[3pt14159]

Is it hard to beat though?

When I started just allocating money into tech stocks I, as a software guy, appreciated return went way, way, way up.

Those Wall St quants can only appreciate M1 so far. They can't see the server farms 5 years out running linux on mac hardware. Or even if they can, they're paid to make decisions every day. "Boss, I'm just going to park it all on hedged and leveraged AAPL derivatives for the next half decade and sit on a beach." Isn't really going to fly.

[dragontamer]

Wall Street literally values Apple / AAPL as the most valuable company in the world. So I literally don't know what you're talking about.

VTI in any case is "the market average", because its literally the whole market. Its surprisingly a difficult strategy to beat, becaust most stock pickers perform below average (!!!).

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The only thing is that the stock market is very volatile. So it makes more sense to mix in bonds with regards to historical risk/reward. You lower your average gains, but often reduce your losses. (Long term bonds are doing poorly early this year, but with interest rates rising, I'd expect that moving forward bonds are going to do well)

And that's where a "target lifepath" fund goes. Those funds mix "total stock market" with "total bond market" and call it a day.

[justsocrateasin]

Sounds like you should quit your day job and become a trader full time. If the market is as easy to beat as you say.

It also sounds like you've been lucky so far. There are many periods over just the last 30 years where the "sure thing" ended up bankrupting people. The hard part is beating the market over the course of your life.

I would caution such reckless confidence. "The more you know, the more you realize you don't know." - if you are looking at a subject like quantitative analysis in stocks and thinking "this isn't so hard", you probably know so little that you think it's easy, but not enough to realize the intricacies of why it's hard.

[3pt14159]

I did learn lessons. I mistimed commodities and got burned. I mistimed the 2008 recession (thought it would be 2007) and the put options expired worthless (though still dodged the recession).

But anytime I mention my gains on HN the crowd says the same two or three things:

1. You're just lucky.

2. Herp quit your job and work Wall St. (No. I'm not primarily money motivated and those people generally, um, are far from my cup of tea.)

3. You're just lying.

They can keep saying that, they can keep down voting me. They didn't buy Tesla early or Bitcoin early or Shopify early, so nobody did that wasn't lucky. I'm not saying I'm some sort of finance prodigy, but it has been pretty easy to call tech stocks for the past ten or fifteen years and combine that with dodging recessions and an otherwise diversified portfolio and yearly returns after inflation of 15% are achievable, not even counting the Bitcoin payday.

[spywaregorilla]

If you feel you can easily achieve a return of 15%, why not make some leveraged investments? What do you mean by "easy"? 90% probability of achieving your goal?

[roflyear]

You are just lucky. You wouldn't say me winning the lottery is skill.

[samjmck]

> But anytime I mention my gains on HN the crowd says the same two or three things: 1. You're just lucky.

Maybe because you are just lucky?

[TrapLord_Rhodo]

Yes - Because we are talking over 20-50+ year timeframes (Well, some of the big firms are thinking in 200-400 yr timeframes like rothchilds.

What if in 10 years the government decides that apple is too powerful? A new CEO comes in and destroys what has been built? A new competitor comes up with a product that is vastly supperior? A total stock market crash happens and your portfolio didn't have any bonds/ shorts/ hedges.

You might be able to go into financial ruin and no one would blink an eye. If large, multigenerational funds go down its a very big deal indeed.

that's why

"Boss, I'm just going to park it all on hedged and leveraged AAPL derivatives for the next half decade and sit on a beach." Isn't really going to fly.

isn't going to fly because the risk delta on that is very high indeed.

[jedberg]

> They can't see the server farms 5 years out running linux on mac hardware.

They definitely can. I got paid quite good money to sit down with full time professional investors and tell them exactly that, and lots of other things. They don't go into these things blind.

They pay good money to people like us to tell them what they need to know so they can see the future just a little better than everyone else.

[Bluecobra]

>They can't see the server farms 5 years out running linux on mac hardware.

I am skeptical on this one. I don't see enterprise customers having a lot of confidence to buy into a new server line as Xserve only lasted ~9 years. They could have have continued to shlep that line along. I would think that Linux on ARM would be more likely than M1.

[jamil7]

It's pretty hard to beat consistently over a long time, yes.

[roflyear]

Plenty of managed funds have super long positions. Idk what point you're trying to make.