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by watwut 16 days ago
People in the bubble typically know they are in the bubble. They do not know when to get out. The "even if you didn't make a profit then you'd stand an even more reasonable chance of getting out with fairly minimal losses" is the thing people are wrong about - once bubble is popping, only fastest few can react fast enough.
1 comments
somenameforme 16 days ago
Is this true though? Take NFTs for again the latest contemporary example - that bubble has obviously long since popped, but those ape NFTs still trade for ~$20k with daily volume in the hundreds of thousands, and a lot of people made a lot of money off it all, some probably still are. At their peak they sold for millions of dollars, but that's on the extreme fringe end. Most traders literally can't afford the heights of bubbles, or anywhere near them, which largely limits the breadth of massive losses.

And we're speaking of modern times where there is this one grand unified global marketplace - the internet, that is most conducive to an inescapably rapid boom-bust. In tulip times there would have been a vast number of relatively decentralized marketplaces with varying supply and demand levels, for a good amount of time after the bubble popped.

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watwut 16 days ago
That is what I took from economy history and from what economists wrote on the topic. That past bubbles we recognized as bubbles were known to contemporaries. They wrote articles about the situation being a bubble, they knew.

> Take NFTs for again the latest contemporary example - Most traders literally can't afford the heights of bubbles, or anywhere near them, which largely limits the breadth of massive losses.

I dont know whether you could have use your NFT "investment" as a collateral for mortgage or it shown up in company sheet etc. Honestly, I don't know who were traders of NFT in the first place. I think that all in all, NFT were kind of a fringe thing for super rich basically gamblers.

What you do actually get with crypto or stocks or in retail futures trading are people who have put all their money into that stuff. Or even took debt to put their money in. So, they are loosing all of that. Or, they invested into funds that buy that stuff - you invest whatever you have, those money join other peoples money and suddenly fund can buy it. And the last point is important, because some of those funds are things like pension funds who invest into certain stuff automatically.

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