Across all 6 accounts I manage through Fidelity (3 of my own, 3 of my wife's):

 

 

Fidelity only updates performance stats month by month, so May's gains are not reflected here (and of course could be reversed by month-end, depending on how things go with the pandemic as physical distancing and shutdown measures begin to roll back).

 

S&P 500 was down 9.29% YTD through 4/30; up 0.86% YOY.  So I'm beating the market by about 22 percentage points this year and 14 percentage points YOY, even after some of the decisions that I missed (e.g., I didn't limit-order back into TSLA at $353 [my original exit point--I considered jumping back in where I jumped out], I didn't increase my stake in TWLO, both of which I strongly considered but didn't do).

 

It's been a good year.  The past 12 months have been the first 12-month period, to the best of my knowledge, when I netted more than my annual salary in (unrealized) capital gains.

 

Needless to say, this can't continue forever and I'm not counting chickens before they hatch.  Reversion to the mean is difficult to avoid, and higher taxes (including corporate and capital gains taxes) are going to happen sometime in the next decade.

 

But it's been a good year.

ATHX was up 7% Friday and 15% today.

Travelcenters America of Westlake (symbol TA) is down about 70 cents to ~$8.50 at the moment.  I sold some June $7.50 puts at 56 cents, meaning I'll be a willing buyer at net of $6.94 a share.

 

 

On 4/29/2020 at 9:51 AM, Cleburger said:

Employment could pick back up, but word on the street is ZERO retail or restaurant tenants are paying their rent currently.  The next financial crisis is going to come in the form of bundled securities in the commercial sector.  

 

I don't think people are considering that, even if things go back to "normal" and most people go back to work, a significant amount of white collar workers are not going to be going physically back into the office for a long time. Maybe another 12 months. My employer has announced a multi-phase reopening of our offices, but we won't be in the final phase until a vaccine is developed and increased distancing is no longer required. That means, for the next year, these workers won't be buying their morning coffee or fast casual lunch. No after-work happy hours with coworkers. No need to buy a new suit, or get your current ones dry cleaned. Way less spending on gas and car repairs. In other words, "normal" for white collar workers don't mean "normal" for the rest of the economy.

Compare Cincinnati or Cleveland Downtown lunch options with Columbus and its 30-minute lunch culture to see how different it looks when office workers can't leave/aren't there to eat lunch. 30-minute lunch has damaged Downtown Columbus severely.

Basically any commercial building over X stories is going to see a new WFH culture simply due to elevator issues. Can you imagine how long the waits will be if everyone has to have their temperature taken to enter, plus reduced maximum occupancies, and overall apprehensions of the enclosed space. There will/would probably have to be elevator shifts in the larger buildings i.e. you're allowed to go upstairs from 7:30-8 and downstairs from 5-5:30, or otherwise need manager approval. Those wasted minutes will add up quickly.

On 5/13/2020 at 11:23 AM, Dougal said:

Travelcenters America of Westlake (symbol TA) is down about 70 cents to ~$8.50 at the moment.  I sold some June $7.50 puts at 56 cents, meaning I'll be a willing buyer at net of $6.94 a share.

 

 

TA edged up over $15 at one point today.  ?

Friendly tip - buy Crowdstrike

On 5/13/2020 at 12:13 PM, GCrites80s said:

Compare Cincinnati or Cleveland Downtown lunch options with Columbus and its 30-minute lunch culture to see how different it looks when office workers can't leave/aren't there to eat lunch. 30-minute lunch has damaged Downtown Columbus severely.

What do you mean by 30 minute lunch culture. I think that is pretty common in a lot of businesses now if you do not have lunch plans, you just grab a quick bite many times? Is there something different in Columbus?

 

On a separate note, all the talk about the demise of the office I believe is overblown. Yes, certainly, there will be more work from home options out there, and more abilities for employees to work from home, but there is a significant problem with a fully remote workplace, especially early on. Most seasoned workers can work well at remotely. They have their job and know what is expected from them. However, there is still an importance of office space for the younger worker and even transfer worker. New grads for example will suffer the most from this because if everyone goes remote, it is going to be harder to develop workers remotely as it would be if they were in the office as part of a group, within the company culture. Certain of the soft skills will be lost as they are not able to be developed working remotely as they would when you are in the office environment. INtern programs will really suffer, because it is hard to give the direction and oversight of an intern when they are full time remote (lets face it, many fresh out of school may not be the best self starters yet and still lack the confidence to take initiative in their organizations).  I feel bad for the college grads in the next 5 years because if we do undergo a transition in work style from office to remote, they will not have come up with the new paradigm and will be asked to shift to that on the fly, whereas, kids in Jr High right now will be able to absorb the switch by that point and be better trained to function in that environment.

48 minutes ago, YABO713 said:

Friendly tip - buy Crowdstrike

but muhhhh Crowdstrike is owned by a russian  

 

Anyway, thanks for the tip. I'm on it

 

Wow, it would've been a great buy back in March. I put in an order for 10 shares. We'll see what happens.

Edited June 4, 20205 yr by freefourur

1 hour ago, Brutus_buckeye said:

What do you mean by 30 minute lunch culture. I think that is pretty common in a lot of businesses now if you do not have lunch plans, you just grab a quick bite many times? Is there something different in Columbus?

 

 

In the '90s, Columbus downtown workers had 45-60 minute lunches. If they got fast food (which Downtown still had at the time) or brought something from home, they could use their spare time to hang out on the Statehouse lawn. People brought blankets and chilled, had picnics, played softball and kickball, read and various other things. By the late '90s fully organized kickball leagues had formed. Some people, especially whip-cracking "productivity experts" would see this and raise all hell assuming the Statehouse gatherers were all government employees (they weren't; the private sector was very well-represented). A stop needed put to this! Under fire, Columbus Downtown employers both public and private adopted 30-minute lunches around The Year 2000. Now only legislators could bolt for lunch and everyone else was stuck brown-bagging it. That's why you look at our CBD and see that it is nearly barren of restaurants and other services to serve the lunch break population that normal CBDs have. Lunch places make it a year or less. I think they've given up.

 

Some companies even put the 30-minute lunch in all of their job descriptions since it's such a turnoff and they want to be upfront about things.

Iv'e had some pretty good luck with SOXL for the past month.

1 hour ago, GCrites80s said:

 

In the '90s, Columbus downtown workers had 45-60 minute lunches. If they got fast food (which Downtown still had at the time) or brought something from home, they could use their spare time to hang out on the Statehouse lawn. People brought blankets and chilled, had picnics, played softball and kickball, read and various other things. By the late '90s fully organized kickball leagues had formed. Some people, especially whip-cracking "productivity experts" would see this and raise all hell assuming the Statehouse gatherers were all government employees (they weren't; the private sector was very well-represented). A stop needed put to this! Under fire, Columbus Downtown employers both public and private adopted 30-minute lunches around The Year 2000. Now only legislators could bolt for lunch and everyone else was stuck brown-bagging it. That's why you look at our CBD and see that it is nearly barren of restaurants and other services to serve the lunch break population that normal CBDs have. Lunch places make it a year or less. I think they've given up.

 

Some companies even put the 30-minute lunch in all of their job descriptions since it's such a turnoff and they want to be upfront about things.

Now THAT is absolutely fascinating.

Well I got back into the exact same risky fracking stock that I basically know nothing about and managed to make more money in one day than I used to make working an entire summer in high school and college.  I'm honestly not that happy about any of this - it just gets me really mad that "hard work" doesn't pay off nearly as much as taking a bet and having it pay off.  20 years ago I was just one or two lucky strikes away from having a completely different life. 

The strangest f'ing year-to-forget continues, as I'm, somehow, up 5.1 percent: Apple, multiple ETFS i.e. Vanguards, Invesco, Roth, Roth IRA...

 

And yet my 401k is down 2.9 percent. WTF?

 

I honestly don't fully understand what I own; one of these days I need to talk to my broker to simplify the information.

The worse small business does the better The Market does. When you shift money from being spent in people's own community to money going to the internet it makes "tech" rise.

On Monday, I'm reversing my strategy from selling puts, counting on a share rise, to selling calls.

Edited June 6, 20205 yr by Dougal

3 hours ago, GCrites80s said:

The worse small business does the better The Market does. When you shift money from being spent in people's own community to money going to the internet it makes "tech" rise.

 

It's not that hard to see that much of the revenue that used to go to 250 newspapers across the country is now going to one lame dude - Mark Zuckerberg. 

 

8 hours ago, Dougal said:

On Monday, I'm reversing my strategy from selling puts, counting on a share rise, to selling calls.

 

I tried reading what selling puts means and what selling calls means -- and I still have no freaking clue what any of this means.

^ Let's take TA, which was selling for 7 and change a month ago.  I sold $6 puts, giving nervous soul the right to FORCE me to buy TA at $6 (cost to me would be $6 minus whatever I got for selling the put). Instead, TA went to $16+ on Friday and the value of the put went to zero (no one  wants to me at $6 when he can get $16 on the market).  Assuming TA stays above $6, I just keep what I got for the put as my profit. The profit isn't as great as if I had bought the shares outright, but with the put the risk was less and the return virtually infinite since I put up no money.

 

Ok, meanwhile another stock I actually did buy has doubled in the last month but I doubt it will go much higher than the $12 it's at now. So Monday I will sell calls, giving someone the right (but not the obligation) to buy it from me at $15.  If it goes to $15 I sell at that price plus I keep the proceeds from the calls I sold. If it doesn't go to $15, I keep the stock plus the value of the call. The risk here is that the stock might go down quite a bit and I'd lose my paper profit in the shares. 

 

I won't make a huge amount of money on any one of these trades, but the return is infinite and I can repeat the deal every month.  It adds up.  The hard part is recognizing when the action is going against you and closing out the position; everybody hates to take a loss.

 

23 minutes ago, Dougal said:

I won't make a huge amount of money on any one of these trades, but the return is infinite and I can repeat the deal every month.  It adds up.  The hard part is recognizing when the action is going against you and closing out the position; everybody hates to take a loss.

 

 

I have read that the traders at Goldman only lose money, as a group, about 10% of days when the market is open.  I have a hard time picturing what these people are are like - are they a bunch of IT-ish nerds with eccentric weekend hobbies?  Do the women in the department outperform the men but then go home to pedestrian mom stuff like driving their kids to dance lessons? 

8 hours ago, jmecklenborg said:

 

I have read that the traders at Goldman only lose money, as a group, about 10% of days when the market is open.  I have a hard time picturing what these people are are like - are they a bunch of IT-ish nerds with eccentric weekend hobbies?  Do the women in the department outperform the men but then go home to pedestrian mom stuff like driving their kids to dance lessons? 

 

Lol my one of my groomsmen is one of them. 

 

He's a pretty normal guy, but he's keenly aware of macroeconomic and geopolitical situations. The name of his game isn't so much picking the right equities, it's knowing when and how to hedge your risk - that's what makes traders elite. The entire "Biff" stereotype of traders, I've found, is wholly incorrect. My friend graduated with dual degrees in finance and Eastern European history - got his masters in Vilnius on Eastern European studies - was hired by Goldman as an analyst  - sent frequently to Prague, Berlin, Zagreb, Vienna with the PMs he worked for as a means of providing cultural context - then became a PM himself, and he focuses almost entirely on EU entities or at least companies with substantial ops in the EU. 

 

Goldman found the value in his geopolitical and historical understanding, cultivated it, and used it for their own gain. 

On ‎6‎/‎7‎/‎2020 at 10:08 AM, YABO713 said:

 

Lol my one of my groomsmen is one of them. 

 

He's a pretty normal guy, but he's keenly aware of macroeconomic and geopolitical situations. The name of his game isn't so much picking the right equities, it's knowing when and how to hedge your risk - that's what makes traders elite. The entire "Biff" stereotype of traders, I've found, is wholly incorrect. My friend graduated with dual degrees in finance and Eastern European history - got his masters in Vilnius on Eastern European studies - was hired by Goldman as an analyst  - sent frequently to Prague, Berlin, Zagreb, Vienna with the PMs he worked for as a means of providing cultural context - then became a PM himself, and he focuses almost entirely on EU entities or at least companies with substantial ops in the EU. 

 

Goldman found the value in his geopolitical and historical understanding, cultivated it, and used it for their own gain. 

 

I know a guy who double majored in chemistry and philosophy who was recruited by Wall St. but he has instead worked at a company that analyzes pre-ipo biomedical and tech companies.  To me this seems a lot easier than trading public companies because there are a)the timeline is much slower and b)there are far fewer players and c)at some point there usually needs to be a face-to-face negotiation, and a lot of people are good at that. 

 

I also know a guy who engineers proof-of-concept medical devices - the working prototype is then sold to one of the big boys.  He said it's pretty weird at first but after awhile the fact that some Arab prince is more or less paying everyone's high six-figure salary in suburban Connecticut seems pretty normal. 

 

 

Edited June 8, 20205 yr by jmecklenborg

On 6/7/2020 at 10:08 AM, YABO713 said:

The entire "Biff" stereotype of traders, I've found, is wholly incorrect.

 

Definitely true.   I have a friend who was West Point, served a couple tours in Afghanistan, then was recruited by Goldman Sachs.  

Of course the partying stereotype of strippers and coke do ring very true.....

27 minutes ago, Cleburger said:

 

Definitely true.   I have a friend who was West Point, served a couple tours in Afghanistan, then was recruited by Goldman Sachs.  

Of course the partying stereotype of strippers and coke do ring very true.....

 

... who among us?

Should have bought Nikola last week.

4 hours ago, DarkandStormy said:

Should have bought Nikola last week.

 

So much is going on right now that everyone is missing huge moves.  You can look back on the past two months and say...whatever.  If I had held on to what I owned in April I would be up $26k.  Instead I'm only up $10k.  It's impossible to be perfect with this stuff...even anywhere close to perfect. 

 

Here is a recent slice of my activity...I made some money for doing nothing.  I can't complain.  

 

 

^Nikola just recently IPO'd last week, though they had been partially available to invest in publicly via VTIQ (also doing well, but nothing like NKLA so far - Nikola appears to be enjoying a Tesla-like bump).

 

My buddy texted me yesterday morning that he had bought some $50 calls for NKLA, expiring July 2, and was hoping he'd hit.  By lunch, the stock price had already surpassed the strike price of the calls. 

 

People were asking about options - this is a basic options move.  He paid a nominal fee for the right (but not the obligation) to buy NKLA shares at $50/share anytime between the contract executing (yesterday) and July 2.  The seller than takes this fee and is hoping the stock price stays below $50 between now and July 2.  My friend is now in the money as he can choose to execute the call at the strike price - $50/share.  He could immediately sell those shares for a profit since they are up near $80 currently.  If the shares had never made it to $50 (well, $50 + call premium - the price paid for the call contract) he would just be out the price paid to execute the call.

 

Hope that was a simple enough explanation on a basic call option.

Good god Tesla.

2 minutes ago, TBideon said:

Good god Tesla.

 

Up bigly on a "leaked" email that Elon wants to start production of a vehicle they unveiled in 2017 and with no actual timetable given or factory site to do said production is peak Tesla.

Plus Microsoft and Apple racing to the 2 trillion dollar club. Amazon isn't too far behind too.

 

Just a bonkers year. From bear to bull to bear in such a short period of time.

Edited June 10, 20205 yr by TBideon

8 minutes ago, DarkandStormy said:

 

Up bigly on a "leaked" email that Elon wants to start production of a vehicle they unveiled in 2017 and with no actual timetable given or factory site to do said production is peak Tesla.

 

2021 is only six months out

Well, so much for that market rally.

39 minutes ago, DarkandStormy said:

Well, so much for that market rally.

 

A few articles appeared this morning about how all of the professional investors missed the rally.  Those same articles aren't showing up on my feed right now.  

 

Fools really rushed in over the past 2 weeks.  You need to buy low and sell high.  

23 minutes ago, jmecklenborg said:

Fools really rushed in over the past 2 weeks.  You need to buy low and sell high.  

 

"Buy low, sell high" is what rich people who don't manage their own investments say, but it has virtually no meaning.  The saying - if executed properly - means you need to time the market correctly.  Twice.  It's virtually impossible.  Most professionals even fail it.  Using this advice, you should have been selling from 2012 on since the markets have been at all-time highs since then.

 

One tell about this sell-off was VIX (Volatility Index).  It was rising the past week while the markets kept going up.  That's usually a recipe for a big sell off, which is what we saw today.

2 minutes ago, DarkandStormy said:

 

"Buy low, sell high" is what rich people who don't manage their own investments say, but it has virtually no meaning.  The saying - if executed properly - means you need to time the market correctly.  Twice.  It's virtually impossible.  Most professionals even fail it.  Using this advice, you should have been selling from 2012 on since the markets have been at all-time highs since then.

 

One tell about this sell-off was VIX (Volatility Index).  It was rising the past week while the markets kept going up.  That's usually a recipe for a big sell off, which is what we saw today.

I follow the slow and steady approach. I buy the same funds on a regular basis. I have a small sliver that I play with on individual stocks. But in the long run the slow steady approach usually wins.

Had to laugh because I inadvertently timed the market successfully this week. Did a 401k rollover last week, the money is in transit now, I guess I sold high. I am all index funds and against trying to time the market.

Edited June 11, 20205 yr by mu2010

18 minutes ago, freefourur said:

I follow the slow and steady approach. I buy the same funds on a regular basis. I have a small sliver that I play with on individual stocks. But in the long run the slow steady approach usually wins.

 

If you just invest regularly in market-index funds (or similar) you end up beating actively managed funds over 10+ years.

56 minutes ago, DarkandStormy said:

 

"Buy low, sell high" is what rich people who don't manage their own investments say, but it has virtually no meaning.  

 

I was making fun of these people because they downloaded Webull over the weekend, bought high on Monday, then sold low Tuesday.  

 

58 minutes ago, DarkandStormy said:

 

The saying - if executed properly - means you need to time the market correctly.  Twice. 

 

Well you need to do one or the other, or else you're in trouble.  Theoretically you could hold a dividend stock for a huge time period, take a loss on the sale, but make money overall, but that's a fairly rare circumstance, albeit that's a lot easier to calculate than the equivalent in rental properties.  

 

 

 

1 hour ago, mu2010 said:

Had to laugh because I inadvertently timed the market successfully this week. Did a 401k rollover last week, the money is in transit now, I guess I sold high. I am all index funds and against trying to time the market.

 

Ugh.  The opposite happened to me with my 401(k) rollover from Prudential to Fidelity.  Worse, Prudential did an in-kind transfer that I requested through their spartan online portal., which was smooth and user-friendly; then, after it was done, they said "oops, we actually weren't able to do that," and somehow clawed back all the shares they transferred to Fidelity (I had no idea this was even possible), liquidated them, and then transferred the cash to Fidelity, at which point I had to manually go back and re-buy everything in my entire 401(k), built up over 7 years at my old law firm.  They literally undid the rollover that was exactly what I wanted and was user-friendly, specifically for the purpose of doing something that was more cumbersome for me and also cost me substantially in terms of missed opportunities--some of those I share partial blame for, but it would have been far better if Prudential had simply let the in-kind transfer stand.

 

Though in the long term, all for the better, happy to have rolled out of Prudential (no online trading, slow and expensive broker-assisted trading, and the most awfully awkward account statements, like something out of the 1970s).  But if I'm ever in the management of any large or small business and on any committee or in any role responsible for retirement benefit planning, I will emphatically not use them as my 401(k) custodian, in case it wasn't completely obvious from my previous paragraph.

14 hours ago, jmecklenborg said:

Well you need to do one or the other, or else you're in trouble. 

 

15 hours ago, DarkandStormy said:

If you just invest regularly in market-index funds (or similar) you end up beating actively managed funds over 10+ years.

 

I haven't bothered with trying to time the market in the last decade.  It's turned out fine for my purpose - building enough of a nest egg for retirement.

 

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/030916/buffetts-bet-hedge-funds-year-eight-brka-brkb.asp

 

 

Warren Buffett offered a challenge to any active manager to try and beat him.  He put his money in an S&P500 fund and let it ride for ten years.  The fund managers could do whatever they wanted over those ten years, but had to be net of their fees.

 

Quote

Over the course of the bet the S&P 500 index fund returned 7.1% compounded annually, significantly more than the basket of funds selected by an asset manager at Protégé Partners. That basket only returned an average of 2.2%.

 

And I believe this bet started Jan 1, 2008 - so Buffett had a very bumpy Year 1.

 

Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard, on market timing:

Quote

“I’ve been in this business 61 years and I can’t do it. I’ve never met anybody who can do it. I’ve never met anybody who’s met anybody who can do it.”

 

Worrying about timing the market - a feat that is virtually impossible - will cause you to lose more than if you just invest regularly.

^ As Buffet suggested, the small investor (by which he probably means less than a billion) should be 10% in Treasury bonds and 90% in an S&P500 index fund.

 

I have not yet completely follwed his advice, but I'm gradually moving toward it.

https://www.forbesindia.com/article/chicago-booth/measuring-chance/34269/1

 

Quote

In the study, "Luck versus Skill in the Cross-Section of Mutual Fund Returns," Fama and French analyze a portfolio of actively managed US equity mutual funds, where each fund's contribution to the portfolio depends on the value of assets under management. The authors measure the portfolio's alpha—the difference between the portfolio's actual return and expected return—which is typically used to assess an active fund manager's performance. Fama and French estimate that from 1984 to 2006 the aggregate active fund portfolio underperformed by 0.8 percentage points per year.

 

Managers of active funds charge high fees and expenses to cover the costs of putting together a portfolio they hope will outperform the market. Active funds are considerably more expensive than passive funds, which simply track the performance of a benchmark index such as the overall stock market. Fees and expenses may weigh down returns, but Fama and French showed that, even if each active fund's expense ratio is added back to the calculations, the aggregate portfolio's alpha rises to only 0.1 percentage point per year. Thus, even before fees and expenses, there is no evidence that active fund managers significantly enhance returns.

 

There is a small fraction of active fund managers—the top three percent—who do about as well as expected if they have just enough skill to cover their costs. This result suggests that there is some evidence of skill among the top fund managers, but it is not likely to be of much benefit to investors.

 

One can imagine a mix of funds that might generate the results that Fama and French find. The top three percent, for instance, could be comprised of talented managers with positive true alphas and less skillful managers with negative true alphas who are extremely lucky. As a result, an investor who buys a portfolio of funds from the top three percent of active managers can expect an alpha of zero. It would be impossible to pick out the truly skillful managers from this group since their returns are simply not high enough to clearly distinguish them from the lucky bad managers who also land on top.

 

A small percentage of active fund managers are able to produce results that cover the cost of their fees over time, but good luck picking funds from that small percentage since they're indistinguishable from fund managers who happen to get lucky for a few years and look like they're producing better-than-average results.

Edited June 12, 20205 yr by DarkandStormy

On 6/12/2020 at 11:14 AM, Dougal said:

^ As Buffet suggested, the small investor (by which he probably means less than a billion) should be 10% in Treasury bonds and 90% in an S&P500 index fund.

 

I have not yet completely follwed his advice, but I'm gradually moving toward it.

 

Small investors should emphatically not try timing the market.  That doesn't mean that small investors cannot learn solid long-term-buy-and-hold (LTBH) investing and beat the market solidly even over the long term.  For some reason, my data doesn't go back to 2008 when I actually started (which means that how I did in the Great Recession is lost in this data ... I did well but would have done much better if I knew about investing then what I know now).  Nevertheless, my 5-year of 20.74% is almost 11 percentage points above the market.  (The one that goes back to 2018 is that 401(k) rollover I described above, and unfortunately my records for my performance in my self-directed 401(k) is not preserved in digital form, and I'm not about to go scan and manually calculate it just to make this point.  The ones that go back to 5/31/19 are my wife's accounts.)  That said, we're getting close to the 10-year threshold even with respect to the available data on my two oldest Fidelity accounts (taxable brokerage and Roth IRA) and those are about 3.5 and 6.5 percentage points above the 10-year market--still good, but not like the last five years when I had a better handle on what I was doing.

 

{pic removed}

 

As I mentioned earlier on this thread, my one perfect market timing move was almost utterly coincidental (selling SDRL right before the wheels fell off): 

 

 

Workhorse Group WKHS is up huge for me. Was around .50 a share a little over a year ago, hovering around $3.60 now.

Returning to work:

 

P&G about 2 weeks ago

Staffmark - now

Neaton Auto - now

ThyssenKrupp - now

Luxottica - end of July/early Aug

Ohio National Financial Svc's - Early Sept

 

(rolling in on rotations and small %'s)

16 hours ago, DarkandStormy said:

Worrying about timing the market - a feat that is virtually impossible - will cause you to lose more than if you just invest regularly.

 

During ordinary times, yes.  We just had an artificial depression in the price of oil at the same time as a flash recession.  Buying oil stocks in March-April was shooting fish in a barrel. 

 

The problem with Wall St. is that the guys who get famous took one or two big bets in their 20s and they worked out.  Warren Buffet, etc., have noted the many guys who become stars by their early 30s who fade into obscurity in ensuing decades.  You don't know if they can beat the market for 40-50 years until 40-50 years have transpired.

Those young guys usually only know how to make money under very specific market conditions that don't last.

On 6/13/2020 at 10:10 AM, GCrites80s said:

Those young guys usually only know how to make money under very specific market conditions that don't last.

 

Very few industries barely change over 30-40-50 years.  Those that do - janitorial services, lawn care, etc. - typically aren't very profitable because they're difficult to scale.  Something like concrete or fruit wholesaling, meanwhile, tends to attract organized crime because there are a lot of ways to cook the books. 

 

Update: I just moved the entirety of my retirement to cash.  I'm getting back into the market after the next 8-10% dip.  It could be a few months but what is going on right now is...insane.  My big, boring 401k is only down 4% for the year.  That valuation does not reflect reality. 

 

I just ran into several former coworkers tonight.  These are the exact sort of people who are going to stop making rent/mortgage payments in the next 1-2 months.  There are a lot of these people out there. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7 hours ago, jmecklenborg said:

Update: I just moved the entirety of my retirement to cash.  I'm getting back into the market after the next 8-10% dip.  It could be a few months but what is going on right now is...insane.  My big, boring 401k is only down 4% for the year.  That valuation does not reflect reality. 

 

I just ran into several former coworkers tonight.  These are the exact sort of people who are going to stop making rent/mortgage payments in the next 1-2 months.  There are a lot of these people out there. 

 

The stock market isn't the economy.  Plus, JPow is printing money faster than the machines can produce it lol