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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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