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Wellness Wednesday for February 21, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Is cost averaging a real and prudent thing or more of a cope? Honest question, hehe.

Have you considered uranium and gold? Mining companies or otherwise.

I quite like the sound of Intel. A good CEO seems to make a huge difference to a company and its stock. I have some interest in Berkshire Hathaway, they're already up 17% YTD. Buffett won't last forever but he hires great people, so maybe it could be good to buy them during the inevitable slump after his retirement/death...?

I'm a newb to all this though. I'll keep reading. Next up is to do my first attempt at company analysis, starting by just finding book value, diluted EPS, etc.

Is cost averaging a real and prudent thing or more of a cope? Honest question, hehe.

I cost average because I have no idea what I'm doing. My most successful picks have been jumping at companies I like. I played the Nintendo Switch, and Breath of the Wild, before it was released and decided it was the real deal. This was at a time when everyone thought Nintendo should get out of the hardware business, and it's executives has taken pay cuts for their failures. It was deeply rewarding jumping on that stock.

I bought Nvidia back in 2017/18 because the Steam hardware survey routinely showed something like 80% of people had Nvidia GPUs. I've been an Nvidia lifer since my first Riva 128. Seemed like a no brainer to me. I can't say I ever saw this AI boom coming, but I knew they were a well run company with good products I use to the exclusion of all else.

I dollar cost average in because I mostly buy and hold forever, so investing cash comes at a slow and steady pace monthly. I also know I'm not educated enough to pick an entry price and throw down five or six figures on it all at once. I keep investing if I have faith the company will eventually do well (like COIN), or because they've been consistently rewarding (like V).

Sometimes I take profit. I had to pay off a $5000 vet bill once while I was saving for a house, so it came out of stocks. When ATVI got bought out I was forced to sell. I also finally cut a bunch of losses and took some profit from several stocks, when I threw down a fat wad on COIN.

Throwing down that fat wad on COIN turned out to be a terrible mistake, and that particular wad is still down over 50%. But like I said, I liked COIN at IPO prices, and I liked it 10x as much when it was 1/10th the price. So it all worked out in the end. Still, that was an expensive lesson. In the future I won't be doing that. I should have spread my wad out over a much longer time to be safe. If it goes up, good, if it goes down, that's alright too.