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Are you a billionaire?
Because if you knew Covid was a big deal in early 2020 you could have made tens of millions easily. But I am guessing you are not.
So saying “it doesn’t take a genius” when you easily could have made 100x on knowing what to come feels off. If the thing where everything in the past looks like it was obvious but yet almost all very smart people got it wrong.
I am not a billionaire because I did not have high starting capital. And I make mistakes like everyone does, I did not anticipate the massive money-printing resurgence after March and missed out a bit there. You might say 'just use 10x leverage' and I assure you that is the surest route to disaster. There is nothing more dangerous than leverage. Nevertheless, I have made significantly greater returns than the market average. Something like 40-50% annualized? I can't calculate it out properly because I put more money in over time.
In February 2020 we had this: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8004055/THE-REUTERS-GRAPHIC-Under-Chinas-coronavirus-lockdown-millions-go.html
But markets didn't react until March! Isn't that insane? China is the factory of the world and they're locking down, where are goods going to come from? What does that say about the rest of the world?
There are loads of smart people who made a tonne of money beating the market. If you're early on the right companies you can make a lot of money. What about the Bitcoin maxis from 2012 or even 2014? They're living in Lambo land right now. I got into crypto much later and still got a couple of 10xes. Or early Nvidia buyers. I bought some Nvidia before ChatGPT and got a 10x there. None of this is terribly hard. There's room for error so long as you work out the broad trends, take things slow and don't leverage up.
I don't understand why AGI-pilled, scaling-pilled people didn't make as much or more than me. I think a lot of people can't be bothered to put in the effort, fill in the forms and stomach that gut feeling of dread when you lose a lot of money.
Alright, so looking at the market today, what broad trends do you see? What are you long?
AI followed by crypto and aerospace/defence (which has been dragging down my portfolio tbh). https://www.themotte.org/post/948/smallscale-question-sunday-for-april-7/205716?context=8#context
Recently I've been trying to get more into the software side of AI, Microsoft as well as Nvidia. As much as I dislike the company's practices, they do have a pretty good business position. And I still think AGIX is a no-brainer. It's a shitcoin with a perfect name and smallish marketcap. We have AGI development, it moons.
https://www.themotte.org/post/381/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/68701?context=8#context
If you'd bought it back in Feb 2023 when I shilled it even after it went up 150%, you'd have made a cool 50-70% by now. Sure, I should've sold at 1.20 rather than waiting for it to fall back to the 0.70 range. I make no claim to perfectly timing the market. But I feel fine playing the long game here, I got in way lower. That's not so great compared to NVIDA but it still beats the index funds.
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I'm in a similar boat to you. From my perspective the last 5 years has been the easiest time to significantly beat the market in the last 40 years by a large margin. Events you can see coming from outer space and almost risk free investments that take advantage of them (if you manage small amounts of money).
But knowing events are very likely going to happen and that they'll impact the stock market doesn't equal certainty of how exactly they're going to impact the stock market and for how long. Seeing the way the wind was blowing though? Easy.
Still, my investment portfolio is up some 10x the last 5years from relatively risk free investment after a preceeding period of 10 years where I barely beat the market. It would have been great if I had bought a house after this period and not just right before...
Now things seem more uncertain to me and I'm pivoting to index funds. I don't feel confident making any time sensitive (or even general) predictions.
As for why smart people aren't making (more) money, around me the smartest people have more or less given up on investing. They focus on their career+family and put excess money in some kind of portfolio of different index funds. They were kind similar to me but making slightly better bets but then they checked out before things got predictable.
Now I don't think they particularly care, they have more than enough money to meet all their needs so whether the excess money makes a larger or smaller return is pretty uninteresting. Why not rather focus on that next golf trip?
I agree with you. Everyone has repeated "you can't beat the market! Just vanguard and chill!" For so long that it's become practically an article of faith. And, to be sure, that's good advice for the typical investor. But passive index fund investing has become so popular that we forgot you do need someone to actively pick stocks in order for the market to work, and that's left some low hanging fruit on the trees.
People might object, "but what about the pros on wall street! Surely you can't beat them!" well...
a) like @100ProofTollBooth said, hedge funds aren't really trying to beat the market. They're more interested in making safe, consistent returns, not looking to take a risk to find the next 10-bagger.
b) the quant funds, as I understand it, are mostly doing market making and/or looking for arbitrage opportunities. They're not looking to "invest" at all, they just want to get in and get out for fast, risk-free profit.
c) the typical retail financial advisor is... just not that smart? He might pick some stocks, but he's not trying that hard. He's more like a financial therapist, convincing his clients to invest and not sell no matter what. He wins as long as they stay invested with him, he doesn't need to beat the market or even come close.
All this, combined with the frenzy for crypto and meme stocks, has led to an environment where it's surprisingly easy to beat the market, as long as you're willing to take some (reasonable) risks.
stuff that I did which paid off big time for me:
Right now I am modestly into bonds, nvdia, and short bitcoin. I am toying with the idea of getting out of stocks all together, or even puying some bearish puts, as I am increasingly of the opinion that the whole market is simply overvalued: https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc240623/ . Bonds, and maybe foreign stocks, look like the best opportunity right now.
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I have seen similar smug attitudes during COVID, people who raked in cash when stocks plummeted between January and March 2020 by almost 25% were patting themselves on the back how smart they are and laughed at other people. And they knew that the worst is only ahead of us: lockdowns, supply chain issues and all that. Only for the market returning to previous heights by September, followed by huge surge up until January 2022. Many people who doubled down on bearish prediction in March not only lost all their gains from early 2020, but lost everything in that gamble.
Just give me a break, streets are lined up with homeless market gurus like you who just know how to beat the market.
I benefited from stock market plunge during covid.
It was very clear that the covid panic was overblown. I couldn't predict how long the lockdowns would last but it was clear that deep pessimism was not justified. If the stocks didn't rise in September 2020, they would by 2024 for sure. So, I bought them when they were low.
And then all extra cash we couldn't spend in lockdowns got invested in stock market and it caused a small bubble of its own but it was still worth to invest for most people.
The funny thing is that I based all this on a simple fact: people get cold virus infections up to 10 times per year and it trains our immunity. We cannot meaningfully stop them, not with our current tech. A new virus will cause more problems because we have no previous immunity. And yet, with covid the risk increased exponentially by age.
Thus my prediction was: eventually everyone will get it regardless what we do. Most people will be fine, elderly will experience higher mortality as in an unusually nasty flu season and that's it. It happened exactly like that.
And yet, so many still refuse to face this reality, still argue that “covid is different” or that “people should wear masks during flu/covid season”.
It is sad to live in among such pessimists but at least I can solace myself with a lifetime chance to win on the stock market. The world should have followed Tegnell's recommendations instead of calling him nazi.
It wasn't a chance that I made the correct prediction. It was rather a chance that I got necessary education in this field and see other experts that reasoned exactly in this same way and being correct in their general predictions.
It is somewhat similar to beliefs about Havana syndrome. One doesn't need to be a genius to understand that no sonic weapons of such impact exist. People just want to believe in them for various reasons. Except that it is a small localized event that never had any impact on stock market.
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Perhaps I'm being unclear. I'm not claiming to have figured out some grand way to beat the market. I'm claiming that the market has been acting predictably irrationally (or more accurately just very slowly) for the last 5 years in response to major events and that I've made some money making relatively low risk investments with this in mind.
I didn't make one risky bet. I made a series of low risk bets in different directions over a half decade.
Its not like I've made massive amounts either. $40k is now ~$400k, which isn't enough to pay off even half of our remaining mortgage. I'm not getting rich here, especially since don't know where to put my money going forward.
Have I done everything perfectly, obviously not. Just going all in on Nvidia 1.5 years ago would have had better returns than what I've been doing over 5 years, or going all in on Tesla or w/e. I've acted on the same general trends, I've just done so cautiously and ineptly.
The data is pretty clear that almost all day traders (which admittedly encompasses many different kinds of amateur investor) lose money. That’s true whether they’re mere stockpickers or WSB derivatives gamblers, and it’s also true even for well above average high IQ people.
In fact, even many star traders at big funds would struggle on their own without access to the costly and expensive resources (some of it provided in-house, some bought or licensed, processed by teams of analysts for trade suggestions etc) of their employers, simply because they have an information advantage that even a very smart day trader adept at risk taking can’t match.
Another reason some smart people don’t bet like this is that their job prohibits it. Almost every job in finance prohibits personal trading in most or all derivatives, mandates very long minimum holding periods for financial instruments including equities and so on. The requirements are even tighter for the front office jobs that pay the most, including employer and regulator monitoring of all personal financial activity and pre-approval by compliance and reporting of even long term personal trades. If you really plan to hold Apple for 5 years and believe it’ll hugely outperform the market it’s doable, but for most people the compliance hassle isn’t worth it and they just put their money in an index fund.
Refraining from stock picking and market timing as a retail investor because you’ve read the literature and have a deep-seated conviction about markets being pretty much efficient :drake_no:
Refraining from stock picking and market timing as a retail investor because you’re too lazy to deal wtih compliance :drake_yes:
But indeed, it’s unclear if even star traders actually have some skill that allows them to deliver above market returns for their employers or if they’re just lucky, unless the “information advantage” is something insider information-adjacent rather than baller information-processing. And it’s also unclear if alternatives like hedge funds and private equity deliver above market returns adjusted for risk, especially after fees.
(Reply to this as well as the comments from @2rafa above and below it)
I know quite a bit about this stuff from direct professional experience.
First, regarding "lol Hedge Funds and PE aren't worth it" (this was an infamous Warren Buffett quote as well) - THAT IS NOT WHAT THOSE PRODUCTS ARE FOR
Total return after 10,15,20+ years is not at all the metric that alternatives ought to be judged against. It's not that they shouldn't be compared to anything, but it's pants-on-head insane to compare something like Citadel's performance to the S&P.
Different asset classes server different purposes. A hedge fund as the name implies puts a lot of emphasis on risk control and stability of returns over a targeted duration, usually one year. The reason that hedge funds go after pension funds and endowments is because those customers need a HIGH CONFIDENCE product that can return 7% or more - with nearly instant liquidity - regardless of what the market at large is doing. Remember in March / April of 2020 when COVID happened and the market took a shit? Not a lot of folks panicked because it was pretty obvious that if they just waited it would bounce back - which is exactly what happened in a matter of months.
But if you're CALPERS and planned on disbursing $1bn in March 2020 alone for your retirees, you might've shit yourself if you had to liquidate and re-balance across your entire portfolio that month to pay the (legal mandated) bills. Fortunately for you, you had already plopped a lot of capital into a hedge fund that made you a promise it could cut that check - rain or shine - and you wouldn't have to crack kthe matrix of your $100bn portfolio to do it.
PE, as an asset class, is heavily about either (a) non-correlated performance with public markets and/or (b) assets that have inherent risk or financial structuring problems that are so bad they couldn't really work on the public market (although, IMHO, this is just a derivative of non-correlation). A PE firm's pitch to its investors is "we can make money with this fund / investment and not worry about what happens in the public markets" (they will worry about what happens in capital markets, but that's a different story). The attraction to you as an investor is true diversification. Public market equity diversification is, in 2024, pretty much a myth. It appears everything is tightly correlated and the Magnificent Seven are so horribly overweighted in the S&P it's a joke. It's very hard to sock away part of your portfolio into a meaningfully different system - unless its PE (or some other alts).
Regarding @2rafa, coin flips, and that unfortunate Portfolio Manger who gets fired after having a position degrade 5-7% over a week or two - that's totally reasonable because the PM either (a) didn't pay attention to his risk management or (b) bet on a market-wide move which is exactly contrary to what hedge funds do. Yes, there are situations in which it is just dumb, dirty rotten luck. Far more common, however, is a PM taking advantage of their newly granted independence and YOLOing. In the large multi-manager funds, in fact, one model is to have lots of PMs all with long leashes and to cull the herd each year so that you build you own survivorship bias and, after 10 years, only have PMs who are actually edge players.
The unfair part of the hedge fund business is that if you do blow up and get fired, it's actually really hard to find another job. It's a small world and having one bad year can kneecap your whole career. Guys who can't pivot out to a whole new line of work often end us as financial consultants to big funds or pensions or do freelance equity research work. Now, this is "boo-hoo I only make $500k a year" level of work, but you are a zombie in your career and I imagine that takes a toll.
The absolutely smartest pure analysts? The make about $10-$20mm and plop enough into a private wealth account to make somewhere around half a million a year. They leave their firm and start trading on their own at home. Why? No risk management and compliance overhead, they can sit on a 5,7,10,20% paper loss if they have high conviction it'll bounce back etc. My personal heuristic for these people is that they live in those very random amazing homes you sometimes come across in rural areas. All they really need is an internet connection. They might be worth 10 figures.
The guys who make it but stay in the middle of the game - I.e. those who ultimately run a fund of their own - are pretty much addict to the game of it, or have an entrepreneurial streak and want to build a company just the same as a TechBro. Ken Griffin has famously said "I don't run a hedge fund" when he runs one of the largest ones in the world (what he means is that he runs the world fastest and most aggressive market making operation, which is accurate). Ray Dalio ran Bridgwater because, IMHO, he always wanted his own cult and just so happened to make it a LOTS OF MONEY Cult.
The dirty secret in financial careers is that - if you're actually good - you can go out on your own pretty fast and early and make A TON of money in the shadows. The "big names" aren't actually motivated by the money - it's often something dumber.
I don’t think it’s at all clear that PE and hedge fund returns aren’t highly correlated with public market performance. 7% a year returns on a truly consistent basis isn’t what is promised or guaranteed, and hedge fund returns were often very poor for the decade from 2008.
Oh come on. You’re not wrong, but it’s so very rare. There are a few hundred, maybe couple thousand young people who have made that kind of money in the business in the *entire world, certainly in the West. The overwhelming number of people in every aspect of high paying front office finance work regular length careers and, even if affluent, don’t really attain PMC level fuck you money until middle age at the earliest. As far as ‘ten figures’ go, 35 year old billionaires who made it in finance are so rare that they don’t even count as a plausible outcome for any substantial number of really smart analysts.
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There is that old joke about prop trading that it’s a meritocracy in the same way that a coin toss is a meritocracy of whoever is smart enough to pick the correct side.
I’m not very familiar with it but my understanding is that the big funds will fire junior PMs for a rolling 5-7% yoy loss, sometimes in weeks. It would seem obvious that the losers are often just people with a couple of consecutive months of bad luck, and the winners the reverse. You gamble big, have a few lucky large early wins, sail out a few more years riding whatever secular trend is taking over successfully, then retire as a “genius” (or do not, as so many do, and be mocked as a failure when your luck runs out). On the upside, the odds are likely still better than roulette.
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A lot of smart people don’t care that much to be rich. They’re happy as tenured academics making $120k a year, can buy everything they want to buy, and don’t have a strong desire to make more money. Some may be socialists or very religious people for whom wealth accumulation is also less important. ‘If you’re so smart why aren’t you rich’ is a fair argument in some cases, but there are nuances.
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