Something 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.

Annie 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

Index 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.

Unfortunately 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.

I 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.

My 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.

I don’t know why websites even bother having text when it is this badly destroyed by advertising.

If 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.

I 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.

This is basically the entire thesis of Fooled by Randomness by N. N. Taleb.

Day Traders only exist because of this. Bull markets allow them to exist.

Unless 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.

The 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.

Sounds 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).

Makes 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.

Bear markets make michael burry feel smarter than he is