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Bull markets make you feel smarter than you are
- rvnx 1y agoSounds like all the crypto geniuses, who are actually lucky guys, but could have been considered the dumbest idiots if cryptos had followed their natural course (being worthless).
- Animats 1y agoThe successful crypto bros are mostly either issuers or crooks. That way they escape the natural tendency of all crypto other than Bitcoin and Ethereum to go down.
- FergusArgyll 1y agoBear markets make michael burry feel smarter than he is
- ecocentrik 1y agoWhat's the obsession with Burry?
- throwanem 1y agoChristian Bale played him in a Michael Lewis movie.
- thisisit 1y agoHe just shorted Nvidia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45813734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45813734
- deaux 1y agoWhen 99.999% of investors lose money and one person hits it big, people are naturally going to be drawn to that person. Even moreso when a really fun movie is made in which they play a big role.
- pendenthistory 1y agoUnfortunately a lesson I had to learn for myself. Hopefully I can pass it on to the next generation, but I fear they'll have to learn it for themselves too. Don't pick individual stocks people, buy broad index funds at most.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoThe temptation is always there though. I have several stocks that produced life changing gains.
- pendenthistory 1y agoHaving nice gains early on fools you into thinking you're smarter than the market. That just makes your inevitable fall that much harder. Nobody made a lot of money on a stock and then thought to themself "I bet I was just lucky, I should probably stop now". Like everyone you will keep going until you lose out big.
- betaby 1y ago> Don't pick individual stocks people We are in the industry, and perhaps we indeed know better. > buy broad index funds at most That gives slightly better than the inflation rate ( Canada ).
- jonasdegendt 1y ago> That gives slightly better than the inflation rate ( Canada ). What do you mean? Over the last year any one of the index funds I'm in has beat inflation by a factor of five, some beat inflation by an order of magnitude. My worst performer is an iShares world fund, which generally has more temperate gains, clocking in at 10% YoY. Looking at Canadian indices such as $VCN, it's the same story.
- betaby 1y agoAs of October 2025, in the previous 30 Years, the Vanguard FTSE Canada All Cap Index (VCN.TO) ETF obtained a 8.72% compound annual return. ~2x better than the official inflation over the same 30 years. I don't see the factor of five or order of magnitude. Also those gains are taxable.
- baxtr 1y agoSomething that is not mentioned: The psychological burden when you check your portfolio multiple times a day. It can become an addiction akin to sports betting. Your mind is constantly occupied by the market and how it’s going. It takes a heavy attention toll on anything other you want to focus on. I have learned my lesson. I buy the index and look at my portfolio 1-2 times a year and focus my mind on other things.
- max_ 1y agoI had the same problem so i just built a custom dashboard that only updates my portfolio once a day (at 6:00 am)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jancsika 1y agoYou just did it in the wrong order: 1. Buy the index 2. Check your portfolio multiple times a day Now it's less like gambling and more like being entertained looking at your fish tank.
- alwa 1y ago1) buy the index (and maybe some bonds) 2) find the friend, colleague, or housemate who’s a degenerate market gambler 3) let their Hot Picks and Levered Options serve as your fish tank. Complete with the roller coaster of (their) emotion!
- burlesona 1y agoI don’t know why websites even bother having text when it is this badly destroyed by advertising.
- raw_anon_1111 1y agoThe question is why aren’t you using an ad blocker in 2025?
- adelpozo 1y agoi haven’t found that block all ads. which do you recommend for ios and for chrome/safari on macos?
- raw_anon_1111 1y agoI don’t see any ads on the site with 1Blocker on iOS on the submitted article. It works the same on MscOS.
- fn-mote 1y agoYou don’t need to block all ads. Even stopping the bottom 50% cleans up the internet so much. You know how to find an adblocker if you read HN. If you don’t want to use one, that’s your choice but it’s disingenuous to complain about blocking 100% of ads.
- moi2388 1y agoAdGuard. Otherwise Ghostery. SponsorBlock for removal of YouTube in video sponsor messages.
- bofadeez 1y agoUnless you're a full time quant with a high deflated sharpe ratio you have no business making trades. It's not an investment to speculate on unpredictable price, that's called gambling, as Eugene Fama explained. Investments yield income. A stock buyback is not better than a dividend.
- gruez 1y ago>A stock buyback is not better than a dividend. It often is, for a variety of tax reasons.
- selectodude 1y agoThis is basically the entire thesis of Fooled by Randomness by N. N. Taleb.
- Hydraulix989 1y agoIndex funds and small investments in things that are still early that you believe in / care about are the way to go. Day trading and dabbling in $GME, shitcoins, post-2023 NVIDIA, individual stocks, etc. are all bubbles. Day trading is a scam. Trading firms are more than well-positioned to eat retail's lunch, every single time.
- zipy124 1y agoYou don't have to trade against the firms, retail can make up the majority of some markets (e.g not on dark pools etc..), you just have to beat them and join the firms in taking their money. It's far more difficult than buying an index but it is not a scam just because it is hard and most people don't know what they're doing. Edit to clarify: my portfolio is almost all index funds to clarify, and that is what you should do too, but I'm just saying it is entirely possible to trade and it is a skill. Something can be somewhat like gambling and yet still have elements of skill just like poker.
- knappe 1y agoWhat really reinforced this for me was learning to what lengths some hedge funds are willing to go to get an edge. Case in point: buying GIS data on major retailer's parking lots to get a feel for holiday earnings. No retail investor is ever going to be able to match that kind of Intel, ever. I buy index funds and leave the majority of my money there but allow myself to make small bets on trends in the market that I think will play over long periods. Sometimes it works, like buying lithium stocks in the 2010s and other times it sucks and doesn't, like buying solar stocks in the 2010s and watching the entire industry get shredded to pieces in the last 5 years.
- cleansingfire 1y agoDay Traders only exist because of this. Bull markets allow them to exist.
- tim333 1y agoDay trading has been going on a long time through bull and bear markets. Most people lose money though - it's a bit like casino gambling.
- pessimizer 1y agoThe main thing current bull markets make you feel is far less subsidized by the government than you really are. There are a lot of people playing at being upper middle class right now, living large paycheck to large paycheck, and they don't realize that the people whose lifestyles they're emulating are getting money for nothing. If the layoffs start getting deeper i.e. if AI takes off OR if AI does not take off, they'll be at the food banks in a year. We'll see what happens in society when the comfortable middle class that makes all of the demands in our political system gets halved.
- assemblyman 1y agoIf one has time, a few books I would highly recommend: The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham Security Analysis by Graham and Dodd Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings by Philip Fisher The Little Book That Still Beats the Market by Greenblatt Warren Buffett's annual letters Actually, anything by Ben Graham or Joel Greenblatt is worth reading if one is interested in the investing world. I don't know if I'll ever invest enough time doing fundamental analysis and actively (value) investing but I am making my way through these just to understand value investing properly.
- throw0101a 1y ago> Warren Buffett's annual letters Buffett says to buy index funds. > Actually, anything by Ben Graham or Joel Greenblatt is worth reading if one is interested in the investing world. Ben Graham in the last interview before he passed ("A Conversation with Benjamin Graham", Financial Analysts Journal, Vol. 32, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 1976), pp. 20-23): >> In selecting the common stock portfolio, do you advise careful study of and selectivity among different issues? > In general, no. I am no longer an advocate of elaborate techniques of security analysis in order to find superior value opportunities. This was a rewarding activity, say, 40 years ago, when our textbook "Graham and Dodd" was first published; but the situation has changed a great deal since then. In the old days any well-trained security analyst could do a good professional job of selecting undervalued issues through detailed studies; but in the light of the enormous amount of research now being carried on, I doubt whether in most cases such extensive efforts will generate sufficiently superior selections to justify their cost. To that very limited extent I'm on the side of the "efficient market" school of thought now generally accepted by the professors. * https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2469/faj.v32.n5.20 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2469/faj.v32.n5.20 * https://www.jstor.org/stable/4477960 https://www.jstor.org/stable/4477960 * https://www.bylo.org/bgraham76.html https://www.bylo.org/bgraham76.html Graham was also of the opinion that analysis is of questionable use even in 1976 (nevermind now, ~40 years later).
- tome 1y ago> 1976 ... ~40 years later I think it would have been ok to say 50!
- caseysoftware 1y agoAnnie Duke has a great book "Thinking in Bets" where she talks about being a professional poker player. One of the things she hammers on is that just knowing how much/often you win isn't the important part because you can win despite making dumb choices and lose despite making great choices. The key thing is being able to make the best decision based on the limited information you have, take the consequences (good or bad), and then reset and do it again. This is relevant in poker, investment, or even our careers and a great ideal to reach for. I included a small blurb on my 2021 reading list: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/my-reading-list-2021 https://caseysoftware.com/blog/my-reading-list-2021
- immibis 1y agoMakes sense. The whole point is to invest before the market goes up. If the market goes up after you invested, you did it right. Works in roulette too, I'm told, so sometimes illegal gambling sites will try to get people addicted by rigging their first few bets to always win. Are people really not smart, though? Buying into a market that's going up, and continues going up, is simply correct timing, is it not? It's only half the equation, of course.
- whateveracct 1y agoMy current employer is like this. A lot of external factors played into our favor and helped us make a lot of money, to the point where any internal decision making doesn't really move the needle in comparison. So whenever problems are pointed out, it's a hard sell because "we are so successful our C-suite are so good" when they didn't exactly do anything.
- htrp 1y agoThe google problem where every business line has to generate at least 10bn a year
- sharadov 1y agoI disagree - I was a value investor for a number of years from the Ben Graham/Buffett school of thought. But the last 5 years or so - with the ramp up in tech stocks, I know enough people who've done really well with indidividual stock picking. In fact there was a paper out that said 10% of retail investors can consistently beat the market - it's a mixture of skill, discipline and luck.
- raw_anon_1111 1y agoThe myth of Buffett just being a smart investor who anyone can duplicate and that’s why he gets outsized returns needs to die. https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2014/11/19/why-you-cant-invest-like-warren-buffett-and-shouldnt-try/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2014/11/19/why-you-...
- potamic 1y agoWell, the last 5 years or so is the epitome of a bull market. Did the paper say the same set of people consistently beat the market over long periods of time or did it say at any time about 10% of investors happen to beat the market?
- sharadov 1y agoPaper came out in 2002 - https://www.bus.umich.edu/pdf/mitsui/nttdocs/coval-shumway2.pdf https://www.bus.umich.edu/pdf/mitsui/nttdocs/coval-shumway2.... Not sure which time period they studied
- potamic 1y ago6 year time period between 1990-1996. Would have been interesting to see how these results would have fared across the 2000 crash. But I don't think the paper claims that they beat the market. What they are concluding is that you can classify investors as skilled and unskilled, with the skilled group able to achieve returns consistently. But whether those returns can beat the market, they say the evidence is limited.
- fred_is_fred 1y agoI wonder how many people picking individual stocks these days were investing in 2007 or better yet 2000/2001. Everyone was a genius stock picker in 1998/1999 also.
- zerof1l 1y agoDid it occur to anyone that stocks and stock-derived products like ETFs and indexes are driven by emotions rather than financials? The company sells its stocks once, typically, and from that moment on, stocks live their own life of speculation by people who mostly have no say in the company. A company might be doing perfectly well, but the stock would fall because some people "think" that the company is doing badly. But if nobody were to act, nothing would happen to the stock. Similarly, people can just decide that a Stock is worth something out of nowhere - GameStop stock. Essentially, predicting stock movement becomes predicting the sentiment of the people. Instead of "the financial report means the company is doing X", it becomes "if people were to see this financial report, they would react by X". And this whole thing feels like a big Ponzi scheme. Everyone keeps repeating that you need to invest your money, and that's what essentially makes the market long-term bullish.
- geldedus 1y agoEveryone is a Warren Buffett in a bullish market
- tim333 1y agoI know what you mean - investment genius. But the real Warren Buffett has been selling shares and moving to treasuries which few are doing.