Very few people like finance, but it can’t be ignored.
I largely do but I every time I don’t I just get more and more convinced that so much of seems structured like a scam.
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Crypto is a fascinating microcosm of this. There’s a discord server I’m in with people I mostly don’t know, and there’s a channel where they talk about stocks and crypto (mostly crypto). Literally what happens time and time again is they buy a coin, insiders sell out before anyone else notices, and the value crashes and they’re left holding the bag. Like they buy these coins for the entire purpose of selling to a bigger idiot coming along after them near the peak. I’m not sure it’s ever worked, and they’ve been exit liquidity more than once.
I’ve talked about Nvidia before and (hate) watching its stock price. There was the initial sell-off, and my dad’s girlfriend bought $15k of it. It’s just the same thing happening again. I’m convinced she was just exit liquidity. The company has no fundamentals, and I keep seeing this vague articles like “oh NVDA is a great investment!” Jim Kramer said to buy it. It was the most valuable company in the world or still is, but it’s close regardless. Again, I do not think this company has any actual long term prospects because its price reflects what will inevitably be short term monopoly. Either Microsoft/Google/Amazon who are investing capital in their own chips actually succeeds, the demand for AI craters (likely), or more and more companies use the models that are sufficiently optimized to need way less top-of-the-line chips like the ones coming out of China recently. Even if you think I’m wrong on all 3 fronts, how could it possibly go up significantly? How is it more valuable than companies like Apple? Smart money is selling, dumb money is buying. It’s just insiders getting out near the peak and those hoping for a bigger idiot after a higher peak buying in.
We structured our society around cars which you both need outside of a few dense, urban areas, and most places are actively hostile to other forms of transportation (including walking). You can’t buy a car without going into debt. You (for good reasons) have to buy insurance. Unless you have an electric vehicle, you regularly have to pay for gas. In each instance, you’re repeatedly giving money to these billion dollar companies with huge profit margins. You want to actually own property? You need to go into debt. You need to make ends meet? Better use your credit card, and go into debt. You overdraw and you pay an overdraft fee. Even if you have medical insurance, if you have a serious medical issue, there’s a chance you have to go into debt. Wanna get a college degree? Debt. Start a business? Debt. The debt payments themselves are often structured so you end up paying more interest. You often can’t extra towards the principal because that would reduce profit.
Like using a credit card makes sense if you don’t fuck up. If you always pay it off immediately, you don’t pay interest and you can get things like cash back. They do this because they want you to sign up thinking “I’ll never fuck up” and they’re still some of the most profitable companies in the world because they know that enough people are going to fuck it up. It’s a trap, and yet I’ve seen finance advice that was like “get a credit card for every day purposes to get the cash back”. It’s telling you to take some of the cheese out of the mouse trap because it’s free cheese as long as you don’t fuck up and no one thinks they will.
None of this applies if you’re rich by the way. Being rich is a cheat code, and you either bypass these systems or can successfully reap the rewards far more efficiently.
Holy shit I’m at a party right now, and I just heard a girl ask a guy next to me “so how did you get into day trading”.
Anyway so much of just things in our society right now are just primarily vectors of wealth extraction from the bottom 90% of people by income that funnels it upward to the top 10%, and if it’s actually useful that’s a distant second priority at best. My company is trying to get money from a VC firm, and apparently they could only find one (1) that accepted anything less than 51% ownership, and the deal we have is for like 49% lol. Cannot wait until that goes through, and there’s a brief period of like “oh yippee we have money” before the “line must go up” hogshit starts, and the investor starts turning the screws.
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everything is priced in
the answer invariably boils down to a gambling addiction at the end of the day
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Yeah
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credit card companies are fucking predatory
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Day trading is the sanity-laundered version of gambling.
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Like, it’s literally just “figure out what the range of stock movement is for the day, buy when it’s in the trough, sell when it’s at the peak”, and I feel like that’s negligent at best and downright foolish at worst.
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day trading is really, really fucking dumb lmfao. There’s no way you, Some Guy, will do that better than the Computers They Made To Do That Exact Thing.
Like, you could do as much research as you want into the day-to-day trends, when stocks are likely to rise/crash/etc over the course of a day. And you still wont beat the Computers That Already Have All Of That Research And Do It Automatically.
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despite this I still get warnings that im going to be labeled a pattern day trader, because I buy some stocks I believe in and then usually immediately realize that I should still just put it in savings anyways, sell it the same day, and get a warning that I am a pattern day trader
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lmao
I genuinely can’t help it, I dive into some company and am like “damn this is way better than its stock price indicates” and then decide I believe that enough to put money behind it. And then lose, like, 6 dollars, and realize that losing any money makes me feel sick, and that you dont lose money in a savings account.
i genuinely cant imagine losing thousands of dollars in a day as my “job”. I think I would fucking explode.
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i heart SEC regulations
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get ur money up so you dont have to worry about it
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I
yeah imma be real this shit sounds like ass
I haven’t gone into investment because it seemed hard
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oh it is ass
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i’m at that stage of my life where I actually give a shit about my future and I still think
‘wow investment is scary’
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99.9% of people should just put their money in an index fund and never think about it again.
Beating the market means that you’ve got to consistently make better reads than the collective investing population, and that is extremely hard to do even with years of experience.
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its genuinely mind-numbing and also sometimes hard to shift through the gallons upon gallons of shit when trying to find good education on investing. Sooooo much of investing info and courses is pump and dump stuff.
My really awful investing idea is that I promised myself a while ago that if bitcoin hit 40k, I would buy as much as I could afford to lose and sell it as soon as I saw a coinbase ad on the TV. I kinda think this is goated but realistically it never hits 40k or i dont have much I can afford to lose.
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this is what my brain is telling me to do tbh
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