Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
What is the best stock screening website, or collection of websites/apps to help pick stocks and stay afloat of news?
Cost is very relevant. If you have to pay 15 or 30 dollars per month for each of many websites, you'll eat up whatever extra % gain you get from using them to inform your picks, unless you dedicate a huge amount of money for this type of investing.
It's easy to beat the market, you just need to be ahead of the curve. You need a thesis and then to act on it. You need patience and the mental fortitude to withstand losses too - losses are inevitable, some bets won't pay off, the unpredictable will happen.
Frankly I don't understand why more people here weren't riding the NVIDIA train up last year given how much AI talk takes place and how many AGI/singularity believers we have here. I vividly recall on the old site a fellow talking about how the 2020 release of GPT-3 might be bigger news than COVID when all was said and done (this was before COVID really got big). Why would you not buy shares in the obvious AI company, NVIDIA? And why not buy AI-related crypto as well?
Consider crypto. You identify that the whole market goes upwards in these cyclic patterns related to the 4-year bitcoin halvings - you identify trends in digitization of money and observe rampant central bank money-printing. In contrast, ethereum has programmed-in deflation and nearly all coins have fixed caps. Why not experimentally buy small/midcap altcoins looking for those big 10x, 50x gains that are so common in crypto but so rare in tradfi? Well, that's what I did in 2019 and that's what I got, explosive gains. I make it sound more casual than it is - it was an absolutely terrible experience in the COVID crash. -50%. Deep in the red. But I stuck to my thesis and was rewarded for it.
I don't claim to be a financial genius. I half-called the COVID crash and sold some but not all. I've made some serious errors with leverage. Leverage is very dangerous and should be avoided - mess about in crypto, mess about in stocks but don't mess with leverage. Nevertheless, I am way ahead of any index fund.
You don't need stock pickers. What you need is to formulate a thesis based on things you know that most people don't. You shouldn't be reading the news in a reactive way but a proactive way to form your thesis so you can then pick your own stocks. Don't day-trade, patience is everything. There will be random noise on the day to day level, 'support' and 'bear flags' and 'technical analysis' - this is rubbish. Trade over the span of months and years, buy and wait for the news to catch up with you.
Sorry about the late reply. I meant to get back to you sooner.
Thank you for the advice! This reinforces the belief I'm starting to have about this stuff; that there is no need to settle for being one of the herd. Opportunities keep showing up in the world, and the average person is either not quick enough to react to them, or overreacts or underreacts, or simply stalls and sticks with their well-trodden path. That last one is still my biggest weakness, being risk averse from a previous monetary loss many years ago, which led to much bigger errors of omission than comission.
The market is not fully efficient, because people are often not efficient. I'm reading a finance book that covers cognitive and emotional errors, and there are many, and they are highly prevalent. I recognize many of them in myself. As long as human nature remains more or less as is, Mr. Market will probably remain significantly irrational and bipolar. Like with NVDA as you say, if the growth was already 'priced in' almost immediately, it wouldn't have gone up another 400% from the point where ChatGPT powered by Nvidia chips was clearly a success, in Feb last year or so, until now.
"Buy the rumor, sell the news" is the old quote... Might work out for me too soon. I'm already decided on staying away from daytrading and leverages.
GJ on sticking to your thesis through the deep red time. That makes me smile. :D
If you don't mind sharing more - what is a thesis you are currently formulating or acting on? I'm not going to blindly follow anyone, but getting some food for thought from a successful investor might be fun.
The reason I wouldn't be a good financial planner is that I don't really come up with new ideas that often. If I was in an office people would just see me doing nothing 90% of the time rather than busily making new reports. But laziness can work really well. Imagine the stock picker who just said 'buy Apple' for ten years in a row, he'd beat SPY and the sweaty actively trading index fund managers.
Right now I am basically all in on AI and crypto, my theory is that it's still undervalued. I believe that OpenAI is cooking something big, GPT-4 is still a top-tier AI and it's a year old with a few updates. What are they doing with all their huge infrastructure spending if not producing next gen models? Just the other day I saw a paper about how you could push up accuracy by having AI models vote on the right answer, getting the wisdom of the crowd. The bitter lesson of AI scaling is that pumping in more compute beats clever fine-tuning, this is the kind of simple trick that works well.
There have got to be a tonne of killer apps yet to be produced with this technology. AI Dungeon for instance, what happened there? It was running off GPT-3 before censoring down to oblivion, there's clearly a market out there for it. Klarna is replacing its customer service people with bots. We've got Suno in music... Yes, NVIDIA stock went down 10% the other day - lots of people seem to think it's a bubble but I disagree. My AGIX went up 15% (what a brilliant name, AGIX, people are sure to buy in on press releases about AGI!). I'm happy to live with volatility, same with crypto.
I also think fossil fuels are undervalued. I have only a small position there since I think tech is worth more but since all the attention and prestige is going towards renewables, I think coal and gas deserve more love. Yes, everyone in the developed world is racing to decarbonize. But industrializing countries are raving about coal, Modi was boasting about reaching a billion tonnes of coal production: https://twitter.com/narendramodi/status/1774844651394228422
China is building up more coal too: it's a reliable, cheap baseload energy source and you can place it anywhere you like, right next to the factory. It needs to be replaced in the long term of course but replacing coal is hard. Germany's been scrambling to get more coal and they've been a huge investor into renewables. DEI funds loathe coal and universities try to divest... There are also wartime price surges as we've seen with the Ukraine war and energy shortages.
Thank you. The thought of investing into planet-destroying fossil fuels put me off my feed a little, so I didn't reply at the time. I think you're right that a lot of killer apps based on AI will be coming.
It's interesting what's happening with BTC right now. A lot of ETFs have been started for it, and the halving happened, but the price is going down. Might reach 52k because there's no real support before that point, according to a technical analysis (lol) video I skimmed.
Yeah, I reckon people overhyped the halving. It's supposed to be a long term effect, it takes months for the bull run to really start in past cycles.
Nothing could happen for six months after the halving and that would be standard. Of course there have been structural changes, ETFs are now involved.
I had a possibly very naive thought about this. Now that the last halving of reward has happened, and nearly all the btc have been mined... is it possible that people will just sorta lose some interest in the whole thing? Move on to a newer crypto as standard? Or do you think btc will remain the gold standard of crypto and just become more and more valuable per btc as more people want to get into crypto (is this even a given, or could products from central banks or Visa/MC become most popular instead?)?
I don't hold any BTC, I only have alts. I was always vaguely worried about the 21 million cap for that reason, plus it's so high market cap that gains would diminished...
On the other hand, if things get bad, the miners will change the rules by consensus. Violating 21 million would make a lot of people very angry but there's no reason all parties can't be satisfied. We had this before in the block size wars. Miners decided they wanted to keep small block sizes with higher fees, thus bitcoin cash and BSV faded away into irrelevance. Bitcoin will persist in some form, in some fork.
If CBDCs take over, we enter the darkest timeline. What good is freedom of speech without the freedom to buy a website, pay for organizations?
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There are only 3 public newsletters that I think gives you a genuine alpha over the 75th percentile trader.
Do they sound unreasonably dense and hard to parse? Yes, they are meant to be. You don't get an alpha by doing easy things.
Otherwise, the best way to be a stock trader is to become a rich person's golf buddy, and hope you overhear some stuff between drives.
The problem is that the 75th percentile day trader still loses money, if not absolutely then certainly compared to the market as a whole, and likely at higher risk. You have to be like a 98th percentile to make money.
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Tbh if you're at that level, the answer is probably "Please don't buy stocks, you're gonna get ripped to shreds by the professionals'. There's basically just two reasons why I'd say it's a good idea to buy specific stocks by yourself:
You're a professional who knows the ins-and-outs on how everyone else does their stock picks, where they get their information from, and generally plays on an equal footing with them
You're a domain-specific expert who is extremely bullish/bearish on a certain technology by a specific company due to deep knowledge that traders can't reasonable have
In the first you already know where to look, in the second you only want to trade on a short list of companies you know well anyway.
Disclaimer: Not a trader precisely for this reason
Yeah but the 8% avg/year virgin fund is too boring. I need to use some (10%) of my money to just play around with.
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