Stocks Thread (A/K/A STONKS THREAD)

Cant you OD on selegeline pretty easily? MAOis suck

He is on a patch so would need to be intentional I think to really overdose.

Given all the depression options these days and associated hazards MAOI use super limited. Gotta think he was going for kinda a Silicon Valley better living through neuroscience performance enhancement approach than just a normal I’m depressed and have ADHD approach

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I’d given him a cheap SSRI and whatever food everyone else is eating. He doesn’t need stimulant medication to function in prison.

I wasn’t commenting on the details of his medical care (I didn’t even read the article).

I was responding more to the “great, fuck him” responses. Withholding appropriate medical care and refusing to supply adequate nutrition is not how our justice system should work.

In other words, inflicting suffering because a person is deemed “bad” is inhumane savagery and we should be better than that.

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I’m not saying he shouldn’t get medical care and all that, I’m just saying fuck this guy, I have zero sympathy for his plight. All of these “effective altruist” guys would turn our nation’s prisons into even worse hellholes than they already are if they had the chance.

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Follow up to this:

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In general yes. That being said things are very weird in the financial markets right now and sitting out on 8/29/2023 is unlikely to be very suboptimal. Certainly not terrible. The only reason I’m in is because I’m 38, have a 20+ year time horizon, and honestly just have to ride this out because taxes.

If your choices are a shitty deal on a financial product or a historically great deal on a different financial product it’s very rarely a terrible decision to go with the latter. 5% for risk free is a pretty good deal at any time in human history with <5% inflation. The stock market is not offering anything close to 5% or risk free if we’re being honest about where it is right now.

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Ehhhh I dunno, over long time frames the universal wisdom is that time in market >>> timing the market, right? This can work out (and I’m glad it has for you) but it seems risky.

If you really think you can beat the market you should start a separate thread documenting every trade you make. If you actually do it over a 3+ year period you’ll be able to raise tens of millions of dollars or more and become very very rich very quickly.

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giphy

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I’m on record as a diehard Boglehead and a skeptic of your methods but I would be interested in following your trading thread.

It might be a lot of work to document past trades so maybe just start on 8/31 with your open positions? That will make it easy to start tracking monthly performance.

I think I could just filter my trading history for buy/sell transactions and take a screenshot and crop it down, right? Only thing is figuring out whether I want to disclose the size of my IRA or keep all the units relative - it kind of matters in spots where I add or trim positions because the units may not round off.

Currently in deep dive mode hunting for new positions, so I’ll circle back to this in a couple days.

It’s a lot harder to be credible coming from a nonstandard background than you would think.

Also managing other people’s money is very very different than managing your own.

I will throw 1k at commonWealth mutual fund

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I’m up about 50% on the last year when I cramered BTC. Subscribe to my onlysubs for more picks

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Beating the market inside an IRA is much easier than beating the market with taxes.

Of course, if his edge is that big, he’s beating it taxes or not.

Anyone that can demonstrate a methodology that rates to beat the market on a risk-adjusted basis would be in a great position to get their foot in the door at a hedge fund.

If you believe you have an approach that beats the pants off the market on a risk-adjusted basis, then you would be crazy to not pursue strategies to allow you to scale that approach as quickly as possible (i.e. doing more than managing a six-figure IRA or whatever).

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Right and I strongly disagree with professional finance about how to measure all of that. Starting with the risk adjusted return I simply don’t agree that the sharpe ratio measures what they say it does (I don’t think volatility = risk just for starters). I also don’t trade all that much which means even I don’t think I have a sufficient sample size to make any significant claims.

The thing about value investing is that the reason it works is that it doesn’t always work. It underperforms frequently for multi year periods. Hedge funds typically aren’t super interested in value guys because those strategies are a great way to go out of business when you’re trying to justify a 2 and 20 (even if those numbers are lower) style fee structure.

Just getting someone to take the time to actually review your results at a hedge fund is almost impossibly hard.

The real problem, of course, is that the vast majority of hedge funds are scams nobody should invest in. They aren’t worth 10% of the fees they charge investors and the most important skill the person leading the fund usually has is fundraising from contacts they acquired from being born rich or working in banking for a few years. They would be much more interested in my business connections and the money they might invest than in any alpha I might generate.

Meanwhile over in logistics I have a realistic chance of making a million a year before I turn 40. Paying my dues again is super unattractive, but I do have money that needs to be allocated arriving in my accounts pretty constantly.

But yeah one of the reasons outsiders can’t really just come in and work at hedge funds is that you would basically have to do several years of full time work for free carefully documenting your methodology as you went along for a chance at a hedge fund. No thanks I’ll just do my investing stuff the way most people do a crossword puzzle. It’s a fun hobby that I seem to be good at, but I’m definitely not going to bet my career on it lol.

I get to invest in a guilt/stress freeish kind of way where I’m not particularly worried about the results. If I don’t make as much money as I would have made in an index fund all I’m out is that money which probably won’t change my life in any meaningful way. If my results for a quarter are bad I’m not at all worried I’m going to lose my job. That’s an entirely different experience than managing other people’s money.

I care so much about the lack of stress that I don’t really do anything that has much of a gambling aspect to it at all. When CW talks about merger arb plays he’s doing he’s certainly not getting me to ride along lol. I’m in a bunch of companies that I think I paid less for than they are worth. With any luck they’ll get a nice spike of good news pop XX% and I’ll instantly sell them and replace them with the next thing that meets my metrics. Even if what I’m doing ends up being wrong it won’t be that wrong, certainly not anywhere near as wrong as putting money in an underperforming actively managed mutual fund with a front end load lol.

One thing I’m pretty sure of is that if I melt down because my bets went sideways all of you index people are going down right along with me. My portfolio is packed full of totally unsexy value stocks that simply don’t have that much room to fall before someone buys the whole thing at a probably higher price than I bought in for… and Berkshire Hathaway which would literally probably still be technically solvent in the Mad Max universe.

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Modern finance theory also does not think that volatility = risk. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to explain why small cap value stocks drastically outperform other asset classes relative to their volatility.

And something like the Sharpe ratio (while it has utility) can be easily manipulated by using strategies that are asymmetric (e.g. selling covered calls). Look at the eye popping Sharpe ratio of something like JEPI for example.

Right that’s why I don’t agree with large chunks of professional finance about it. I’m sure there’s some smart buy side money out there that agrees with me, but good luck finding them and getting your information in front of them without already being an insider and knowing at least some of the players in the game on a personal level.

Look you might actually be right about where I am at 38 vs where I was at 27-28 and was really trying to figure out if getting into a hedge fund was viable. I’m a lot smarter and a lot more well spoken now than I was then. I also have a track record of being great a capitalism that is so glaringly obvious at this point that I have no intentions of going back and finishing the bachelors in econ I need a class and a half to complete. I probably could get in front of a hedge fund and I probably could get a job.

Probably for less money than I make now. I might be making some Sklansky bucks because it raised my odds of becoming a billionaire from totally impossible to very improbable, but I am not Jeff Bezos lol. I have a really good job that I’m really good at and the security that entails is worth a lot to someone who grew up poor.

I will literally never find work/life/$$$ balance as good as I have it right now. Absolutely impossible. I ran hotter than the sun already I have zero desire to do another run out lol.

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