8 ms·

I don’t get why they need more money.

e40 3y ago
Yeah, that was my first thought. I didn't imagine he had that much, though, and it makes it even more of a head scratcher.
tombert 3y ago
I think I get it now. I did a reasonably good job at timing Nvidia stock. I bought three shares in February of last year, and it's more than tripled since then. Initially I was really happy to have bought when I did, but almost as quickly I started thinking "damn, if I had bought ten shares..." or "if I had bought an option contract instead..." as if me making two grand wasn't objectively a great thing. It's not rational, but I think it must just be instinct to always want "more", no matter how silly it becomes. It seems like the first thing people want when they have a billion dollars is a second billion dollars.
- toyg 3y ago
  This is particularly true for financial matters, where everything is just a number; and particularly true for someone whose lifestyle won't be materially impacted by outcomes. It's just a game.
- bastardoperator 3y ago
  Gambling has been known to be addictive.
  - tombert 3y ago
    It's a little annoying, because the only way to really preserve wealth is to push it into the market, and investing is always a bit of a gamble. There's reasonably low-risk tickers like VOO and SPY and VTI, and that is typically what I dump my money into, but it does concern me that the economics of the world has kind of forced me to embrace gambling. I'm generally a pretty risk-averse person, I've bought two lottery tickets in my life (once when I turned 18, once again when the Powerball hit a billion in 2015). Unsurprisingly, I didn't win both those times. I would much prefer to keep my cash in some kind of government-secured savings account, but the interest rates in those rarely keep up with inflation, at least not long term. The closest I have found to that is treasury-bills, and I do use those, but I still put the bulk of my money into ETFs, AKA gambling.
    - trogdor 3y ago
      > the economics of the world has kind of forced me to embrace gambling How so?
      - tombert 3y ago
        I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but what I was trying to say is that the way that you're expected to preserve wealth in the US is to put your savings into the market somehow. Markets are sort of inherently unstable, or at least unpredictable, meaning that there's sort of an inherent risk to that, and as such you're "gambling", at least a little. If you compare this to an FDIC-insured bank account, or a treasury note, there's effectively zero risk, so I would say it's decidedly not gambling, but the problem is that generally speaking zero-risk things don't pay enough interest to beat inflation, meaning that your money is degrading a bit. Obviously there's a difference between YOLOing everything in GME vs putting a bit of money every month into VOO, but the latter still does carry some risk, particularly in the short-term.
        WalterBright 3y ago
        The golden rule is the higher the risk, the higher the rate of return.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      I pondered for a long time what the difference was between gambling and investing. I finally figured it out. Gambling is when the rate of return (over time) is negative. Investing is when the rate of return (over time) is positive.
      - tombert 3y ago
        I don’t think I follow. Suppose I buy a share in a company specifically because I believe in their business and products. I think that’s pretty clearly investing, but are you claiming it would cease to have been an investment if the company went bust?
- spxneo 3y ago
  i actually lost a small fortune (now its nothing but back then it was a lot) on nvidia options as well as buying large amount of puts on a crypto mining company. the reason im telling you is exactly the mentality you described: in Q1 I hit a major home run buying puts on a bunch of banks that went under. I experienced 28,300% ROI. From then on I was like an addict. Constantly loading up on insane amount of FDs until I lost all of what I earned. Quite an experience and I think its best to just focus on building or growing a business. Had I bought stocks and held I think that would've been better. Just realize the winners and pros are writing you the options in the long run. Punters like me, as I experienced, cannot last. Also its a zero sum game. When I experienced financial ruin, I realized when I hit that 283x bagger, the person who wrote me those put options experienced financial ruin. So now I'm jaded about options and financial markets in general. its a double edge sword. its a dangerous societal drug.
  - tombert 3y ago
    I agree with everything you said, except is it actually implied they faced financial ruin with your 283x return? What if they were doing a covered call? Then they lose the stock, that sucks, but they're not going to go into debt. I'm just being pedantic, your broad points are absolutely true. I mostly just through cash into VTI.
    - spxneo 3y ago
      because I talked to the guy who wrote those puts on wallstreetbets he was depressed from all the comments making fun of him so i sent him some money from the winnings now that i experienced the exact thing he experienced, im just done with trying to make a buck from the markets because the profits come from others loss. options trading is a zero sum game. maybe you can say same about about stocks or futures who knows. options also offer an important tool for managing risks like insurance. so again here im trying to attach some judgement to numbers which are amoral. I guess I just don't want to be part of something that causes so much emotional and mental violence anymore. I want to build and help create ease for others.
      - 3y ago
- gigaflop 3y ago
  I sold my crypto bags one by one this year. I felt fantastic for hodling long enough to swing +20% minimums on my btc, doge, shib, eth. Doge, I got +39%. Then crypto kept going up. Whoops. Made money, but not all of the money. As a consolation prize, profiting any% on crypto probably puts me in the 1% of investors. I will say I missed my best timing on Doge by literally sleeping on it another night. I was out at a bar with 2 of my brothers, and was joking that my Doge had hit +69%. Would have been up a few hundo if I'd sold then instead of day after.
  - tombert 3y ago
    It's a frustratingly easy mindset to have, and it's kind of objectively wrong. If I put down money, and got more money back without any real effort (outside of clicking a button or two on ETRADE) then that's a win. I got free money! But that's just not how my brain works. Instead of being extremely happy that I got extra cash for nearly-zero effort, I'm sad that I didn't get more cash for nearly-zero effort. I try and fight that mentality and focus on the good, but sometimes that's easier said than done.
    - gigaflop 3y ago
      My way of fighting the mentality is to be lazy. No joke. I'm either Accumulating, Holding, or Looking to Sell. For stocks, I generally stick to #1 and #2. Buy if numbers/velocity looks good, hold if I don't like how they were doing. When doing my taxes for FY23, my Robinhood showed zero crypto sales. Having seen a few winters, I am willing to wait 6 to 8 months before considering getting back in. Musk might tweet about Doge on the shitter again, and spike its price by +69%, but I don't have the patience to follow such micro movements. Show me the 1yr graphs.
      - omnibrain 3y ago
        > My way of fighting the mentality is to be lazy. No joke. There is also "too lazy". I was too lazy to buy Tesla Stock during the Roadster Days. I was too lazy to get some Bitcoin when a friend could not stop talking about it in 2010. On the other hand, I would have sold both after they doubled or tripled for the first time. I know myself...
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > It seems like the first thing people want when they have a billion dollars is a second billion dollars. Of course. One's perspective changes right along with one's net worth. It's the same thing with power. The more power one has, the more power one wants.
vladms 3y ago
Can't say I understand this case (and don't know the details), but generally once you "train" yourself to do something and like it (basically, anything, like develop programs, run, watch movies, etc.) it is not that easy to just give up because you don't "need it". Making money or making startups can be addictive (the startup part I know from experience) and because the successful people might be the ones that are most addicted, that means they can't just stop even if they succeed.
msie 3y ago
Why stop at your first billion?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mmcdermott 3y ago
Beyond a certain point, the money is a scoreboard not a resource. It's like watching someone spend hundreds of hours on a video game for a speed run. You played to win and this is the metric.

e40 3y ago

Yeah, that was my first thought. I didn't imagine he had that much, though, and it makes it even more of a head scratcher.

tombert 3y ago

I think I get it now. I did a reasonably good job at timing Nvidia stock. I bought three shares in February of last year, and it's more than tripled since then. Initially I was really happy to have bought when I did, but almost as quickly I started thinking "damn, if I had bought ten shares..." or "if I had bought an option contract instead..." as if me making two grand wasn't objectively a great thing. It's not rational, but I think it must just be instinct to always want "more", no matter how silly it becomes. It seems like the first thing people want when they have a billion dollars is a second billion dollars.

toyg 3y ago
This is particularly true for financial matters, where everything is just a number; and particularly true for someone whose lifestyle won't be materially impacted by outcomes. It's just a game.
bastardoperator 3y ago
Gambling has been known to be addictive.
- tombert 3y ago
  It's a little annoying, because the only way to really preserve wealth is to push it into the market, and investing is always a bit of a gamble. There's reasonably low-risk tickers like VOO and SPY and VTI, and that is typically what I dump my money into, but it does concern me that the economics of the world has kind of forced me to embrace gambling. I'm generally a pretty risk-averse person, I've bought two lottery tickets in my life (once when I turned 18, once again when the Powerball hit a billion in 2015). Unsurprisingly, I didn't win both those times. I would much prefer to keep my cash in some kind of government-secured savings account, but the interest rates in those rarely keep up with inflation, at least not long term. The closest I have found to that is treasury-bills, and I do use those, but I still put the bulk of my money into ETFs, AKA gambling.
  - trogdor 3y ago
    > the economics of the world has kind of forced me to embrace gambling How so?
    - tombert 3y ago
      I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but what I was trying to say is that the way that you're expected to preserve wealth in the US is to put your savings into the market somehow. Markets are sort of inherently unstable, or at least unpredictable, meaning that there's sort of an inherent risk to that, and as such you're "gambling", at least a little. If you compare this to an FDIC-insured bank account, or a treasury note, there's effectively zero risk, so I would say it's decidedly not gambling, but the problem is that generally speaking zero-risk things don't pay enough interest to beat inflation, meaning that your money is degrading a bit. Obviously there's a difference between YOLOing everything in GME vs putting a bit of money every month into VOO, but the latter still does carry some risk, particularly in the short-term.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        The golden rule is the higher the risk, the higher the rate of return.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    I pondered for a long time what the difference was between gambling and investing. I finally figured it out. Gambling is when the rate of return (over time) is negative. Investing is when the rate of return (over time) is positive.
    - tombert 3y ago
      I don’t think I follow. Suppose I buy a share in a company specifically because I believe in their business and products. I think that’s pretty clearly investing, but are you claiming it would cease to have been an investment if the company went bust?
spxneo 3y ago
i actually lost a small fortune (now its nothing but back then it was a lot) on nvidia options as well as buying large amount of puts on a crypto mining company. the reason im telling you is exactly the mentality you described: in Q1 I hit a major home run buying puts on a bunch of banks that went under. I experienced 28,300% ROI. From then on I was like an addict. Constantly loading up on insane amount of FDs until I lost all of what I earned. Quite an experience and I think its best to just focus on building or growing a business. Had I bought stocks and held I think that would've been better. Just realize the winners and pros are writing you the options in the long run. Punters like me, as I experienced, cannot last. Also its a zero sum game. When I experienced financial ruin, I realized when I hit that 283x bagger, the person who wrote me those put options experienced financial ruin. So now I'm jaded about options and financial markets in general. its a double edge sword. its a dangerous societal drug.
- tombert 3y ago
  I agree with everything you said, except is it actually implied they faced financial ruin with your 283x return? What if they were doing a covered call? Then they lose the stock, that sucks, but they're not going to go into debt. I'm just being pedantic, your broad points are absolutely true. I mostly just through cash into VTI.
  - spxneo 3y ago
    because I talked to the guy who wrote those puts on wallstreetbets he was depressed from all the comments making fun of him so i sent him some money from the winnings now that i experienced the exact thing he experienced, im just done with trying to make a buck from the markets because the profits come from others loss. options trading is a zero sum game. maybe you can say same about about stocks or futures who knows. options also offer an important tool for managing risks like insurance. so again here im trying to attach some judgement to numbers which are amoral. I guess I just don't want to be part of something that causes so much emotional and mental violence anymore. I want to build and help create ease for others.
    - 3y ago
gigaflop 3y ago
I sold my crypto bags one by one this year. I felt fantastic for hodling long enough to swing +20% minimums on my btc, doge, shib, eth. Doge, I got +39%. Then crypto kept going up. Whoops. Made money, but not all of the money. As a consolation prize, profiting any% on crypto probably puts me in the 1% of investors. I will say I missed my best timing on Doge by literally sleeping on it another night. I was out at a bar with 2 of my brothers, and was joking that my Doge had hit +69%. Would have been up a few hundo if I'd sold then instead of day after.
- tombert 3y ago
  It's a frustratingly easy mindset to have, and it's kind of objectively wrong. If I put down money, and got more money back without any real effort (outside of clicking a button or two on ETRADE) then that's a win. I got free money! But that's just not how my brain works. Instead of being extremely happy that I got extra cash for nearly-zero effort, I'm sad that I didn't get more cash for nearly-zero effort. I try and fight that mentality and focus on the good, but sometimes that's easier said than done.
  - gigaflop 3y ago
    My way of fighting the mentality is to be lazy. No joke. I'm either Accumulating, Holding, or Looking to Sell. For stocks, I generally stick to #1 and #2. Buy if numbers/velocity looks good, hold if I don't like how they were doing. When doing my taxes for FY23, my Robinhood showed zero crypto sales. Having seen a few winters, I am willing to wait 6 to 8 months before considering getting back in. Musk might tweet about Doge on the shitter again, and spike its price by +69%, but I don't have the patience to follow such micro movements. Show me the 1yr graphs.
    - omnibrain 3y ago
      > My way of fighting the mentality is to be lazy. No joke. There is also "too lazy". I was too lazy to buy Tesla Stock during the Roadster Days. I was too lazy to get some Bitcoin when a friend could not stop talking about it in 2010. On the other hand, I would have sold both after they doubled or tripled for the first time. I know myself...
WalterBright 3y ago
> It seems like the first thing people want when they have a billion dollars is a second billion dollars. Of course. One's perspective changes right along with one's net worth. It's the same thing with power. The more power one has, the more power one wants.

vladms 3y ago

Can't say I understand this case (and don't know the details), but generally once you "train" yourself to do something and like it (basically, anything, like develop programs, run, watch movies, etc.) it is not that easy to just give up because you don't "need it". Making money or making startups can be addictive (the startup part I know from experience) and because the successful people might be the ones that are most addicted, that means they can't just stop even if they succeed.

msie 3y ago

Why stop at your first billion?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mmcdermott 3y ago

Beyond a certain point, the money is a scoreboard not a resource. It's like watching someone spend hundreds of hours on a video game for a speed run. You played to win and this is the metric.