[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?