinese people could invest overseas and earn better returns than their horrific internal market which would collapse their whole investment model. And you can see how China has treated Australia or Lithuania using their economic influence when the nations displeased them, the devil you don't know is hardly some stable partner.
You could maybe make an argument for a euro swap but it has its own problem, like that there isn't one unified euro bond market, each state has its own so there is no equivalent to a US treasury. And to be a reserve currency you need to have a huge amount of outstanding accounts, There literally are not enough euros in existence to make this kind of thing work and the process of printing and spending them would very likely wreck the European economy.
Finally Who is protecting the rest of the seas? Who owns the other straights? If we're going to enter a US isn't responsible for foreign shipping protection and in fact being able to threaten shipping entitles you to extracting rents from shipping then I know of an entity that is able to threaten every ship everywhere.
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The US dollar, bond yields, and S&P 500 have held up well despite oil having gone up so much, suggesting market participants are not concerned.
https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/TVC-DXY/?timeframe=1M
People again have made this argument of the US losing the petrol dollar and it has not borne out
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But the debt grows even more, hence the ratio of debt to GDP is increasing. And the tiny bit that was inflated away after COVID part was also not so free, the bondholders are no longer willing to give their money for peanuts and the interest rates are much higher than a few years ago.
The problem with debt is that it can be meaningless for a long time and then it can matter a lot. Like the famous Lenin quote "There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen".
This can be true , but when people make this prediction every year and nothing happens, it comes off as crying wolf. This is much more applicable for smaller economies which do not have reserve currency status, which cannot inflate their debt as the US can.
If there's a clear indicator that's getting worse all the time but disaster hasn't struck yet, it's hard to see this as the same as crying wolf. You'll recall that in the fable it was, in fact, not clear that there was even was a wolf. We can all agree that debt to GDP is increasing.
Is it crying wolf to be concerned about a small moon on course to collide with the earth? It gets closer every day but nothing has happened yet!
If you are making a prediction about a small moon on course to collide with the Earth, hopefully your predictions are going to be "the moon will collide on so-and-so day". If you predict that the moon will collide next week, and it doesn't, and you predict that it will collide the week after that, and it still doesn't, and you keep that up, people will be justified in ignoring you.
Orbital mechanics permit a degree of certainty that's rare in most other human affairs.
We can pick another metaphor. If you keep OD'ing on fent on Market Street and people keep narcaning you from the brink of oblivion and telling you that you're gonna die if you do this again, but you haven't died yet and you've done this tons of times should you ignore them?
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The laws of physics are much more reliable than economic forecasts or the relation between debt vs. sustainability. Since 2008 there has been no shortage of smart-sounding people who make this type of prediction invoking charts and other data. It sounds persuasive, but it's of no actionable value. Sitting out of the market in the expectation of a crisis means loss of real wealth as inflation keeps growing at 2-5%/ year, and homes become more unaffordable. Ask people who waited to buy a home in 2010 fearing things would get worse or in 2020 during Covid.
Agreed.
I am long the market, so yes, agreed. But presumably there are ways that the national debt can become a problem without the S&P500 crashing.
Nevertheless, looking at the countries that had a higher debt to GDP ratio than the US right now, it's not a great collection - Japan, post-WWII UK, Sudan, Lebanon, Greece. Maybe it's not the debt that made these places suck, but it seems reasonable to be concerned about where this road leads.
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Indeed, the debt/GDP ratio reaching problematic levels is a very recent development (post-covid, getting much worse in Trump 2).
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I'm a bit confused whether you're just being humble here and downplaying it, or if you're just talking about a relatively modest gain. The stock market has been going gangbusters for the past 10 years, so lots of people have made great returns as long as you're not panic selling everything.
He means an actual ton of money.
You could have 50x'd your money before/at the start of this Iran war.
How? Oil futures are up 82% over the past 3 months, very good, but hardly 50x.
By leveraging the hell out of it.
Fair enough, I have zero risk appetite for options.
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That applies to any possible market movement.
Yeah, this. You can get massively rich on anything with enough leverage. Like what WallStreetBets calls "Faggot's Delight" options- very far out the money options with short expirations. You have to completely nail the timing and price point to make any money that way at all, its not enough to just say "turmoil in the mideast will make oil prices go up."
Hmm actually it was.
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Trump announces something insane and then the stock market hits an all time high after a brief freakout, which may or may not involve a backpedal. It's been like 9 times so far. Did you predict that?
so predictable, like free money at this point, hence TACO meme.
I mostly only saw Trump announce insane thing, people sold off expecting the crisis to deepen and then lock in a loss when Trump backpedaled.
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At some point the rubberband is gonna break, though. Like the stock market has decoupled from anything beyond worship of the number but 'I'm just gonna bid any pullback no matter what' can't work forever.
The thing is, tech stocks are actually quite cheap. META's PE ratio is under 19, for example. So it's not as if they have decoupled from fundamentals.
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Funny, my real net worth dropped during the "Biden boom times" and increased significantly during the first year of Trump's second term, enough that I retired in January.
No, the biden times were actually really good if you just had a normal ass portfolio and normal ass hedges; just buy the index, secure with bonds, hedge with precious metals. The standard 101. If you were out here doing wall street bets tomfoolery there was less for you to bite on.
Now that trump is back you can make some real money off the fact that shit is crazy and moving in a bad direction.
The thing that seems to let someone make money is movement in general; it doesn't matter if the movement is up or down or real or bubble; if people are jumping in and out of investments in a panic or in a stratagem, if you pick right twice you can part a fool (retirement fund, old person, degenerate gambler) from his money (what they need to not die).
Because Trump is so inconsistent but in a consistent way, and so many people with conservative leanings gaslit themselves into thinking "He won't actually do it, it wasn't that bad in the first term" some cynical hater moves really payed out.
Or you just YOLO into AI stocks and try to time the bubble, and make the same or more money without all the maneuvering; I'm just too much of a coward to put it all on 00 at the table.
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It's a a good point, number went up during Biden's term, but in real terms it mostly treaded water for us. It has gone up significantly during Trump's second term (not through any particular investing insight, mostly own broad funds plus some extra in oil/resource stocks and tech stocks). We have also 'retired', if involuntarily (both got laid off), which prompted looking at our finances and realizing that under any non-extreme-blackpilled assumptions there is enough there (and in those situations the skills are probably worth more then any extra money), which hadn't really been on the radar given we are in our mid-40s with 3 kids. 'Retired' is in quotes though as within 6 months old colleagues began bugging us to take on some contracting projects which we did to help out folks, stay up to date, make some side money, etc. My wife ended up making more last year doing that then she did working full time and I made about 1/2 so we'll just see how it goes. Congrats on retiring.
Contracting does seem to be where the money is, if you can get enough work on the side. Sorry to hear about the lay-offs and glad to hear you guys managed to get something going. Mid-40s with 3 kids is a hell of a time for both parents to be laid off.
That's the part that absolutely terrifies me when contracting otherwise sounds attractive. I don't know how people find business. Is it networking? I'm awful at that!
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As the saying goes, congratulations and Go Fuck Yourself.
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had trump been reelected in 2020, do you think the 2022 selloff would not have happened? I think it still would have happened.
My point is that including the "Biden boom times" in this makes it less likely to be true politically motivated gloating and more likely to be false politically motivated gloating.
I think that part of OP's point here is the availability of very specific TACO/horrible policy trades under Trump 2. Personally, though, I'm not sure how one figures out that tariffs will be a TACO dip opportunity and that the equally horrible idea of Iran not - seems like a lucky guess to me.
In contrast, the Biden correction was broad-based in response to the rise of interest rates due to the post-pandemic inflation. This seems harder to take levered retail bets on that would turn screw-around money into screw-you money.
You could make money on Iran by selling oil futures when they spiked; I think there were several spikes which dropped within a day.
While obviously any volatility creates trading opportunities, it seems like OP is just trading big picture ideas. Here, it means "expensive oil" rather than some fundamentals-bases idea of "oil price target is X" because of impact of policy on supply, so they are not really in a position to take wins on moves down since they don't really have a thesis beyond "closer to $95 than $75".
Yup. I do this shit for fun on the side when I'm tired and don't feel like reading, I'm gonna spend more time woodworking and model building than situation monitoring.
I just tell the guy who actually Monitores "I think it will be like that, so put this amount of my money in the maximum risk 'like that' pile and let me know if it doesn't go to zero".
I'm making this post because it went up enough that it's scaring me, the hoe, too much to not have it in something boring.
I would say that it you have reached fuck-off money it is probably time to put the amount of money that it takes for that back into target date funds or something. One consequence of your various theses is that Treasury interest rates are going to remain pretty high for a while...
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