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Every single shiller was wrong. Gold and crypto protect against inflation. Bonds should be 20-40 percent of a portfolio. Apple and MSFT and the rest of big t

Every single shiller was wrong. Gold and crypto protect against inflation. Bonds should be 20-40 percent of a portfolio. Apple and MSFT and the rest of big tech are safe havens. It's always a good time to buy a home, as supply is at a generational low and will remain like that for a decade, we will become like Canada so you shouldn't wait to buy. My favorite one is, you can't time the markets. Quite obviously a lot of people correctly timed the market's trends starting around the end of 2021, and the reasoning was pretty sound. I'm kicking myself today for dismissing them.

dannyw 4y ago
Thinking you can't time the markets is a fallacious story that buy and hold investors believe in. It may be beneficial, as many tend to sell low and buy high, but it's nothing further from the truth for me.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Assuming someone can time the market, what reason would they have for not cracking into the list of the world’s wealthiest people within a couple decades?
  - mckirk 4y ago
    It might be worth distinguishing here between 'some people that can time the market' and 'market conditions that can be timed by some people'. 'You can't time the market' would preclude both, but I think GP is talking about scenario 2 and you are talking about scenario 1.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - mywittyname 4y ago
    This one was easy though. Practically everyone was looking around while the pandemic stock market was exploding, realizing that it didn't make sense. For me, Tesla was the flashing red sign, it's market cap was something close to that of the entire auto industry combined. I had a big expense coming up this year, so I went ahead and sold a bunch of stock in January.
    - chasebank 4y ago
      Ya but it hasn't made sense for years. Which is why you can't time it. You just got lucky. Tesla didn't make sense when it was $250/share prior to the stock split. Look where shorting got you.
    - Aunche 4y ago
      Selling a stock that you think is obviously overvalued isn't "timing the market." You're just applying market fundamentals. Timing the market would be shorting a bunch of Tesla.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    Lack of credit, capacity constraints.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      For decades?
      - lordnacho 4y ago
        Yes. If a strategy can only make $1m a year, you won't become a billionaire from it.
janmo 4y ago
It seems like the only inflation hedge was to short the entire market (Stocks, Crypto, Gold...)
notinfuriated 4y ago
I'm not sure how you can confidently make any conclusions about any of this while we're in the midst of it. We're not through to the other side of this downturn yet, so who knows what could win? My casual observation that I'll probably forget about in a few years and maybe remember the next time a real downturn (I'm too young to have ever paid attention to the economy, economic news, etc. during a downturn) happens is that, most likely, everyone gets scared of the uncertainty and dumps their assets in to cash so they're ready to pay off any debts they have. What happens next is unknown. > Quite obviously a lot of people correctly timed the market's trends starting around the end of 2021 How many incorrectly timed the markets in 2020? In 2019? Etc. I felt real smart when I sold my BTC at the ~$18k peak way back when. I even told myself I'd wait til it dropped to $2k before I bought more. Seemed smart back then. Not so smart now. Granted, I still made money, but I left a lot on the table.
- cableshaft 4y ago
  With bitcoin you could have bought back in at $3500-6000 and rode it back up in March of 2020, and had a bigger bag in the process (or the same bag plus a bunch of cash). Granted things were really scary then. I'm the even bigger dummy. I held through that $18k peak and crash in 2018, and still held through the $68k peak and crash last year. Still holding, but could have made way more if I had sold even a piece of it when it hit my target ($54k) instead of waiting for the $100k everyone kept promising was definitely going to happen based on previous cycles. Oops.
  - randomopining 4y ago
    My gut said sell at 69k or even much before. I 100% knew 100k was impossible. Truly I expected 75k or so. But I listened to the shills. Key lesson -- if a shill has good information, take the information. But make your own decision at the end of day. How it fits into your mid/long term goals etc.
    - cableshaft 4y ago
      Honestly I was expecting 75-80k myself, and was planning to sell a good chunk then (up to 50%). The 100k I was a little less sure about. But it didn't even get that far. Dropped almost immediately after getting to its ATH, which usually doesn't happen. The world had to shit the bed and take it down with it before that.
mizzack 4y ago
> Quite obviously a lot of people correctly timed the market's trends starting around the end of 2021, and the reasoning was pretty sound. You mean when some of the Fed officials sold? Sound reasoning, indeed.
gassiss 4y ago
"You can't time the markets" doesn't mean it's not possible. It means if you do, it's luck
- mancerayder 4y ago
  Timing the market is often read literally, like someone bought or sold at peaks and bottoms. But a lot of people saw the bear markets coming. Whether they sold in November or August, they correctly timed. Buy and hold investors made the wrong move by holding. It was obvious then to many.
  - jjoonathan 4y ago
    Bears have been predicting the next recession every year since 2008, and calling it "obvious" too. The ones who got the timing wrong -- most of them -- slink away, while the ones who more or less got it right will brag for the next decade. So it goes.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    But you're using the results of a Pachinko machine to say that some balls knew the right place to land. There have been people pulling money because a crash is coming any day since the start of the bull market. Sure, it's possible to time the market but it's equally possible to make the wrong prediction. > Whether they sold in November or August, they correctly timed. Buy and hold investors made the wrong move by holding. It was obvious then to many. In a decade or so I strongly believe my investment will be up significantly from those November numbers. I won't care what happens right now, it literally doesn't effect my plans to withdraw the cash when I retire.
  - danaris 4y ago
    There's a classic scam (I'm sure it has a name, but I don't know it) where the scammer gives out predictions for some stock or other: they pick their (large) group of targets, then send half a prediction that it will rise, and the other half that it will fall. After the appropriate time passes, they are proven right to one half, and wrong to the other. Then they take the half they got right, and do the same thing again. After a few iterations, their pool of marks is smaller...but they also believe that the scammer is never wrong. (I believe the scammer then tells them they need to put a large sum down—which the scammer will, of course, handle for them...and then absconds with it.) You're focusing on the ones who got it right, ignoring the ones who got it wrong, and calling it smarts. It's very unlikely to be so. The market as a whole should always be treated no differently than the scammer's entire initial pool of marks.
chasebank 4y ago
Why do you think housing is a safe haven? Interest rates will continue to rise, thus making a monthly mortgage payment more expensive. People can flat out not afford to purchase homes at these levels if interest rates rise. It's simple math.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > Why do you think housing is a safe haven? Interest rates will continue to rise, thus making a monthly mortgage payment more expensive. People can flat out not afford to purchase homes at these levels if interest rates rise. It's simple math. But if you get your mortgage now, you don't have to worry about those future increases. IIRC, most American mortgages are fixed rate.
  - ejb999 4y ago
    yes, but you still risk paying too much, and then if you have to sell for any reason, risk taking a huge loss. Lots and lots of people lost a ton of money in real estate during the 2008 downturn by overpaying and then being forced to sell.
  - chasebank 4y ago
    The price of a home doesn't really matter. You're effectively buying yourself a monthly payment. $1M 30 yr loan @ 3% vs 7% is $4,200/mo vs $6,600/mo.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - JTbane 4y ago
    If interest rates do go up a lot, there is a good chance housing will crash, at least proportionally.
- mancerayder 4y ago
  All of the points above were sayings, slogans being repeated that we see today are incorrect. Interesting username, btw!
rvz 4y ago
> My favorite one is, you can't time the markets. Exactly. My favorite one was about Cloudflare stock. Look at the responses in [0] when it was more than $210 per share, For Bitcoin reaching >$60K 'This isn't even close to what will be the all time high.' [1] and I suggested many to run away from the market [2] and one said 'Stock market up 1% today on both this news and decades-high inflation.' which that obviously didn't age well. So as you can see, it looks like so far I (and many others) were able to time the market and predict the 2022 crash, especially in crypto. [3] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29355360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29355360 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26840880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26840880 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29752372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29752372
- bigyikes 4y ago
  Spot-on predictions! If I predict this coin flip will be heads, and I flip it, and it is heads… does that mean I can predict coin flips? What if I do it three times in a row? What if I do it 10 times in a row? [1] [1]: https://youtu.be/rwvIGNXY21Y https://youtu.be/rwvIGNXY21Y
  - mywittyname 4y ago
    False equivalency. We have loads of information available to us which is correlated with stock market performance. With enough information about the coin's motion while it is in the air, one might be able to predict a coin flip pretty accurately too.
- yunohn 4y ago
  Your [0] is based on AWS competition, not a Cloudflare fault nor did their stock start falling immediately. The other three citations are basic speculation from Apr 2021, and 6-7 months ago. Not sure how this counts as “timing” the market.
boringg 4y ago
If it isn't clear to anyone right now. There are no safe assets, there haven't been a lot of options for the last year. Your best bet is to minimize your losses. Hold cash- lose ~7-8% real value. Safe bonds are probably your best bet for the short term or owning a inflation protected business however those are rare and a recession is coming along. I guess there's a case for some risky short bets but that makes the problem worse. It just feels like there is about to be an asset wipeout across the spectrum - like a forest fire clearing out the forest for new growth. Don't run to the exits because that's an even worse outcome unless your holding leveraged stock bets.
- giantg2 4y ago
  You can buy $10k of I-bonds per year. That is a safe haven, even if small.
  - randomopining 4y ago
    There's a way to effectively get more by gifting
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - giantg2 4y ago
      You have to be careful not to do anything illegal with that approach.
      - randomopining 4y ago
        I don't think it's illegal. You are holding it within the confines of their online system
  - ant6n 4y ago
    Can anybody, or is it just for US people?
gorjusborg 4y ago
> My favorite one is, you can't time the markets. Quite obviously a lot of people correctly timed the market's trends... Whoa. Think about it, there are constantly people thumping their chests and posting their theories about how things are under and over-valued, and pretty much everything else (like the world ending). If you think that because some people made a winning bet with their money that timing the market in general is a good strategy, I'd suggest you never play poker seriously.
- fengb 4y ago
  2010: All this pump is fake. Sell! 2014: All this pump is fake. Sell! 2018: All this pump is fake. Sell! 2022: All this pump is fake. Sell! See, you can time the market.
  - nathanaldensr 4y ago
    The funny thing is, it was fake--caused by 20 years of extremely cheap debt-money.
    - gorjusborg 4y ago
      I would agree, there are fundamental reasons that would suggest different outcomes for investments, and that's sort of an illustration of why you can't time the market. Even if you know the truth, and you believe that the market will always eventually reflect the truth, it's difficult to know how long that correction will take.
      - davidgh 4y ago
        “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
    - xsmasher 4y ago
      We didn't lose twenty or even ten years of gains though; only about one year. So the Cassandras were wrong nine out of ten times.
netheril96 4y ago
> Quite obviously a lot of people correctly timed the market's trends starting around the end of 2021, and the reasoning was pretty sound. Surely at any time somebody correctly timed the market.
- sooheon 4y ago
  Yes, when there are both buyers and sellers (which is the definition of a market that clears), there will always be a number of trades that were right, and an equal number that were wrong.
paulpauper 4y ago
yeah, every single "hedge' except oil/gas and real estate failed real estate has a lot of lag though so you are probably paying above market price for homes today
randomopining 4y ago
Super low rates and a bunch of time on peoples' hands caused the biggest zero sum game in years. Pump and dump. No new value created, just people playing musical chairs until the music eventually stopped. I feel your pain, I was deep in it too and my gut was telling me the way forward. But I ended up listening to the shills, mostly because I'm relatively young and wanted to lean towards more exposure than less.
Jeema101 4y ago
I've been around since before the dot-com crash, and while "you can't time the markets" is true to some extent, some people take it as an excuse to turn their brains off entirely and ignore fundamentals.
fny 4y ago
Remember, every single shiller is selling you their product. A few additional thoughts: > Gold and crypto protect against inflation. No insurance policy pays when the house is already on fire. > Bonds should be 20-40 percent of a portfolio. If you believed in inflation north of 3%, why the hell would you own bonds? > Apple and MSFT and the rest of big tech are safe havens. Megacap tech is still up tremendously from the 2020 lows. Not saying they're going higher, but they've weathered the recent storm pretty well. > It's always a good time to buy a home, as supply is at a generational low and will remain like that for a decade, we will become like Canada so you shouldn't wait to buy. This was good advice if you were planning to live in your home you could have locked in rates at generational lows. Sure you were paying up for the house, but your mortgage payments would have been absurdly low. And yes, I'm almost positive over a 15-30 year period you'd be able to recoup your principle.
- Thetawaves 4y ago
  > If you believed in inflation north of 3%, why the hell would you own bonds? Inflation protected bonds earning nearly 10%?
throwawaymaths 4y ago
The "not timing the markets" is an incredibly privileged take: for many people they are getting hired and fired cyclically -- when markets are high they are getting paid and when markets are low they might not be, and might be taking money out of their savings investments; so if they are doing their best to cost average when they have cash flow that permits they might be losing money.
shreyshnaccount 4y ago
gold and crypto protect against inflation? gold i kinda understand, but crypto? how?
- atemerev 4y ago
  Theoretically, Bitcoin is a deflationary asset, it’s supply is limited. In practice, crypto is very prone to hype cycles.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > Theoretically, Bitcoin is a deflationary asset, it’s supply is limited Assets aren’t inflationary or deflationary. Prices are. Prices, denominated in crypto, have inflated through the moon this year as the value of the currencies crashed. There are plenty of things in the world with naturally or artificially fixed supply. Anyone pitching them as deflationary is talking tripe.
  - shreyshnaccount 4y ago
    wrong, a true asset of that class would not only limit but actively reduce the number of tokens in circulation afaik
- thargor90 4y ago
  crypto was sold as a deflationary investment, because supply of some crypto currencies is limited, i.e. no more than 21 million bitcoins are planned to be mined in total.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    That's the exact reason I have all my Star Trek TNG collectible plates! Only 1000 made baby!
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Can I have NFT for one of those?
harambae 4y ago
>It's always a good time to buy a home, as supply is at a generational low and will remain like that for a decade, we will become like Canada so you shouldn't wait to buy. Sadly, this one hasn't been disproven yet (I hope it will be soon). All we've seen is record home cancellations which may or may not be a leading indicator [0] [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/homebuyers-are-canceling-deals-at-highest-rate-since-start-of-covid.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/homebuyers-are-canceling-dea...
andsoitis 4y ago
> you can't time the markets What is generally meant by this is that you cannot know the future so you cannot know when is the most optimal time to buy or sell. Now, you can react to trend (eg your “trends starting around the end of 2021”) and sell, for instance. But when are you going to buy again (ie can you know when the bottom is?).
tarsinge 4y ago
Bonds were not a good idea because rates were historically low. If you can't time the market then why bonds should not be 20-40 percent of a portfolio?

dannyw 4y ago

Thinking you can't time the markets is a fallacious story that buy and hold investors believe in. It may be beneficial, as many tend to sell low and buy high, but it's nothing further from the truth for me.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lotsofpulp 4y ago
Assuming someone can time the market, what reason would they have for not cracking into the list of the world’s wealthiest people within a couple decades?
- mckirk 4y ago
  It might be worth distinguishing here between 'some people that can time the market' and 'market conditions that can be timed by some people'. 'You can't time the market' would preclude both, but I think GP is talking about scenario 2 and you are talking about scenario 1.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- mywittyname 4y ago
  This one was easy though. Practically everyone was looking around while the pandemic stock market was exploding, realizing that it didn't make sense. For me, Tesla was the flashing red sign, it's market cap was something close to that of the entire auto industry combined. I had a big expense coming up this year, so I went ahead and sold a bunch of stock in January.
  - chasebank 4y ago
    Ya but it hasn't made sense for years. Which is why you can't time it. You just got lucky. Tesla didn't make sense when it was $250/share prior to the stock split. Look where shorting got you.
  - Aunche 4y ago
    Selling a stock that you think is obviously overvalued isn't "timing the market." You're just applying market fundamentals. Timing the market would be shorting a bunch of Tesla.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Lack of credit, capacity constraints.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    For decades?
    - lordnacho 4y ago
      Yes. If a strategy can only make $1m a year, you won't become a billionaire from it.

janmo 4y ago

It seems like the only inflation hedge was to short the entire market (Stocks, Crypto, Gold...)

notinfuriated 4y ago

I'm not sure how you can confidently make any conclusions about any of this while we're in the midst of it. We're not through to the other side of this downturn yet, so who knows what could win? My casual observation that I'll probably forget about in a few years and maybe remember the next time a real downturn (I'm too young to have ever paid attention to the economy, economic news, etc. during a downturn) happens is that, most likely, everyone gets scared of the uncertainty and dumps their assets in to cash so they're ready to pay off any debts they have. What happens next is unknown. > Quite obviously a lot of people correctly timed the market's trends starting around the end of 2021 How many incorrectly timed the markets in 2020? In 2019? Etc. I felt real smart when I sold my BTC at the ~$18k peak way back when. I even told myself I'd wait til it dropped to $2k before I bought more. Seemed smart back then. Not so smart now. Granted, I still made money, but I left a lot on the table.

cableshaft 4y ago
With bitcoin you could have bought back in at $3500-6000 and rode it back up in March of 2020, and had a bigger bag in the process (or the same bag plus a bunch of cash). Granted things were really scary then. I'm the even bigger dummy. I held through that $18k peak and crash in 2018, and still held through the $68k peak and crash last year. Still holding, but could have made way more if I had sold even a piece of it when it hit my target ($54k) instead of waiting for the $100k everyone kept promising was definitely going to happen based on previous cycles. Oops.
- randomopining 4y ago
  My gut said sell at 69k or even much before. I 100% knew 100k was impossible. Truly I expected 75k or so. But I listened to the shills. Key lesson -- if a shill has good information, take the information. But make your own decision at the end of day. How it fits into your mid/long term goals etc.
  - cableshaft 4y ago
    Honestly I was expecting 75-80k myself, and was planning to sell a good chunk then (up to 50%). The 100k I was a little less sure about. But it didn't even get that far. Dropped almost immediately after getting to its ATH, which usually doesn't happen. The world had to shit the bed and take it down with it before that.

mizzack 4y ago

> Quite obviously a lot of people correctly timed the market's trends starting around the end of 2021, and the reasoning was pretty sound. You mean when some of the Fed officials sold? Sound reasoning, indeed.

gassiss 4y ago

"You can't time the markets" doesn't mean it's not possible. It means if you do, it's luck

mancerayder 4y ago
Timing the market is often read literally, like someone bought or sold at peaks and bottoms. But a lot of people saw the bear markets coming. Whether they sold in November or August, they correctly timed. Buy and hold investors made the wrong move by holding. It was obvious then to many.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  Bears have been predicting the next recession every year since 2008, and calling it "obvious" too. The ones who got the timing wrong -- most of them -- slink away, while the ones who more or less got it right will brag for the next decade. So it goes.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  But you're using the results of a Pachinko machine to say that some balls knew the right place to land. There have been people pulling money because a crash is coming any day since the start of the bull market. Sure, it's possible to time the market but it's equally possible to make the wrong prediction. > Whether they sold in November or August, they correctly timed. Buy and hold investors made the wrong move by holding. It was obvious then to many. In a decade or so I strongly believe my investment will be up significantly from those November numbers. I won't care what happens right now, it literally doesn't effect my plans to withdraw the cash when I retire.
- danaris 4y ago
  There's a classic scam (I'm sure it has a name, but I don't know it) where the scammer gives out predictions for some stock or other: they pick their (large) group of targets, then send half a prediction that it will rise, and the other half that it will fall. After the appropriate time passes, they are proven right to one half, and wrong to the other. Then they take the half they got right, and do the same thing again. After a few iterations, their pool of marks is smaller...but they also believe that the scammer is never wrong. (I believe the scammer then tells them they need to put a large sum down—which the scammer will, of course, handle for them...and then absconds with it.) You're focusing on the ones who got it right, ignoring the ones who got it wrong, and calling it smarts. It's very unlikely to be so. The market as a whole should always be treated no differently than the scammer's entire initial pool of marks.

chasebank 4y ago

Why do you think housing is a safe haven? Interest rates will continue to rise, thus making a monthly mortgage payment more expensive. People can flat out not afford to purchase homes at these levels if interest rates rise. It's simple math.

tablespoon 4y ago
> Why do you think housing is a safe haven? Interest rates will continue to rise, thus making a monthly mortgage payment more expensive. People can flat out not afford to purchase homes at these levels if interest rates rise. It's simple math. But if you get your mortgage now, you don't have to worry about those future increases. IIRC, most American mortgages are fixed rate.
- ejb999 4y ago
  yes, but you still risk paying too much, and then if you have to sell for any reason, risk taking a huge loss. Lots and lots of people lost a ton of money in real estate during the 2008 downturn by overpaying and then being forced to sell.
- chasebank 4y ago
  The price of a home doesn't really matter. You're effectively buying yourself a monthly payment. $1M 30 yr loan @ 3% vs 7% is $4,200/mo vs $6,600/mo.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- JTbane 4y ago
  If interest rates do go up a lot, there is a good chance housing will crash, at least proportionally.
mancerayder 4y ago
All of the points above were sayings, slogans being repeated that we see today are incorrect. Interesting username, btw!

rvz 4y ago

> My favorite one is, you can't time the markets. Exactly. My favorite one was about Cloudflare stock. Look at the responses in [0] when it was more than $210 per share, For Bitcoin reaching >$60K 'This isn't even close to what will be the all time high.' [1] and I suggested many to run away from the market [2] and one said 'Stock market up 1% today on both this news and decades-high inflation.' which that obviously didn't age well. So as you can see, it looks like so far I (and many others) were able to time the market and predict the 2022 crash, especially in crypto. [3] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29355360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29355360 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26840880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26840880 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29752372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29752372

bigyikes 4y ago
Spot-on predictions! If I predict this coin flip will be heads, and I flip it, and it is heads… does that mean I can predict coin flips? What if I do it three times in a row? What if I do it 10 times in a row? [1] [1]: https://youtu.be/rwvIGNXY21Y https://youtu.be/rwvIGNXY21Y
- mywittyname 4y ago
  False equivalency. We have loads of information available to us which is correlated with stock market performance. With enough information about the coin's motion while it is in the air, one might be able to predict a coin flip pretty accurately too.
yunohn 4y ago
Your [0] is based on AWS competition, not a Cloudflare fault nor did their stock start falling immediately. The other three citations are basic speculation from Apr 2021, and 6-7 months ago. Not sure how this counts as “timing” the market.

boringg 4y ago

If it isn't clear to anyone right now. There are no safe assets, there haven't been a lot of options for the last year. Your best bet is to minimize your losses. Hold cash- lose ~7-8% real value. Safe bonds are probably your best bet for the short term or owning a inflation protected business however those are rare and a recession is coming along. I guess there's a case for some risky short bets but that makes the problem worse. It just feels like there is about to be an asset wipeout across the spectrum - like a forest fire clearing out the forest for new growth. Don't run to the exits because that's an even worse outcome unless your holding leveraged stock bets.

giantg2 4y ago
You can buy $10k of I-bonds per year. That is a safe haven, even if small.
- randomopining 4y ago
  There's a way to effectively get more by gifting
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - giantg2 4y ago
    You have to be careful not to do anything illegal with that approach.
    - randomopining 4y ago
      I don't think it's illegal. You are holding it within the confines of their online system
- ant6n 4y ago
  Can anybody, or is it just for US people?

gorjusborg 4y ago

> My favorite one is, you can't time the markets. Quite obviously a lot of people correctly timed the market's trends... Whoa. Think about it, there are constantly people thumping their chests and posting their theories about how things are under and over-valued, and pretty much everything else (like the world ending). If you think that because some people made a winning bet with their money that timing the market in general is a good strategy, I'd suggest you never play poker seriously.

fengb 4y ago
2010: All this pump is fake. Sell! 2014: All this pump is fake. Sell! 2018: All this pump is fake. Sell! 2022: All this pump is fake. Sell! See, you can time the market.
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  The funny thing is, it was fake--caused by 20 years of extremely cheap debt-money.
  - gorjusborg 4y ago
    I would agree, there are fundamental reasons that would suggest different outcomes for investments, and that's sort of an illustration of why you can't time the market. Even if you know the truth, and you believe that the market will always eventually reflect the truth, it's difficult to know how long that correction will take.
    - davidgh 4y ago
      “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
  - xsmasher 4y ago
    We didn't lose twenty or even ten years of gains though; only about one year. So the Cassandras were wrong nine out of ten times.

netheril96 4y ago

> Quite obviously a lot of people correctly timed the market's trends starting around the end of 2021, and the reasoning was pretty sound. Surely at any time somebody correctly timed the market.

sooheon 4y ago
Yes, when there are both buyers and sellers (which is the definition of a market that clears), there will always be a number of trades that were right, and an equal number that were wrong.

paulpauper 4y ago

yeah, every single "hedge' except oil/gas and real estate failed real estate has a lot of lag though so you are probably paying above market price for homes today

randomopining 4y ago

Super low rates and a bunch of time on peoples' hands caused the biggest zero sum game in years. Pump and dump. No new value created, just people playing musical chairs until the music eventually stopped. I feel your pain, I was deep in it too and my gut was telling me the way forward. But I ended up listening to the shills, mostly because I'm relatively young and wanted to lean towards more exposure than less.

Jeema101 4y ago

I've been around since before the dot-com crash, and while "you can't time the markets" is true to some extent, some people take it as an excuse to turn their brains off entirely and ignore fundamentals.

fny 4y ago

Remember, every single shiller is selling you their product. A few additional thoughts: > Gold and crypto protect against inflation. No insurance policy pays when the house is already on fire. > Bonds should be 20-40 percent of a portfolio. If you believed in inflation north of 3%, why the hell would you own bonds? > Apple and MSFT and the rest of big tech are safe havens. Megacap tech is still up tremendously from the 2020 lows. Not saying they're going higher, but they've weathered the recent storm pretty well. > It's always a good time to buy a home, as supply is at a generational low and will remain like that for a decade, we will become like Canada so you shouldn't wait to buy. This was good advice if you were planning to live in your home you could have locked in rates at generational lows. Sure you were paying up for the house, but your mortgage payments would have been absurdly low. And yes, I'm almost positive over a 15-30 year period you'd be able to recoup your principle.

Thetawaves 4y ago
> If you believed in inflation north of 3%, why the hell would you own bonds? Inflation protected bonds earning nearly 10%?

throwawaymaths 4y ago

The "not timing the markets" is an incredibly privileged take: for many people they are getting hired and fired cyclically -- when markets are high they are getting paid and when markets are low they might not be, and might be taking money out of their savings investments; so if they are doing their best to cost average when they have cash flow that permits they might be losing money.

shreyshnaccount 4y ago

gold and crypto protect against inflation? gold i kinda understand, but crypto? how?

atemerev 4y ago
Theoretically, Bitcoin is a deflationary asset, it’s supply is limited. In practice, crypto is very prone to hype cycles.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Theoretically, Bitcoin is a deflationary asset, it’s supply is limited Assets aren’t inflationary or deflationary. Prices are. Prices, denominated in crypto, have inflated through the moon this year as the value of the currencies crashed. There are plenty of things in the world with naturally or artificially fixed supply. Anyone pitching them as deflationary is talking tripe.
- shreyshnaccount 4y ago
  wrong, a true asset of that class would not only limit but actively reduce the number of tokens in circulation afaik
thargor90 4y ago
crypto was sold as a deflationary investment, because supply of some crypto currencies is limited, i.e. no more than 21 million bitcoins are planned to be mined in total.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  That's the exact reason I have all my Star Trek TNG collectible plates! Only 1000 made baby!
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Can I have NFT for one of those?

harambae 4y ago

>It's always a good time to buy a home, as supply is at a generational low and will remain like that for a decade, we will become like Canada so you shouldn't wait to buy. Sadly, this one hasn't been disproven yet (I hope it will be soon). All we've seen is record home cancellations which may or may not be a leading indicator [0] [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/homebuyers-are-canceling-deals-at-highest-rate-since-start-of-covid.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/homebuyers-are-canceling-dea...

andsoitis 4y ago

> you can't time the markets What is generally meant by this is that you cannot know the future so you cannot know when is the most optimal time to buy or sell. Now, you can react to trend (eg your “trends starting around the end of 2021”) and sell, for instance. But when are you going to buy again (ie can you know when the bottom is?).

tarsinge 4y ago

Bonds were not a good idea because rates were historically low. If you can't time the market then why bonds should not be 20-40 percent of a portfolio?