insemination is the biggest slot machine
We need a Stakeholder economy, not a Shareholder economy!
It’s not gambling for the people that the state will bail out.
It’s not gambling for the House, because the odds are already stacked in your favor.
It’s not gambling for the state, because this is guaranteed tax revenue and campaign contributions, off the backs of people who are more than willing to feed the beast.
It’s not gambling for the players, either. In the end, they always go to zero.
It is gambling attached to a ponzi scheme. It kind of works so long as growth can keep up, but if it ever stops and reverses for any reason…
Unrelated, how are sea surface temperatures going nowadays?
Glad you asked!
Line goes up so this has to be good, right?
How do I invest in sea temperatures? $SST?
It’s pure profit! That line just won’t STOP going up!
Is this what they mean by ‘Line must go up’? 😕
Shoreholders want it warm
It may look like gambling, but it’s actually fraud.
Could not find a less jpg version :/
Pornography is either fraud (nobody looks like that, nobody fucks like that, etc.) or gambling (you’re looking at something hot and sexy until, catastrophically, you aren’t).
what about the drawn verity?
Yeah, when you are a politician you can legally cheat the system. And many do. Trump and his cronys of course, but Democrats like Pelosi too.
Like real gambling it’s all fixed by the mob.
The real mob… The state.
The mob used to be cool, pretending they were in the god father and feuding amongst themselves.
Now it’s all peptide blood boy tech moguls who always look wet for some reason.
The telltale sheen of SHARK TESTOSTERONE
Star fox tried to warn us!
Speaking of which, I’ve always been curious to try “investing in stocks”, but have no idea how. Does anyone have tips on starting?
I keep writing and deleting this same post a lot, because there’re so many facets to it, but I swear it’s not really that complicated once you understand how much of it is about tax efficiency. It turns out that answering the question you asked is the best place to start: “tips on starting.”
Tips:
- Pick a brokerage that isn’t Robinhood. Fidelity, Charles Schwab, and Vanguard are big names with zero trading fees; Schwab probably has the best user interface since they got ThinkOrSwim when they bought TD Ameritrade.
- Get comfortable with the idea that you’ll want to do direct bank ACH transfers to your accounts with the brokerage. You should at least have a normal brokerage account that doesn’t have tax advantages or rules, and a Roth IRA.
- Learn about Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). You can buy shares of $VOO (if I use a dollar sign it means it’s a stock “ticker symbol”) and get a slice of the entire S&P 500. A share of $VT buys a slice of (one of Vanguard’s interpretations of) the entire world market. You can be diversified with just one fund.
- Find good websites to research. Bogleheads is a good one that I like. $RDDT had several subreddits that looked at the topic from all different aspects, but now that’s just another thing they’ve stolen from the world.1
- Ask questions if you have them and find good websites to research. Most of the buy-it-and-hold crowd’s advice won’t have changed at all across decades (that strategy is where you buy the stock, and then hold it), but search engines tend to push newer websites, and it’s kind of pointless to set up a new website that just always says to buy and hold.
Some links:- https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Roth_IRA
- https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/ETFs_for_Bogleheads
- https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=443260
- https://www.etfrc.com/funds/overlap.php
- https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Emergency_fund
- https://www.thepennyhoarder.com/investing/dead-investors/
[1] Since we know they do marketing campaigns that will push certain topics/movies/whatever if they’re paid to, AND we know they have carte blanche with shadow bans/hiding posts/etc, has anyone done any analysis to see if they’re being paid to push certain stocks in whatever tattered remains are left over from their investing forums? I guess you’d have to pay them for access to scan their comments now with any kind of speed, and I’ll also guess you wouldn’t be able to buy a product from them that would prove they’re doing it.
Margin is a short term loan from your broker that requires interest payments. As noted in the boglehead article, usually this requires borrowing against your portfolio (or if you’re using Robinhood, you flip the switch that allows margin and borrow against a software bug). The brokerages have high speed computers programmed with people who like money to make sure anything risky you do on margin doesn’t come back on them, and they can/will sell shares out of your portfolio to balance their risk.
If you want more exposure than you have cash, there are funds like $NTSX that use witchcraft to effectively capture 90% of the 500 largest stocks in the US (saying S&P 500 is trademarked or something) and 60% of the bond market, for a total of 150%. I don’t know much more about it except to say that if the fund goes to zero, which everything could, your exposure is limited to the money you put into it.
Note that none of this is investment advice, and any cash you stick in a mattress loses purchasing power to inflation.
Sources:
- https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Margin
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d80ahvRSV8E (a man loses a bunch of money on stock options that he didn’t have and livestreamed it for some reason)
- Don’t seek advice on a meme forum
- Use common sense, a company that has had profits for the last 5 years is probably a good investment.
- Seek information online, with the biggest grain of salt imagineable. If an investment bro or comment online seem manic or urgent, it is a bad investment. Those are the people you are suppose to be profiting from.
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This is the best, most consistent strategy for the past 50+ years:
Step 1: Open an account. If you have a 401k, you already have a retirement account, probably with Fidelity. If you don’t have a 401k, Fidelity is still a fine choice. You could also choose Schwab or Vanguard. Don’t overthink it, though, because it doesn’t really matter.
Step 2: Put everything into $VOO.* Every time you get a paycheck, put some of it into your account and buy more $VOO.
Step 3: Don’t touch it. Don’t. I know you want to. I know you want to look at that number. Don’t. Don’t do it. I know you heard about trading options somewhere and you saw the posts of people who turned $10k into $10 million. That’s not going to happen. Don’t touch the money. Leave it alone.
Step 4: When you have enough money to live comfortably for the rest of your life, start selling it to buy bonds.
*Everything else you do might get more money, but it is worse on average. For example, you might be feeling smart, and decide that all these big tech stocks are overvalued. So you’ll buy $RWL instead. That might get more money, but it probably won’t. If you insist on doing something fancy, at least put most of your money in $VOO.
Put everything into $VOO.* Every time you get a paycheck, put some of it into your account and buy more $VOO.
VGT has been beating VOO for almost it’s entire existence. Higher volitility, but better long term results.
Everything else you do might get more money, but it is worse on average
That’s a real YMMV situation. If you want an easy way to guarantee around 10% ROI on your savings every year, no thinking required, VOO is great (VGT is marginally better, but not an enormous difference).
If you get into the weeds, actually learn what you’re investing in, find equities that are undervalued, and stay well diversified, you can do better than the market more often than not.
The big caveat is most people don’t know how to value equities. It’s difficult, complicated, it can carry a lot of risk, and it can be very stressful.
The other caveat is, you won’t do that much better. So if you aren’t working an eight figure+ fund, the difference between 10% ROI and 11% ROI won’t be worth the leg work.
If [things], you can do better than the market more often than not.
This is not true for 90+% of people who attempt it.
If you were born with an extra luck-bone, go for it. If not, $VOO and turning your brain off is a superior strategy.
…VGT…
I said 50+ years.
This is not true for 90+% of people who attempt it.
I would be curious to see your homework on that one. It sounds like a number you pulled from the air
Roth IRA. put 10% in each paycheck.
If you’re instead looking to trade stocks like Pokemon cards, there are plenty of apps that let you do that. And just like Pokemon cards, you’ll put more in than you’ll ever take out if you trade like that.
Buy the dip, hold. You’ll either eventually come out ahead or the company you bought will dissolve.
Buy the dip, hold.
Timing the market is always a bad idea. You’re routinely better off fully invested than with cash on the side waiting for the dip.
I forgot that there is only ever one stock available to purchase at any given time and the line only ever goes up.
I mean, index funds are a thing, just for starters
As long as he isn’t turning them over in trades, or overweighting his purchases, he can pick stocks like Pokémon cards and do fine. Plenty of buy and hold investors beat the indexes and the ones that don’t usually aren’t that far behind.
Sure. But it seems like this individual doesn’t really know much so like, let them test the waters first.
Absolutely not a stunning revelation. Stock brokers and others in the industry have always used betting terminology pretty openly.
Agriculture is gambling.
It’s also the origin of interest.
No, because you still have to do work and make a product when farming. The same can’t be said for gambling.
the activity of risking money on the result of something, such as a game or horse race, hoping to make money
Agriculture fits: you put in resources and hope that weather/pests/etc. will leave enough for you to survive
Yeah, everything is gambling. Real deep.
It actually is, unironically. Goes to “your breath is gambling” level deep and more
Agriculture is a low risk bet that is that reduces variability and isn’t all or nothing. Gambling is a high risk/reward zero-sum game.
Reducing variability is just how we are doing it now, not what it is. And I can just as well not bet all my money in one go. Besides, seen recent (last decade) news on climate changes? Doesn’t look like low risk for agriculture to me
I’m pretty sure hunting and foraging is gambling too.
No, that’s gaming
I wouldn’t say that common stock trading is gambling, but futures and options trading definitely is.
The way stocks are meant to work, it isn’t gambling. It is an investment in a company in order to help them grow and gain a return from that.
The way people use it now, it is gambling.
As a futures trader, I can confirm that trading futures is gambling. Like poker, if you know what you’re doing, you can make a living. Most people can’t make a living playing poker, and 95% of traders are not profitable.
it’s educated gambling where the house has significantly less of an edge (or at least appears to)
gambling has negative expected value, the house always wins in the long run.
the stock market has pretty much always trended up over time so if you just buy a bunch of stuff and wait a while you will pretty much always win. (you can still gamble with stocks, it’s just that stocks are fundamentally different and you can also not gamble)
yes, however it is at least theoretically possible for those with a controlling stake in enough companies to manipulate the entire market in a way that makes that strategy lose
“Appears” being key.
Honestly… Yeah. Outside of insider trading, there’s no real way to know what the future holds, so every stock and every bond is just a gamble with varying levels of risk (or Crypto if you like getting rug-pulled over and over)
Life in of itself is way more about being lucky than most people at the top would like you to think about
While this has changed, used to be you could look at the financials of a company and determine whether it was a reasonably good long-term investment, so you could pretty consistently build wealth with a diverse array of investments. With algorithmic trading down to the millisecond, much of this has gone out the window
Yeah, I was going to say something similar. What job you take, where you decide to live, friends you make all have a risk/reward element to them.
That being said I do believe there is a big difference between polymarket/prediction markets and stocks (or at least some stocks). Prediction markets is either betting on pure chance or against insider knowledge. Technically stocks should be seen as investing in a company (especially ones that pay dividends). Could a company run into hard times and lose you money, sure, but there is at least a bit more freely available information on that available to you.
Andrew Beyer’s horse racing book “On Speed” (from the 70/80’s iirc?) showed that a long while ago the basic math for the stock market is very much similar to how paramutual horse / dog betting works.
it is gambling all the way down.
I was watching the World Series last night and made a comment in a chat about how ads and companies these days in the US are just one grift after another. Seriously, the ads were:
- AI (multiple companies)
- Medications that are borderline poison but somehow get approved anyway
- Kalshi and other betting platforms
The US creates problems for its citizens and then finds ways to sell them the cure. All of this has accelerated over the years and it’s just going to get worse.
Spouse was just watching something on some free streaming app and all the ads are ai generated and scams aimed at old people. This one was about some fake life insurance claims when it flashes a 1-2 second picture of this at the end where it tells you if you call they will add your information to their databases and sell it and you choose to void your rights and take yourself off the national do not call list…
My mom got hit with this kind of shit. It’s the reason she ended up with 10 car warranties. I overheard her answer the phone one day while I was at her house and it was the parasite warranty company again. I ripped that motherfucker a new one. Made him tell me exactly how many warranties he can see that she had prior, made him cancel them all while I was on the phone, all with the threat of legal recourse. After all of that, I told him to get a real job and to stop fucking over the elderly.
A country that allows this, knows exactly what it’s doing. Just like the US government knew what it was doing when it repealed gambling regulations in 2018.
Jokes on you, I put all my savings in USD in 2000 and I’m only down 50%. I just gotta keep putting more in, I’ll win eventually.
(VTV+VXUS+BNDW)×(Roth) the most boring winning strategy. Get modestly rich slowly through consistently disciplined and simple contributions. It’s your best bet for beating the house (because you’re in the house, or at least its mudroom).
a fellow boglehead 🤝
All hail Jack
What happens when the AI companies get into the indexes? Big tech is already heavily represented and the AI bubble popping will probably destroy sensible index fund portfolios.
Probably bad things, which is why I feel (marginally) safer in VTV, Vanguard’s large cap value fund, focused on consumer staples, insurance companies, holding companies like Berkshire, defense contractors…basically large companies with the lowest P/E and P/B ratios. I’m not saying it won’t hurt when the bubble collapses, but it intentionally excludes the FAANG and overpriced tech.
It ain’t perfect by any stretch, but it at least tries to capture profitable and (relatively) underpriced companies with proven records instead of market darlings.
VXUS for exposure to foreign markets. BNDW for the ginormous market of bonds.
The crash will hurt. It’ll be a good buying opportunity for anyone with cash. I have a few more decades to weather the storm, so I’m just staying steady. I’ve already tried my hand at picking stocks (gambling) and learned the hard way (because I ignored the books telling me what not to do) that I suck at gambling. Technically, any normal person is supposed to suck at gambling, otherwise it wouldn’t survive as a venture.
That serms like a sound plan. It’s all gonna be terrible, but that should at least be a hedge against the insanity in big tech. I suspect that defense will have a slow decline as our former allies contine to back away from our unreliable dumb asses, but it won’t have the spectacular crash out like AI related stocks.
I’m having trouble looking up all those acronyms. I know about roth 401ks, but not the other stuff.
Ah! Thank you muchly!
