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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   2706 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 7, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I do a combo of Roth IRA + the lazy portfolio 3-way split. I'm avoiding looking at the numbers as of late so as not to stress out since they're investments for the very long term. I don't really do individual stocks or options since I don't value my financial predictive ability that highly. I recently broke that rule and tried crypto trading and wound up with universal losses, though fortunately I only used a relatively small amount of play money to buy in. This has only reinforced my personal rule to stick to long-term stuff and not try to beat the market.

Buy and hold is comfortable and has good expected returns, I recommend it to friends and family. For me though, even though I know it’s a tall order, I attempt to beat the market, because I enjoy the time I spend thinking about it. Even if I fail, as long as I keep transaction costs low, the expected return should be the same, minus my time, which is worth zero.

My go-to example for how beating the market can be done, and after which I decided to become more active, is covid: rats saw it coming, we had a discussion where people suggested puts on cruise companies, which would have 15xed a few weeks later. The main opposition to buying those puts wasn’t because we didn’t believe covid would be bad, but an ill-placed faith in the all-knowing market.

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