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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.
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.
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.
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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'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.
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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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