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There are some pretty smart investor type people on HN, but my impression (could be wrong) is that the overton window of serious HN investing discussion (i.e. o

by gen220 3y ago

There are some pretty smart investor type people on HN, but my impression (could be wrong) is that the overton window of serious HN investing discussion (i.e. omitting crypto) is skewed towards passive strategies. There's not a big incentive for thoughtful investors to jump in to conversations centered around "investing = gambling", "why bother because efficient market hypothesis", etc. It's a fun question to speculate about why that is. My guess is that most of the hacker type people who've grown wealthy (and therefore had disposable income to invest with) in the last 20 years were generally conservative people (i.e. people working at BigTech for 6+ years). It's perhaps ironic that the source of their outsized wealth was effectively a concentrated bet against the efficient market hypothesis and passive investing strategies.

raincole 3y ago
> It's a fun question to speculate about why that is. For me, it's humility. If from now on, I quit everything else I do and just focus on studying a competitive game, like chess. I'll treat it like a full-time job, spending 8 hours on it a day, for 3 years. That's about 8k hours. What'll this land me on? Unless I'm covertly the best chess genius ever, the chances are: pretty good, but not great. I'll slay a local chess club, while having 0 winrate against pros. That's why I'm hesitiate to invest actively.
- gen220 3y ago
  To extend your analogy, though, investing is a very different competitive game from Chess, because the rewards of "winning" your regional/hyperlocal competition (i.e. small caps) are financially equivalent to "winning" the biggest competitions in the world (betting on interest rate fluctuations, the earnings of any S&P500 company, etc.). It's much easier to "double" your money in one of those local games, because the competition is weaker, their attention is divided, and their holding periods are brief. Until you're playing with 10s or 100s of millions USD or have super short holding periods, there's no need to play against 1800 elo players – the pie of "the market" is absolutely massive. The 1800+ players exclusively play in big markets, on the payroll of people with billions and tens of billions of capital to deploy – but if you're not throwing billions around, why bother playing that game? You might need 10k hours to bet competently on highly-competitive, complicated financial instruments. But I reckon you'd only need ~100-1000 hours of education to do a surprising amount of damage in simpler markets. YMMV.
- JojoFatsani 3y ago
  Yes, much easier to just dump money in vanguard index stocks, sit back and watch it pile up. If you really want to “get rich quick” you can probably come up to speed on effective real estate investment (aka landlording and leveraging real estate equity to build a portfolio) in a much shorter horizon.
DANmode 3y ago
Worth over a mil, and you historically make 8%-12% a year by not changing a thing? Easy to develop a lack of interest - and/or "lack of scrap".

by gen220 3y ago

raincole 3y ago

> It's a fun question to speculate about why that is. For me, it's humility. If from now on, I quit everything else I do and just focus on studying a competitive game, like chess. I'll treat it like a full-time job, spending 8 hours on it a day, for 3 years. That's about 8k hours. What'll this land me on? Unless I'm covertly the best chess genius ever, the chances are: pretty good, but not great. I'll slay a local chess club, while having 0 winrate against pros. That's why I'm hesitiate to invest actively.

gen220 3y ago
To extend your analogy, though, investing is a very different competitive game from Chess, because the rewards of "winning" your regional/hyperlocal competition (i.e. small caps) are financially equivalent to "winning" the biggest competitions in the world (betting on interest rate fluctuations, the earnings of any S&P500 company, etc.). It's much easier to "double" your money in one of those local games, because the competition is weaker, their attention is divided, and their holding periods are brief. Until you're playing with 10s or 100s of millions USD or have super short holding periods, there's no need to play against 1800 elo players – the pie of "the market" is absolutely massive. The 1800+ players exclusively play in big markets, on the payroll of people with billions and tens of billions of capital to deploy – but if you're not throwing billions around, why bother playing that game? You might need 10k hours to bet competently on highly-competitive, complicated financial instruments. But I reckon you'd only need ~100-1000 hours of education to do a surprising amount of damage in simpler markets. YMMV.
JojoFatsani 3y ago
Yes, much easier to just dump money in vanguard index stocks, sit back and watch it pile up. If you really want to “get rich quick” you can probably come up to speed on effective real estate investment (aka landlording and leveraging real estate equity to build a portfolio) in a much shorter horizon.

DANmode 3y ago

Worth over a mil, and you historically make 8%-12% a year by not changing a thing? Easy to develop a lack of interest - and/or "lack of scrap".