Youtube comments of Magic Beans (@Magic_beans_).

  1. Thoughts and prayers to the people of Green Longshape.
    11000
  2. Point 3 is important: saying the CEO gets paid 200x what the media worker does is too abstract for folks to really get worked up about. What’ll hit home is an example of the CEO spending the average worker’s annual salary on something frivolous.
    1100
  3. If they really wanted to crack down they’d send awkward extroverts. Imagine someone who keeps trying to force a conversation despite the other party’s complete lack of interest.
    732
  4.  @stoneneils  He says it in the “Cosmos” TV show and wrote it in “Broca’s Brain.” He was referring to this kind of stuff too. The sentence before that is “The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses.” Even in the 70s there were hucksters claiming that the mockery and debunking only showed how scared The Establishment were of their revolutionary idea.
    539
  5. There was a bill to eliminate this part of the process, but Big Swimsuit made sure it failed.
    519
  6. New ownership as of April 2024. They’re shifting away from the usual news-blog model of hosting scummy clickbait ads and instead adopting an optional-subscription model.
    382
  7. 2:45 Tangentially related, but WWI is also when the US became primarily monolingual. Prior to the war Americans learned foreign languages at about the same rate as Europeans, and German-language newspapers were common throughout the country and especially in the Midwest. When war broke out, foreign languages became suspicious, German most of all. Public life was to be conducted in English only, and in some places laws even prohibited teaching German. Those laws didn’t last long, but they were enough to break the chain of transmission, the tradition of kids learning from their grandparents. Following the war there was a cultural shift where the US grew more insular. Part of that shift was defensive: we didn’t want to get dragged into war again. I assume Europe felt the same way considering how far they went to appease the next guy. I also think for us there was an experience akin to realizing one’s parents have flaws. If Europe could do that for five years, who are they to tell us what it means to be civilized?
    260
  8. I feel personally attacked. Then again, I'm pretty awful.
    206
  9. I’m glad he mentioned reinventing busses and trains. Aside from sidestepping regulations, one of the biggest driving forces behind startups seems to be wrapping themselves in a little cocoon: “What if there was a vehicle with all the limitations of a train, but also it could only carry twenty people?”
    150
  10. And they still manage to fit in comments about her appearance as well as clichés like “dynamo” and “feisty.” Fantastic.
    147
  11. Have you tried posting about how grateful you are for your last job, how being laid off helped you grow as a professional, and how this has motivated you to be a super performer at your next job?
    126
  12. 8:00 This is good to remember for investments in general: expectations are already priced in. Maybe the markets are inefficient in the probabilities they’re pricing in, but it’s not as if hodlers don’t already know about the ETFs or the halving.
    122
  13. I’m so glad they did this study. It’s such a great use of our research dollars.
    113
  14. I’d say celebrity is a big part of it too. Who’s the CEO of United Healthcare or Wells Fargo? Unless you’re an investor you probably have no idea. Tech companies are much more identified with an individual, the visionary CEOs who was often a founder as well. Negative press coverage of the individual is bad for the company, so they have more of a reason to appear like normal folks who aren’t exploiting the system.
    71
  15.  @DeltaNovum Yep, that’s classic narcissist logic, the chain of causality ends right before it gets to them. If those companies tank Twitter it’ll be for no reason at all. Certainly not because he ruined its credibility, let trolls run wild, and proposed paywalling the ability to create content for the site.
    65
  16. He was kind of a shady character from the start. Rich Dad himself appears to be fiction, and there’s a bit where Kiyosaki straight-up says to make friends with high-ranking businesspeople and see if they can throw you some insider information. Kiyosaki claims it’s not insider trading because you’re not the insider, but Martha Stewart’s conviction says otherwise. She benefitted third-hand — an insider (who, granted, was also a friend of Stewart) told his broker to sell a bunch of shares. The broker called Stewart and suggested she sell. If that’s close enough to count as a felony, outright asking your golf buddy for insider tips definitely does.
    65
  17.  @ozzy8449 I’m just trying to bring you out of your shell. So what’s your favorite movie? I like the Rocky series. You have a favorite Rocky movie? I think mine is Rocky IV because it has that great training montage in the wilderness. Real macho stuff, getting back to the earth. Of course that was also the one with the silly robot, but Stallone eventually cut that scene in later versions. You like any other Stallone films? I must have seen everything he ever made. What a lot of people don’t understand about Stallone is…
    63
  18. I like the portrayal of the general here. He’s not a yee-haw warmonger in the “Dr. Strangelove” mold. He’s more like General Devereaux (Bruce Willis) from “The Siege”: he understands the gravity of the situation but also knows that indecision is itself a decision, and probably the worst one possible.
    58
  19. I prefer broader funds like ITOT or VT for the diversification. The S&P had a “lost decade” from 2000-2009, but smaller and foreign companies kept chugging along. Then Europe had a lost decade roughly 2008-2018 and the US was doing well. I couldn’t say what’ll outperform, but the imperfect correlation between market segments can reduce the swings somewhat.
    48
  20. I particularly like how the characters’ names appear to have been culled from food advertisements (Zesty, Vitamin, Perfomance). Puritans named their children for Biblical characters (John, Leah, Habakkuk) or pious attributes (Prudence, Silence) because that was their great ambition. In the future, what we want most is sustenance.
    47
  21. The world’s most humble thousandaire.
    46
  22. Part of it to me is that colloquially we’ve overused “scam” to the point of it losing meaning. Anything that doesn’t appeal to me personally or that’s more expensive than I’d prefer is a scam.
    45
  23. Yesh, but didja hear it was rishk free? Seriously though, this is how a lot of hedge funds work, and it’s why (aside from regulation) they’re used by wealthy people. If you have tens of millions of dollars you don’t really need to grow it aggressively. Steady growth and protection from severe losses is good enough.
    38
  24. Folks with ADHD often report skipping meals because they were too focused on something else. I remember junior year of college I researched and wrote a 20-page paper on Lyndon Johnson in one sitting. Or there are those who aren’t organized enough to have food in the house and the mental wherewithal to cook. Something like Soylent that’s prepackaged or Huel that’s just powder and water can be really helpful. (It’s still not a technology though; Slim-Fast has been available as a powder or ready-to-drink since the 80s.)
    38
  25. I won my local stock picking contest one year. I didn’t care, so I dropped my entire portfolio into a single company with whom I share a name. They happened to report good earnings during that timeframe so I made like 20%. People say they wish schools taught about investing, but the trouble is how do you say something teenagers will listen to and remember in ten years? That simulation is probably the best approach:: have everybody manage a faux portfolio and see how many of them go bust YOLOing into biotech.
    30
  26.  @kontiuka  If even that; none of her examples were European. It’s like he has no idea where Guatemala is. Putting on my drama-nerd hat for a minute, I’d also say “Europe or wherever” underlines how they both spoke of “Africa” as a single homogenous place. Is the drought in Ethiopia or Mozambique? Both get regular droughts but they’re like 4,000km (2,400mi) apart.
    28
  27. They’ll all still have their own local groups, which is plenty of room to look for other civilizations. But that’ll be it; as far as they’ll know their local group is all there was or ever will be. And that could severely limit their knowledge of the Universe. Our local group has a radius of 5,000,000 light years, so a future civilization in the Milky Way could only see that far into the past.
    27
  28. 8:08 This is a problem in Alaska where we have an annual payout to all residents (the Permanent Fund Dividend, or PFD). So much of our campaigning focuses on that one issue. They know that the average voter doesn’t care about actual governance, just how big of a check they’re getting.
    26
  29. “Your favorite CEO”… is that a thing?
    26
  30. What’s wrong with Amtrak? I love riding trains, in fact here’s my scrapbook with all my ticket stubs from… Oh.
    23
  31. There’s one that I drink that’s basically oat flour, protein powder, powdered oil, and a multivitamin. Much as I like it, I recognize that all they’ve invented is a moderately better form of gruel.
    23
  32. That too, but also what the host meant by “proceeds of crime” is that we have laws against keeping the profits of a crime for which one has been convicted. Whether that includes publishing media about your crime or selling the rights to your story, that’s a legal grey area. Several states passed “Son of Sam” laws saying any proceeds must go to the victims rather than the perp, but those laws have been struck down by the Supreme Court and several lower courts. They could probably be rewritten though to be more airtight. [You may recall that OJ Simpson wrote a totally hypothetical narrative of how someone might hypothetically have killed his ex-wife and her friend. That was kind of a special case: OJ had declared bankruptcy, and the book was an income-producing asset.]
    23
  33. Wait, I thought this was a channel about wood nymphs.
    22
  34. Be careful with that. Sometimes people think something has no effect on them, but really they’re just not aware of the effect.
    21
  35. Maybe not cheaper, but more effective. Getting in with a retailer makes the product more visible and accessible. For a major purchase like a mattress, I can see people researching companies and buying direct. Who really wants to do that though for a razor or laundry detergent?
    18
  36. He didn’t really explain EBITDA, just said what it stands for and that it’s another measure of profitability. To address that question (not that anybody asked) I’d say EBITDA has two especially good uses: One, it helps make companies more comparable because maybe company A took on more debt while company B issued more equity. Company B will automatically look more profitable because interest is an expense and dividends aren’t. Two, EBITDA is nice over shorter timelines because it focuses on things management can quickly control (staffing and supplies yes, equipment purchases from five years ago no).
    16
  37. Or they’ll rent the goose out, so to speak: start an investment fund and charge clients a percentage. Hedge funds often have a provision where they get a share of any excess returns. Of course the gurus always have a reason why they don’t do this, some vague appeal to democracy and helping the working folks, or conversely an attack on the ruling caste: “Wall Street’s trying to suppress this information, so be a brave rebel and give me $500.”
    16
  38. Can’t wait to see how many new bagholders we get from this.
    16
  39. Oh yeah, she knew what she was doing. Just kept feeding him rope.
    13
  40.  @failedsuccessfully0000  - It's that special kind of pronunciation you get from someone who doesn't speak French and learned that one phrase from someone else who doesn't speak French.
    13
  41. Yes, but also to explain that investigations are more complex than “it’s kinda sus and I don’t like him, therefore guilty.”
    11
  42. Frugality can be hard to let go of though. I came back to this video after watching one by Ramit Sethi titled “We achieved FIRE with $4.3M. Why can’t we enjoy it?” It’s just what it sounds like: Sethi interviews a couple who’ve been very frugal and built up a great nest egg. They got there by focusing on cost-saving behaviors and taking comfort in seeing the number go up, but now they’re having trouble letting go of that.
    10
  43. 7:50 As of early 2024 this is happening in the grocery store industry. Kroger trying to buy Albertsons and the authorities want to make sure that doesn’t exacerbate local monopolies.
    10
  44. For sure, that’s basically the “stealth wealth” our host referred to. They buy experiences or things that provide security, much less so things for showing off. Apparently there are even some billionaires who pull this off because Forbes doesn’t know who they are. But then you have these folks who deliberately cultivate an image of humility because it’s good PR.
    10
  45. Zero-commission brokerage has made that much more feasible. I now have my regular biweekly investment automated & spread across 20+ stocks,, so I’m basically my own ETF.
    9
  46. "Sir, is this sleigh registered to you?"
    9
  47. 5:12 Put another way, asset allocation is the biggest determinant of returns.
    9
  48. During a gold rush, the real money is in selling shovels.
    9
  49. My Intermediate professor told us “Embrace the boredom. That’s why we get paid what we do, nobody else wants to deal with this stuff.”
    8
  50. 6:10 Most accurate part - in the time it took that tattoo to fade, she got at least one more.
    8
  51.  @michaelchomiczewski7937  At the same time, highlighting her background in physics shows how public policy is often based on making voters feel safer, even if that feeling has no relation to actual danger.
    8
  52.  @fabiolean  Fairbanks, Alaska makes me hopeful in this regard. It gets stupid cold in the winter (-40° is common) so it’s pretty standard for cars there to have plug-in engine block heaters (keeps the fluids flowing, reduces wear on the engine). To accommodate this, many offices and even grocery stores built electric outlets into their parking lots.
    8
  53. Isak Helber Also, make it a best-of-nine series. All else being equal, a longer series favors the stronger team.
    7
  54. 4:00 “Teens who started smoking before the age of 15” …probably already had some serious shit going on. I’m not surprised they engage in rebellious, self-medicating, or self-punishing behaviors, it’s probably more a question of what they can get their hands on first.
    7
  55. There’s an episode of How I Met Your Mother where two of the main characters decide their usual bar is too expensive and has too many rules, so instead they open a bar in their apartment. As you might expect, they soon learn exactly why things are the bar is so expensive and so much of a buzzkill. That’s not to say the old guard has it all figured out so don’t bother innovating. But in a competitive enough industry there’s a good chance companies are trying a bunch of disruptive strategies and adopting the ones that actually work.
    7
  56. That relates to something that I don’t think we talk about enough. We think of retirement as not working at all, but there’s also a lot of value in being not-poor enough to work on your own terms. If you have a few months’ expenses saved up you’re no longer stuck at your job. If conditions get bad or they ask you to do unethical things, you can bail. That’s quite a liberating feeling. With a couple hundred K you can have a fallback income that allows you to downshift to part-time or seasonal work. I know a couple of Silicon Valley guys who did the latter: grind like hell for ten years while living as cheaply as possible, then “retire” to Oregon, work at a coffee shop two days a week, and otherwise focus on parenting or running a small consulting business.
    7
  57. Contingency-based compensation. If they lose they get nothing, if they win they get something like 1/3 of the judgment.
    7
  58. A period of time that’s vacant from obligations. What would you even call that?
    7
  59. That’s the point, good investing isn’t exciting. The average retail investor does far worse than they would by just buying and holding an index fund and accepting market-average performance. A couple of the big reasons they do worse is trading too much and chasing performance. In this case it could mean jumping into BTC expecting quick gains, then bailing when the correction comes. (That’s one thing the hodlers get right, they don’t buy at a peak and sell during a crash. Can’t say that for a lot of ARKK investors.)
    7
  60. Same here. I think it’s the way they don’t just cross the line, they launch past the line and into utter madness.
    6
  61.  @x--.  Likewise, those players like stability. That 80-year-old Senator is a known quantity, and he can cultivate his son or wife as a successor, giving the other players comfort that the good times won’t suddenly stop.
    6
  62. That is so metal.
    6
  63. The deeper you get into speculation — altcoins, NFTs, MOASS — the more you see that embraced by the rank and file. The conversation shifts away from democracy and equity toward a future that’s just as hierarchical and unequal, but this time they get to be on top.
    6
  64. 5:49 Once again, “I haven’t actually made money yet, but I totally will because I have a strategy .”
    6
  65. If you’re running a jewelry business that’s supposedly pulling in $500,000 a week, won’t someone eventually notice that you’re not buying much or any new jewelry?
    6
  66. 9:36 Here I think it’s worth pointing out that homelessness declined steadily from 2007 to 2020 for the nation as a whole, then started trending up again for reasons you can probably guess. However, the current population of homeless individuals are increasingly concentrated in high-cost areas like major cities. Also a larger share are entirely unhoused (as opposed to slightly more comfortable but still precarious situations like shelters or couch-surfing). Today’s unhoused population is smaller than even in recent history, but they’re more visible, which contributes to the sense of crisis. (Which hopefully leads to meaningful action but probably a lot of bureaucracy and NIMBYism as well.)
    6
  67. Now in 2025 hedge fund manager Scott Bessent has been nominated as US Secretary of the Treasury, prompting people to look at his fund’s returns as a measure of his understanding of the economy (a flawed concept to begin with). The masses clowned him for earning about 3% annualized in a huge bull market, but astute readers noticed that his fund’s best recent year was 2022; while the regular market tanked his fund gained 30%. It’s almost like his fund was meant to hedge something.
    6
  68. 1:30 That’s a nice little sound bite, but all he really means is we find winning rewarding. The same areas light up from tasty food or solving puzzles.
    6
  69. Meanwhile Will acts like he doesn’t give a damn about anything but he says last year he put $400,000 into savings and sent $150,000 to his parents.
    6
  70. I’m that way even when I make money. My investments have been crushing it for years but I’ll still stress over buying a $50 game because if I wait maybe I can find it for $40.
    6
  71. The spoiler thing bugs me so much.  I read a lot of history books, and when we're talking about big stuff I think it's safe to assume we're already pre-spoiled; you don't have to pretend it's going to work out between King Henry and Anne Boleyn.  If we're talking about something more obscure, like a bunch of slaves stealing a ship and sailing it past the freaking White House, just let me enjoy the ride.
    5
  72.  @chaoticcat2564 That’s pretty much how it works: these names are in the news again, so the algorithm pumps the stock.
    5
  73. Wait just a minute, are you suggesting that someone went on JRE and spouted a bunch of nonsense, and Rogan accepted it without question?
    5
  74. 18:00 The way I heard it, requiring disclosure of top officer pay also contributed to the rocketing of that pay. Regulators thought it would have a “name and shame” effect, but what really happened was execs could see their peers’ pay and demanded more.
    5
  75. That’s exactly what he says at 7:29. It’s a marginal correction, something that happens every few years in the stock market. It’s just that some people expected an immediate surge.
    5
  76. 9:00 This is important to the whole “startup refuses venture capitalist’s offer to invest” thing. The VC is buying an ownership stake, and in many cases they’re going to act like it.
    5
  77. His two homes are worth $20M combined. The sitting President earns $400K per year plus housing (most food and clothing is at their own expense though). Former Presidents get a $226K/year pension. If that were all he got and Michelle went back to her $250K/year job, then yes it would be a stretch; who else can buy homes worth 40x their income? However, modern Presidents unlock other income streams after leaving office, namely book rights and speaking fees. The Obamas in particular have made a ton of money from their books. Their joint book deal that would eventually produce Becoming and A Promised Land is said to have earned them $65 million.
    5
  78. Without getting too spoliery, there were two special regenerations that didn't result in a new numbered Doctor, so Eleven (Matt Smith) was actually the thirteenth version. When Eleven's time came, the Gallifreyans gave him more regenerations. The customary 13 isn't a hard limit; prior canon suggests it's imposed by the Gallifreyan leaders and lives are transferable. In the Eighth Doctor's TV movie, for example, the Master tries to steal the Doctor's remaining regenerations. We don't actually know how many more the elders gave The Doctor. As far as the Doctor knows, each one now could be the last, but as far as the show's concerned there's no need to stop any time soon.
    5
  79. That too, there’s famous and then there’s Musk-Zuck-Bezos famous. Tech and media companies have to sell a vision, so their image is far more tied to their CEO individually (especially if they’re also a founder) than is the case with other more established companies. For example: Indra Nooyi spent 18 years as one of PepsiCo’s top executives (CFO, CEO, President, and/or Chair). She was making $15-20M a year including stock-based compensation, so she’s easily worth hundreds of millions if not a billion. Forbes would know about her for sure — Pepsi is a household name and the 40th biggest company in the world by market capitalization — but the average person wouldn’t recognize her.
    5
  80. I used to audit companies’ financial statements, and we were barred from “any direct or material indirect” investment in a company we handled. For partners in the firm that extended to any client the firm had whether they worked that client or not. That’s just basic stuff; how could we expect people to trust our judgment if we might be personally affected by the outcome?
    5
  81. 0:31 - Odysseus totally did it with Circe, and probably Kalypso too. Like Achilles, he also would have had concubines at camp. When he recounts his adventures to Penelope in Book 23, he probably even told her about all of that, because why not? It's not like he was supposed to keep it in his pants for twenty years. Why? Marriage at the time was strictly about producing heirs. The women had not only to remain faithful to protect their son's inheritance (which in Telemachos's case includes a throne, so it's a pretty big deal.) If a guy slept around, it didn't make any difference in who inherits what, so who cares?
    5
  82. A few of these are only ridiculous when applied to a mass audience.  At 1:37, you can see several simultaneous clips of physical therapists using the Hawaii Chair with older patients, probably because they've had a fall and need to gently rehab their hips.  The Snuggie allows people in wheelchairs to cover their torsos while sitting up.  The Flowbee is used in nursing homes for residents who you can't easily take out to a salon.
    4
  83. It's not about them, it's about you.  Did you do something inconsiderate or hurtful?  Do you value their friendship enough that you want to repair that relationship?  Then apologize in a real and meaningful way.
    4
  84. I know some folks like that. Regulation is a pain, it’s government overreach, it increases costs. Then their industry gets deregulated and in that one instance they care about consumer protection and ensuring a quality product.
    4
  85. Re: “If you’d invested back then you’d have this much now” - there’s also this thing called reversion to the mean, also illustrated by phenomena like ARKK Innovation or the Madden Curse. Someone has a great year, better than anybody would have expected, so they suddenly get loads of press coverage, endorsement deals, new investors, or whatever. Before jumping on the bandwagon, remember that their great performance was noteworthy because it was unusual. True, it may represent a turning point in the player’s career or the emergence of a brilliant fund manager, but often they just had one good year. After that they go right back to being average, sometimes worse.
    4
  86. It could be intentional. Make a claim so ludicrous that anybody with any sense dips out. Now you’re pitching exclusively to the gullible and the desperate.
    4
  87.  @Dr-dikhead Agreed, and our host says himself at 1:50 that this is a real issue that warrants scrutiny, criticism, and perhaps legislation. But it’s still important to get the facts straight.
    4
  88.  @Bedhead13 It wasn’t a rugpull per se , but Anchor was part of the the Terra-Luna ecosystem, which collapsed almost overnight in mid 2022. So yeah, shocker, the safe 20% yield wasn’t sustainable.
    4
  89. There’s a bit more to it than that. User-serviceable devices can’t be packed as tightly as those that require expert service, so there’s a trade-off, be it sticker price, device size, or hardware quality. Similarly, the “break more often” part is the price we pay for small, light, portable devices. How often have you needed to take your TV in for service?
    4
  90. 12:50 It was explained, as a teaser rate to draw in initial “depositors” (but not legally depositors so that when this whole thing evaporates we’re not liable). Trouble is I don’t think people got the memo. The Plain Bagel, in his “Investing TikToks Part 4” showcase, shares someone who said they were going to finance a house with income from Anchor. They seemingly expect Anchor to continue paying 19% for 30-plus years.
    4
  91. True, but how much it matters depends on the broker’s policies, namely where they do that rounding. I use Fidelity, and they round to either 0.001 share or the $0.01. So the effect of rounding on, say, 0.001 share of Chipotle (priced at $2,903.44 as of this writing) is pretty small.
    4
  92. So you’re saying it’ll create lots of jobs? #accentuatethepositive #orelse
    4
  93. One, the disparity is even worse. Two, MLMs are nearly zero-sum. At least in a normal exploitive-capitalist arrangement both parties make money, and the disagreement is about how that income should be split.
    4
  94. Right, but I don’t think that’s what he’s talking about. I think he’s responding to TED-talk types saying, “Automation’s going to replace half of existing jobs, but don’t worry, UBI will fix it.” That would help some things, like the economic consequences of half of the country being unemployed. It doesn’t fix the unemployment itself though. And as many of us learned in 2020, there is such a thing as too much leisure time.
    4
  95. Remember, the price needs to end in a 7. That makes it seem like a bargain.
    4
  96. Notice how flustered he gets when someone points out Niger and Nigeria are different countries.
    4
  97. Yes, but it doesn’t count as working because you’re living the dream. (Only a slight paraphrase of Tim Ferriss when people point out he works way more than 4 hours a week.)
    4
  98. 3:50 Gru flip board meme: duck jetting through space runs out of propellant falls off screen falls off screen?
    4
  99. One important lesson for modern investors to take away is that conditions can be positive for an industry, but that doesn’t make any particular company a sure thing. Even if electric cars are the way of the future, that doesn’t guarantee Workhorse or Rivian will survive. Who knows, even Tesla could get shaken out. More surprising things have happened.
    3
  100. 0:01 He’s not wrong, he’s just conflating cause and effect.
    3
  101. These are salespeople, they have a line for that. Why are they sharing their secret? Because they care about helping everyday people achieve their financial goals. Why does it cost hundreds of dollars? Because if it didn’t, you wouldn’t value the information as much.
    3
  102. I love seeing all the scam comments offering to “help” you recover your stolen coins.
    3
  103. It’s all related. The constant “work or starve” financial pressure pushes people to take the first or highest-paying job they can find rather than do something they find meaningful.
    3
  104. This was true back then, and before. You can find articles back to at least 2000 saying demand for “companionship” spikes during the conventions. Margaret Atwood wrote that a lot of being supposedly-prescient is just looking at existing trends and wondering “What if it keeps going like this?”
    3
  105. 15:10 “too smart or too well informed to be tricked” - I see this all the time in smaller ways. People think they’re being of pure rationality but really they’re just low enough in emotional intelligence that they don’t know their own emotional state and how it’s influencing them.
    3
  106. There were some upsides to life in the Eastern Bloc. As you say there was no need for advertisements plastered everywhere. Employment was secure and basic needs were met, so rather than climb the corporate ladder people spent time with their families. Of course there were also some huge drawbacks.
    3
  107. Bear in mind that the purpose of most ads isn't to get you to rush out and buy something right now. Typically it's just the company reminding you that they exist or associating a certain image or feeling with their brand so that when you do want something, they come to mind. Take something simple like bread: where do you buy yours and why? Like really why? Why do people pay $6 at the local bakery rather than $4 for mass-market bread or $2 for store-brand bread? Usually because of an idea, somewhat based in fact and somewhat in feeling, that the more expensive option is better: more nutritious, more ethical, more befitting their lifestyle, or whatever else. Those ideas seep in over time through advertising and branding.
    3
  108. Yeah, it’s pretty typical for retail investors to overestimate their risk tolerance. It’s easy to think you can stomach big swings and even buy the dip, but until your portfolio drops 20% or a single position gets cut in half, it’s hard to really know how you’ll respond.
    3
  109. Tell me you didn’t watch the video…
    3
  110. I’d seen another video about this film, and that commentator touched on another rule of suspense: “don’t show the monster too early”. The audience don’t really need to know what this is, just that it could vaporize the company.
    3
  111. Impossible, the author of Africa 2.0 would never make that mistake.
    3
  112. For sure, it’s an old concept. “Lipstick on a pig” and whatnot.
    3
  113. As Dan Olson (Folding Ideas) puts it, the ideal crypto-scam target is “tenuously middle-class”. They have money to invest but not enough money to feel like conventional investments will build the life they want.
    3
  114. ⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠ @SeanBeatsMapson  I suspect that’s part of it, the way Western cultures assign blame (as opposed to honor-shame cultures which have their own pros and cons). If you got suckered that implies that you are a sucker. Folks don’t want to acknowledge that, so they hunker down into their opinion, dismissing the criticism as FUD and critics as haters. [Since I’m using terms that are popular in the crypto space I’ll go ahead and clarify: I’m not saying crypto is a scam, just that scams happen in the crypto market. Swap out some words and this could be about politics or MLMs.]
    3
  115. That’s the point. Convince people they have a problem, then sell them a solution.
    3
  116. Richard kind of misspoke there. When he said “positive return” I’m pretty sure he meant “excess return.” Earning average returns is easy, you just spread your bets around.
    3
  117. Arceushero If I drop my Nook and it breaks (unlike the dozen times I actually have dropped my Nook, or the time my friend dropped a Kindle in the bathtub) my library is still intact.  I can go to my computer or my phone and continue reading.  Also, e-readers don't cost $300, multimedia entertainment tablets do.  Black and white e-readers cost about $69 and can go a month between charges.  I use mine all the time in small villages without Internet access or reliable electricity. That said, I still give e-books a big negative mark in one category: sharing.  If I like a book and want somebody else to read it, I can just give her the book.  To share an e-book, the other person must have a compatible reader and the publisher must enable sharing.  Assuming those are true, I can only ever share a given book with one person one time for 14 days.  For me, that's a huge handicap, and as such I only use my e-reader for public domain classics and mass-market stuff that everybody's already reading.
    2
  118. Tom Leeds On the other hand, imagine that we found an alien species who'd never come in contact with Earth, and yet their stories were very similar to, say, Inuit legends. How would we respond to that?
    2
  119. Your watch has ended, Argos.
    2
  120. Depends on what you mean. A main criterion of inclusion in the S&P is that the company has to be headquartered in the US. Many companies do get their revenue from other countries, mostly the Tech and Communications companies. Other sectors like Financials and Utilities are harder to extend across borders so they depend more on the local economy. And of course it works the other way around. Samsung, Spotify, and Nestle sell their wares here. MercadoLibre is more specific to its region.
    2
  121. It should, yes. Imagine you buy Microsoft (share price around $400) at $50 a paycheck. After your eighth or ninth purchase those fractions will add up and pass the full-share mark. At least at my brokerage, from that point on the cobbled-together share is treated like any other full share. It gains voting rights and can be transferred.
    2
  122. If you’re that worried about a correction or a bear market, that’s probably a sign your overall allocation is too aggressive. Build up more of an emergency fund or move some of your investments to bonds or commodities full-time. Sure your upswings won’t be as big, but you’ll have the resources to ride out a downturn. Waiting comes at a cost too. According to research by Elm Partners, even when starting from an expensive market, the odds of correctly predicting a correction within the next 3 years are a little better than a coin flip (56%). When the predictor is correct they save themselves about 10% of losses, but when they’re wrong they miss out on the gains the market made during that time, an average of 30%. That means on average waiting for the dip means 8% missed gains.
    2
  123.  @masi9044 ​​⁠ Right, because these funds are supersets of an S&P 500 fund. The S&P 500 make up about 80% of a total US market fund (like ITOT) and just under 50% of a total global market fund (like VT). That other 20-50% is important though, as it provides further diversification.
    2
  124. Yes there’s some dumbing down of things, like “6 Senators Killed Dead!” But also languages change, they always have. The first newspaper in what is now the United States (Boston 1690) was titled “Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick”. My guess for the next 100 years is that English grows more phonetic, shedding more of its French & German roots. Perhaps we’ll also develop (with or without conscious effort) a dialect for international use, richer in loanwords and using simplified grammar.
    2
  125. You could try, but (1) how do you know you’re early? And (2) as Coffee says at 3:18 the gains can be addictive.
    2
  126. Related to these, I think people who are smart in “hard” topics like physics or medicine make the mistake of assuming that because nutrition or finance is “easier”, they don’t need to take the time to develop the relevant expertise. As a result they do what so many of us did as university freshmen: read a handful of articles and think we’ve cracked the code.
    2
  127. No, in fact he made a video on that exact topic: “Grant Cardone is officially a fake guru.” showing how Cardone’s gone from promoting financial responsibility to flashing his wealth and selling courses.
    2
  128. Even if you are making higher-quality handcrafted items, potential customers will ask what makes handcrafted worth the premium. A solid answer could win them over.
    2
  129. Aside from Stewie, the characters do seem to age about one year per decade of our time. Peter’s quoted age has crept up from 42 to 45. Chris was originally in junior high school and now he’s at West High with Meg.
    2
  130. They always have an answer for that: it’s not about the money, their passion is helping ordinary people. They only charge $497 for their course because if they gave it away you wouldn’t appreciate it as much.
    2
  131. I don’t think it’s about any one person or event. To me it’s about celebrity foundations in general. - Getting involved with a cause because it personally affected them - Intentionally or not, the charity becomes at least somewhat about the founder (on the website at 1:01, note how many times it mentions Tracy) - Vague goals like “awareness”
    2
  132. This is why I’m dubious about the assumption (discussed in “The Fermi Paradox”) that intelligent life will necessarily expand throughout its galaxy. I can see us spreading out across the solar system for resources, but if we get better about renewables and recycling, those resources could last us a really long time. What would our motivation be for colonizing, say, Barnard’s Star?
    2
  133.  @lucagerio Nice catch. So yeah, we have no reason to believe she’s doing better than random chance. She could even be losing money, we don’t know.
    2
  134. 7:03 “Behold the only thing greater than yourself.”
    2
  135. Especially as young as some of these guys are. If the market keeps going like it did in the 20th century, investments would roughly double (after inflation) about every 10 years. For a 25 year old that $80K would be $1.3M by the time they’re 65. Lock that down, retirement’s sorted, you’ve pretty much guaranteed yourself a better future than most of your peers. Then play with the rest.
    2
  136. I agree, that happens with any asset. A company or a sector has a great quarter and then people buy in. But also Belshe didn't really answer the question. The host was asking how we should regard crypto: as a commodity, a currency, a collectible, intellectual property? It's kind of a softball question, an opportunity for Belshe to refute the notion that Bitcoin's price is based on nothing but hype. Instead he stammered about how much the line has gone up, only really saying anything meaningful at the end when he mentioned the fixed supply.
    2
  137. Yeah, it just means that when those factors change, they move in opposite directions.
    2
  138. It’s a good thing we don’t fall for stuff like this anymore.
    2
  139. Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) are just funds that can be bought and sold on an exchange like stocks. They’re different from mutual funds mostly because an ETF’s price constantly updates and they can be traded during the day. The price of a mutual funds only updates once a day after hours and they do their buys and sells at that time. Either type of fund can be actively managed (meaning a few specific people decide what to buy and sell) or passively managed (meaning the fund mimics an index).
    2
  140. Yep, exactly why it’s not suitable for ordinary folks. You have to (1) have an educated guess about where the market’s headed, something strong enough to justify losing money the whole time you hold this position, and (2) be actively engaged enough to move quickly when conditions move in your favor.
    2
  141. 3:30 And I was just in the middle of typing a joke about writing down your door’s seed words.
    2
  142. That whole voiceover is great. I love the stonerish accent, it gives me the impression that the person we’re trusting to run this show is barely out of high school. It also shows how some of these schemes are self-selecting. The pitch is bad enough that anybody who’s still listening has pre-screened themselves as naive enough or desperate enough to believe anything.
    2
  143. That’s the trouble, guys like Andreesen don’t want ethics or empathy.
    2
  144. 1:38 How do we know you’re not doing this already, disembodied YouTube voice?
    2
  145. I like meal replacements too. I lost 16 kilos swapping two meals a day with Huel, and like you I saved a bunch of money because it was easier than buying tacos. It’s just silly to try and sell it as a technology . You can get most of the way there with oat flour, milk, and a multivitamin. (“Well what about enjoyment?” critics often say. I enjoy meals with my family or on vacation. Most days I don’t care; I’m only eating because that’s what it takes to keep this meat suit running.)
    2
  146. Yep, and their single biggest campaign in the US is math education, graduation rates, and college preparedness in poor & minority communities.
    2
  147. What do you mean? She’s having a great time. Or at least I think she is.
    2
  148. Totally, and if you’ve dabbled in the market here and there you’ve probably gained 1% in a day. If someone’s an expert trader they should be able to do that every day, right?
    2
  149. The 25% guy (4:45) was a real mixed bag too. Three of his four electric car picks are down 80% or more. (Nothing wrong with a few speculative holdings; I have shares in alternative energy and air taxi companies. But they’re like 2% each of my overall holdings. Most of my money’s in boring stuff like insurance companies and grocery stores.)
    2
  150. “Financially comfortable” is fine with me. I wouldn’t even know what to do with tens of millions of dollars.
    2
  151. 5:18 His producer is so done with this shit. There’s no sugar-coating, no sympathy, just a calm recitation of which parts they replaced.
    2
  152. Short answer, yes, the company will pay back the par value (in your example $1,000) at the end of the term, regardless of what you personally paid for it. That 25% return isn't likely though because of competition. If you're offering to buy that bond for $800 so you can get a 25% return, why wouldn't someone else offer $850 and get a 17% return, or $900 and get an 11% return? And it would keep going like that until this bond pays about the same rate as similar bonds.
    2
  153. “This thing is kickin’ my ass.” Then when it’s time to take the kids out “I’m on a roll.”
    2
  154. You can still have that stuff if you want it, just do it for yourself, not to show off. There’s a quote supposedly by Bill Murray: “I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘try being rich first.’ See if that doesn’t cover most of it.” Showing off wealth is a great way to earn envy and admiration, but is it worth the gold diggers, scam artists, and sometimes even extortion schemes? Probably not.
    2
  155. One note to this is that when your portfolio is new and small, new deposits can quickly dwarf these differences, so you don't have to put too much thought into it. Let's take this example of a $300 monthly deposit. That's $1,800 in the first six months. Unless Stock A continues its runaway performance, contributing equally to each investment will push it back toward balance anyway. Not perfectly of course, but enough that it won't terribly matter.
    2
  156. Maybe it was meant to be. The phrase is most identified with two dangerous times and places: Baltimore 1967 where discontent would soon erupt into riots, and New York 1970 when the Bronx was swarming with street gangs.
    2
  157. Yes, for example “Nico” (Florian Wünsche) did several soap operas before this, and he currently (early 2023) has a recurring role in a detective series, SOKO Stuttgart .
    2
  158. They’re basically all the same, they hold a basket of assets and each of these funds’ baskets hold just one thing: Bitcoin. Unless you have a reason to seek out or avoid a certain provider, you may as well go with the cheapest. ARKB, BITB, IBIT, and FBTC are all in the 0.20-0.25% range. As our host mentioned, some funds are temporarily waiving part or all of their management fee. Just my conjecture, but I suspect that they’re doing this is because within a couple years they expect the market to have consolidated into maybe three dominant funds, and everyone will flock to those going forward. We already have that with S&P 500 index funds: there are dozens of such funds but SPY, VOO, and IVV dominate. Even within a company, SPLG is 1/20 of the size of SPY and sees 1/10 the trading volume despite being the same holdings with a lower expense ratio. Since asset managers make their money as a percentage of assets under management, becoming one of those really big funds would be great for the bottom line.
    2
  159. 8:50 How does Swag think that sounds? I could understand “I don’t watch the clock because I work whenever inspiration and opportunity meet.” But this is “I don’t know what day it is because I’m *always working* .”
    2
  160. That’s normal, look up the “forgetting curve” if you want to learn more. Hearing something once you’ll retain very little, even just the next day. If you want it to stick you need to review it, frequently at first but eventually a quick refresher is all you need. It also matters how much content you take in at one time. It’s pretty common for avid readers to tear through a 700-page book in a weekend, and I’m sure they had a good experience at the time, but just a few days later they could barely tell you why happened. Spacing that reading out, say 30 minutes day, would improve retention.
    2
  161.  @nadadur No way to be sure, but at least we’re not pitching anything.
    2
  162. 10:57 I got a podcast about… something, and a nutrition supplement.
    2
  163. And for a couple of them he bought right at the peak. Good news is if he holds onto these companies and they do well, that won’t really matter. Imagine you’d bought into Microsoft at the worst possible price of 2015 but held on. Yes you could have done better, but you’d still be up more than 500% because you were there for all of 2016, 2017, 2018…
    2
  164. I think this also speaks to a sentiment common in amateur-investing circles lately: risk is judged retroactively. The line for [stock or coin] keeps going up, therefore it’s not risky.
    2
  165. 2023 example of a “dividend trap”: Hawaiian Electric. As of this writing (30 Nov 2023) their profile on various investment sites shows a dividend yield of 12-14%. However , they’re partly responsible for the Maui fires earlier this year, so they face an unknown but probably large liability for damages. This means (1) their share price got smacked down, and (2) they suspended their dividend to free up cash for when that liability comes due. Someone who doesn’t know the context could buy in thinking they’ve found a great income stream, only to learn it’s not coming anytime soon.
    2
  166. Ice bath, journaling, meditation, edging, everything you’d expect for someone with the sigma grindset.
    2
  167. My garage dragon speaks to me, but telepathically so it probably won’t work for you. I’d be happy to pass messages along though.
    2
  168. Bonds, preferred stock, REITs, & BDCs are more directly income focused, and would provide some diversification (emphasizing dividends would create some concentration in the common stock of already-mature companies.) Another approach would be to just sell some fraction of your holdings as needed. Here in the US, qualified dividends and capital gains are taxed the same.
    2
  169. Ariel Cotton Hey now, that’s not fair. These people are trying to sell you a product, which is a disgrace to journalism. Fox News provides informative programming to show how investing in gold just makes sense, especially in these troubled times.
    2
  170. 5:00 Regarding the 1,000 share limit - Investing had much more of a hurdle to entry back then. It was typical to trade in “round lots” of 100 shares. Some brokers even required it, they wouldn’t deal in smaller “odd lots” because of the higher fees involved. If they took the request, you the investor would pay more in commissions to buy 50 shares than you would to buy 100. That round-lot requirement might mean each blue-chip position in your portfolio was thousands of dollars; in 1990 you’d need about $6,000 to get your first stake in Coke or IBM. This is also why stock splits were more common than they are now. You wouldn’t have seen someone trading at $1,000/share like Booking or Chipotle do today, because it could make them more difficult to invest in.
    2
  171. It is, his name is Brian Huskey. He also had a recurring role on Veep and voices Regular Sized Rudy on Bob’s Burgers .
    2
  172. 0:30 Wow, he looks just like Tom Cruise!
    2
  173. Using newspaper as insulation is a pretty well-known trick among people who’ve slept on the streets. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was also used by old folks living in cheap drafty houses.
    2
  174. As our host mentions at 4:40, I also like the variety in the type of property I can own. I’m not interested in being a residential landlord, but through REITs I can own medical offices or bowling alleys.
    2
  175. 19:45 I’m gonna tell my kids these were the Power Rangers.
    2
  176. This looks much nicer than how it was portrayed in American media. Much like Cuba it’s calm and orderly, people seem prosperous and happy. Just don’t look behind the scenes.
    2
  177. But number went up!
    2
  178. The movie is Boyz N the Hood , set and filmed in the Crenshaw neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles* circa 1990. That wasn’t a nice neighborhood by any means, but also the movie intentionally emphasized the poverty and violence. * renamed South Los Angeles in 2003, possibly to escape the outdated image of it essentially being a war zone.
    2
  179. Yep, you can short a $10 stock with a stop-loss at $20, but if big news makes it gap up to $50 you’re deep in the red.
    2
  180. US Treasury bonds can be bought directly from the Treasury. Otherwise you'll probably need to go through a brokerage. There's usually an area titled "Fixed Income" or something like that where you can buy or sell government bonds, corporate bonds, bank certificates, annuities, or mutual funds that hold any of these things.
    2
  181. And in the final scene, Kal Penn shows up, giving us a hook for the sequel.
    2
  182. I don't disagree with any of the speakers conclusions, but talks like this are exactly why I stopped caring about TED. Instead of focusing on one thing, TED tried to branch out and diluted their brand. Where the original conference was a place for passionate people to share their work, TEDx and TED-ED are flooded with pitchmen and armchair experts.
    1
  183. I think the interviewees nailed it; a language should be used for communication, not as something to memorize and repeat for the exam. There is a German school in my town where German is not just a subject, but also the medium of instruction. Morning classes are conducted in English, and afternoon classes are conducted in German. This means that their 2:00 p.m. science class is in German, and if the student has questions, he should ask them in German. Over the course of eight years, the students get thousands of hours of practice communicating.
    1
  184. I think that call-in show says it all; nobody wants to be the one who has to pay for it.  Doesn't matter what "it" is or how important it is: education, science, infrastructure, social benefits, we want somebody else to pay for it. The safest thing for a politician to do is nothing.
    1
  185. This list can't decide what it wants to be.  Are we talking about deliberately quirky  videos like "Groove is in the Heart", strange imports like "Cotton Eyed Joe", look-at-me-I'm-so-artsy videos like "Thank U", or dated videos like "U Can't Touch This"?  They could easily have devoted a top ten to each category.  That melange of nonsense, however, is exactly what I love about the 90s.  Back then they were willing to try something crazy.  From about 1998 to 2008, the major record companies settled into a nice comfortable spot and spent all their time defending it from anything new.
    1
  186. Lots of movies have a twist in the middle to start the second or third act; those always get stepped on.  The line "I see dead people" was supposed to be a surprise.
    1
  187. Good for them. The safe path would be to go back to the well, do more of the same, and earn the easy money. That doesn't give you the space to create and try new things, though, and eventually those lost opportunities come back as anger and resentment. Better to walk away now and preserve the relationship.
    1
  188.  @gacomics5951 I took a webinar where the speaker’s pitch was a down-market version of this: gather up 20 pages of business tips or quotes from successful people and self-publish that. Congratulations, you can now call yourself an author, which gives you more cachet at a subject matter expert. Next step is to turn that into public speaking engagements and other opportunities to grow your brand.
    1
  189. They even say that up front: voters have always cared about bullshit.
    1
  190. He gave those to the English as a gift? "Thank you for inviting me into your home, Your Majesty. I brought you a present, but be careful because it could explode and give you a face full of powdered glass."
    1
  191. As with so many problems, I don't believe the Internet caused it, but merely exposed it.  George Carlin observed decades ago that a moment of silence at a ballgame was a nerve-wracking ordeal.  Everything we've ever created -- art, science, literature, sport -- is an attempt to fill our time, to avoid silence, stillness, and boredom.  Can one go too far in that direction?  Of course.  If you check your phone so often that it disrupts your daily activities and social life, or if you spend so much time at the office that your spouse is basically a single parent, you should probably think about your priorities, and whether your actions are working toward or against them.
    1
  192. No, that was real.  In the late 80's and early 90's, it was trendy to wear jeans with rips and holes along the front of the leg.  The look started with early punk bands like the Ramones, who often had worn-out clothing because that's what they could afford.  One could encourage specific spots to tear with a razor blade, but this wasn't something one would admit to doing; the generally accepted thing was to buy new jeans and let nature take its course. Anyway, capitalism looked at this and saw money to be made, so they started selling pre-torn jeans at a premium.  As you might expect, the only people who bought them were rich kids who didn't really understand the concept and just wanted to be trendy.
    1
  193. Limp Bizkit helped bring together hip-hop and rock?  No no no no nonononono.  They were just one of many.  Before Limp Bizkit was even formed, we'd had collaborations like Aerosmith & Run DMC, Anthrax & Public Enemy, and Michael Jackson & Eddie Van Halen, as well as individual acts that blended rap and rock like Cypress Hill, Puya, and Urban Dance Squad.
    1
  194. Audiobooks can be a great way to sneak some reading into a busy day.  I listened to "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" in half-hour shifts during my commute.  Librivox provides free recordings of public domain classics.  Since the readers aren't compensated, the quality ranges from "really good" to "just okay", but it allows anybody to tap into a huge library of material. Audiobooks aren't the same as reading from a page and imagining everything from scratch, but sometimes the performance adds something of its own.  I've read "The Handmaid's Tale", but hearing it again through the voice of Claire Danes shed light on several parts that I didn't really notice before.  Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" was recently released as a full-cast recording, sort of like a radio play, which again presents the work in a new fashion.
    1
  195. It's on the Staples website.  Go to your search engine of choice and search for "Staples reading speed test."
    1
  196.  @Illusion666  It was back in the 1980s, it’s basically Ramsey’s origin story. He’d accumulated some $4M worth of real estate but it was one debt propping up another. Then one of the banks he worked with got sold, and the new owners called $1.2M of his debts. He filed for bankruptcy two years later. I wouldn’t exactly call him a fake guru in the Coffeezilla sense. His teachings are roughly in line with those of Jack Bogle and he doesn’t claim to know any secret techniques or systems. Then again he makes money off books and seminars, then uses that wealth to convince listeners he knows what he’s talking about.
    1
  197. If I were a billionaire, I wouldn’t be for long. I got no need for that kind of money.
    1
  198. 0:57 “Zoom and enhance.”
    1
  199. I would disagree a bit on the idea of fan pushback for endorsing garbage products. Online fandoms are so fleeting that nothing sticks for long. Even the outright scams are soon forgotten.
    1
  200. Most of it is bits from Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf”.
    1
  201. The other important thing to remember is that this isn't a one-time thing. This has just been the first wave. The virus is still out there and almost nobody is immune. As restrictions get lifted and people mingle more, cases will rise. There's a good chance we'll need more periods of distancing to keep the caseload manageable. April's been tough, but if, as one of the Harvard intermittent-distancing models indicated, we'll have to do the same thing again in August, how are we going to use the next three months to prepare?
    1
  202. Another tool is to find an employer who’ll reimburse tuition. Unless for some reason you need a Master’s to get started in your field, save it until you’re working and then peck away at it over 4-6 years. It’ll cost way less out of pocket, and you’ll probably have a better idea of what you want to do long term. That transition is a perfect opportunity to either specialize (Biology to Botany, for example) or change course (like Psychology to Public Health). One word of warning, some employers include a clause that if you quit you have to give back any reimbursement you received in the prior 6-12 months. I wouldn’t not use the program over that, it’s just something to be aware of.
    1
  203. Maybe. As our host estimates in this video, the World’s Greatest Trader probably is making six figures from selling courses. However it’s also common for these guys to rent homes, cars, and planes to use as props. So he’s probably making bank, but also not nearly as well off as social media would suggest.
    1
  204. Kind of, but the general idea goes back at least as far as microtransactions. FarmVille players would spend $1 for a decorative item and bystanders would act like it’s the dumbest decision anybody could ever make.
    1
  205. He’s not. Bagel’s pretty clear that this is all really shady and Left lies all the time. A criminal conviction however requires way more than that. How do you prove beyond a reasonable doubt what Left believed about the company when he published his report? Investors could pursue civil remedies which have a lower standard (basically 50.1%) but the plaintiffs would have to show they were harmed by Left’s statements. How likely is that when most of the time he’s been correct about the company being over- or undervalued? You can’t just lock people up because what they did feels wrong.
    1
  206. That’s just it, stop trying . There have been studies on amateur traders, and they find that the more actively a person trades, the worse they usually perform. Almost everybody would be better off just socking money away into a mutual fund.
    1
  207. 3:43 This seems to be a really common assumption, that technology or growth companies are inherently better long term investments, but that’s not necessarily the case. Stock movement is largely expectation vs. reality. The company you hold could increase profits 25% year over year, but if the market was expecting 30% the company’s stock would lose value.
    1
  208.  @federicoytbe That’s true, the gains that people miss out on by waiting for a crash are more than what they’d lose in the actual crash. But the teacher’s story also illustrates how our panicky monkey brains lead us astray. More than a few people pull their money out of the market during the crash, and they don’t get back in until the rally is well underway.
    1
  209. Long as it wasn’t LMND. They’re down 80% since this video.
    1
  210. Owning a business isn’t likely to make you rich. I’ll pull from an article in Entrepreneur magazine, so you know I’m not data mining to make business ownership look bad. According to them and the AmEx study they cited: - Median individual income in the US for 2017 was around $52,000 and median household income was $62,000. - Median entrepreneurial income at the same time was $68,000 per year. (“Will Entrepreneurship Make You Rich? A Realistic Perspective” by Dan Bova, May 8, 2017) It’s an honest living, above average even. But the fact that the wealthiest people are mostly business owners doesn’t mean most business owners become wealthy.
    1
  211. Even if that cashier with $10,000 actually did somehow 100x it overnight, that’s not “retire at 25” money, and certainly not “casually shopping for another Bulgari” money like you see in the sales pitch videos. It’s more like “supplemental income so I can stop doing gig work after my regular job” money.
    1
  212.  @factorfitness3713 Buffett has repeatedly said he doesn’t invest in companies he doesn’t understand. That’s one thing that annoys me about the crypto community, they’ll mock people for not investing because they don’t understand the tech, but that’s the correct response. Sure, learn more if you’re on the fence, but there’s plenty of time for that. If someone had invested in Microsoft in 2015, twenty years after Windows became a household name, they’d be up 500% or more.
    1
  213.  @jo2305 Exactly, people are confusing pain relief with happiness. The first is important for sure and can free up resources toward pursuing the second, but they’re not the same. Research on what brings happiness typically finds the same few things: meaningful relationships, helping others, and having a sense of purpose to your life. A certain amount of money can help with that; if you’re working 60+ hours a week just to get by, you won’t have much time for relationships or helping others, and those jobs may not align with your purpose, they just pay the bills. So yeah, get that person a basic income or a living wage and they probably would be happier. Beyond that though, it tapers off. Going from a salary of $50K to $100K a year helps somewhat, but $100K to $1M a year doesn’t. Once you’ve removed the obstacles to pursuing happiness, money doesn’t help much. In fact some people horseshoe around to where they’re working such long hours that they have no time for relationships.
    1
  214. That’s the point of this video, it’s not about Wood or ARK. Peter Lynch had a legendary run as the manager of the Fidelity Magellan Fund. He averaged 29% annual returns over his 13 years, double the S&P’s growth rate during that span. He only had two calendar years with negative returns, 1984 and 1987 (and you can hardly blame him for 1987). Even so, the median investor in the Magellan Fund during that period lost money. They didn’t just lag the market, they had negative returns in one of the most impressive actively-managed funds ever. How? Exactly what Patrick talks about, buying when the market is hottest and bailing when it cools off.
    1
  215. They can now, that wasn't as widely available when this video was made. My brokerage will sell as little as 0.001 of a share or $0.01, whichever is more (For example as of late 2023, Chipotle sells for about $2,300 per share, meaning 0.001 shares would be $2.30. They wouldn't let me buy $1 of Chipotle because that would round down to zero.)
    1
  216. Prompt engineering is super important. It’s getting attention now as more companies roll out AI assistants, but already in organizations that depend on Decision Support Systems there are employees whose whole job is to help users ask good questions.
    1
  217. Also, if the softwares work as well as she says, why would people bail before the two years? By the end of a month they’ll have almost doubled their money and be super excited to keep going.
    1
  218. I suspect some of it is also our perception of investment and wealth building. We think of it as picking that one elusive company that goes 🚀 and makes us instantly wealthy, as opposed to the more reliable but less exciting approach of getting decent returns over a long timeline.
    1
  219. What I love about Krohn’s video is that if you’re paying any attention he contradicts himself. He says both that “you can’t save it, you can’t invest it” and that “it’s on the roller coaster of the stock market.”
    1
  220.  @masi9044 Sure, large caps are part of the total market, in fact they’re the largest part. But ITOT, VTI, or IWV also put about 20% toward small- and mid-caps. That provides a bjt of diversification, and if that small-cap premium comes back investors will benefit. VT takes this a step further and expands globally with a floating market cap. The US is currently about 60% of global equity, so it’s 60% of the fund. The other 40% is spread across lots of other countries. Market cap weighting means the fund adjusts as the markets do, so if Brazil’s economy takes off it’ll automatically become a bigger part of the index.
    1
  221. I’d agree, with a couple of caveats: 1) Being a good host is also important, and some of this seems like a major imposition on the guests, like expecting everybody to ride bicycles to the reception. 2) Do they really like this stuff? Basically everything mentioned here was a trend in 2012-13, and the narration suggests a couple times that their quirkiness is just put on for show.
    1
  222. 0:11 Could we then turn that green Mars into a blue Mars?
    1
  223.  @briangasser973 That’s the general rule for covered call strategies, lower but steadier returns than the underlying. You can see this in basically all the “option strategy” ETFs like TSLY, NVDY, DISO, and JEPQ.
    1
  224. > keep doing whatever the hell it was I did to earn $100,000 But that involved working and earning a paycheck. If there’s one thing passive-income folks stand for, it’s to exit the workforce as soon as possible.
    1
  225. ⁠​⁠ @saeedhossain6099 Rich Dad, Poor Dad literally recommends insider trading. He says to ask rich friends for stock tips based on non-public information because “That’s what friends are for.”
    1
  226. That was a smooth segue at the end.
    1
  227.  @bigboot6139 Mathematically, it mainly comes down to your interest rate on the mortgage and what you can earn in the market, both after any tax effects. I’ll use myself as an example: my mortgage charges a fixed 5% and isn’t big enough to provide any tax benefit. My investments have historically grown 10% per year and I’d pay 15% tax on capital gains, so I’m effectively earning (.10 * (1 - .15)) = 8.5%. That means that by letting my investments ride rather than paying the mortgage down earlier, I’m netting about 3.5% on that invested balance. (On average, it’ll vary wildly by year and the future could be different from the past.) There are intangibles to consider though. Owning the house free and clear may not be the most mathematically ideal choice, but it would sure help me sleep better at night. Not having a mortgage would also lower my income needs, so it’s still an important contributor to financial independence and retirement planning.
    1
  228. To die at His hand is ecstasy.
    1
  229. Ponzis are great as long as you’re early (which of course they’ll say you are) and you don’t mind knowing that your gains came at someone else’s expense.
    1
  230. Agreed, the spread thing really depends on the company (and it happens anywhere, not just zero-commission brokers). As our host said, the more heavily traded a given security is, the smaller that spread will be. At the end of business Dec. 22, 2023 I’m seeing a bid-ask spread of 0.06% on Microsoft but 2.5% for Synchrony Financial (a mid-cap bank best known for doing the behind-the-scenes work for retail financing, those “no interest for 12 months” promos.) Overall the spreads aren’t too bad. I’ve automated my stock purchases so they happen every two weeks, and on that day I can expect to lag the market by a quarter percent. So for each $400 I invest I’d pay $1 in spreads. I’ll take that any day over $7 per trade like in the dot-com days or 2% minimum like in Wolf of Wall Street .
    1
  231. Yes, but that advisor will say something boring like paying off your debts and investing over time. These gurus will tell you how to become a multimillionaire in a year.
    1
  232. 11:23 This doesn’t surprise me at all. HOAs can be a pain for sure, especially when they get to nitpicking over lawn ornaments or whatever*. This is what they’re meant for though; they’re a channel for neighbors to resolve grievances peacefully and to hold disruptive neighbors accountable. 8:50 I’m glad you mention this. People are hearing to avoid AirBnBs so they stay off that particular site, but those same properties are being listed elsewhere. It’s not AirBnB alone, nor even short-term rentals alone (those do have their use cases), it’s more about the gold rush mentality. * I would say though that a good half the time the homeowner’s entire case is “I should be the exception.”
    1
  233. Reminds me of a cutting edge tech firm out of the Midwest that I just invested with.
    1
  234. 4:47 So I’m one of those postal owls dropping a letter down the chimney?
    1
  235. Sure, but is starting a business any more certain? Even the stats passed around by entrepreneurs say 7.5% of businesses fail each year, with the first year higher at 12.5%. A company or industry laying off 7% of their workforce is seen as severe (that was the tech layoffs of 2023). If layoffs reach 10% that’s crisis management (Boeing 2024-25). And of course those don’t happen every year; nationwide the only time we’ve had more than 2% of the population laid off was Q2 2020, and you probably remember what happened then. If you think you’ll beat the odds, or at least that you’ll enjoy the process whether it pays off or not, great. I’m not here to discourage you. I’m saying that the people who promote business ownership as easy, lucrative, and safer than a W-2 job are full of it.
    1
  236. I think a lot of people would have been interested to understand how an IPO works. For a lot of people it just means some kind of automatic windfall for the people who (work at? manage? founded?) a startup.
    1
  237. He’s not, in fact he uses them himself in other videos. It’s just that people overcomplicate things. Of course TikTok is somewhat to blame for this because a video saying “here’s what a put does and when to use it” doesn’t get as much attention as “here’s a strategy you haven’t heard of before, it requires four legs, but don’t worry because it’s basically free money!”
    1
  238. Regarding pitch decks and use cases, if you intend to hold your stocks for 5+ years, TA doesn’t terribly matter because any timing advantage gets dwarfed by compounding. Let’s say you bought into Microsoft at some point in 2018. At the close of the day 2023-12-13, MSFT was $374.37. - The lowest price all year was $83.83 on Feb 9, 2018. If you’d bought there you’d be sitting on a 347% return, about 29% annualized. - The highest price all year was $116.18 on October 10, 2018. If you’d bought there you’d be sitting on a 222% return, about 25% annualized. - If you’d dollar-cost averaged, buying equal amounts at the opening price on the first trading day of each month, unsurprisingly you’d wind up right in the middle: $99.95 average cost basis, 275% gain, ~27% annualized. Granted, some of these did better than others, so you if you have time to look for good entry points you may be able to juice your returns a little bit. That’s what I do, I see if theres a chance I can get a better price and set a limit order for that price. The more important thing though is there were no wrong answers. You may kick yourself for buying at $116 when a couple months later the price was down to $95 (assuming you even notice, which is a point in favor of dollar-cost-average and chill) but everybody did well in the long term. (See also: Bob, the world’s worst market timer.)
    1
  239. מזל טוב!
    1
  240. I also think people take ESG ratings to mean more than they do. Nestle is constantly in the news for problems ranging from price fixing to child labor, but they get good ESG ratings for having strong internal controls and independent board oversight. Likewise, Social grades for a company aren’t necessarily about the executives’ demographics or whether the company supports certain causes, but how responsive they are to changes in customer wishes; Monster Energy’s latest MSCI report mentioned that they haven’t been as forthcoming with sugar-free flavors as other beverage companies. I know this goes against the desire for an easy indicator of “greenness”, but rather than trust an agency’s assessment of ESG one could also look into direct indexing. Essentially the investor picks an index and makes exclusions or modifications within certain limits (for example maybe they want the S&P 1500 but without tobacco companies). The result is sort of like having their own customized ETF: contributions can be allocated out automatically across the companies, even when that means tiny fractions of shares, but also the investor owns the shares directly, which can be important for things like tax optimization and voting rights. Also also, lots of companies are a mixed bag ESG-wise. I hold a few energy companies that are busily transitioning to renewables, but in the meantime still trade in coal & gas power. Is that green enough? Depends on your personal values.
    1
  241. I find the Lamborghini stuff off-putting. It screams “salesman.” I’d be content, and I think a lot of others would be too, just being able to work on their own terms: part-time, self-employed, or just having enough of a cushion to take some time off between jobs. I’ve read about executives taking a “sabbatical” to travel or study and how that reenergized them for the rest of their careers. I think that would be amazing.
    1
  242. We probably will need to reframe our notion of retirement. Personally, my goal isn’t to stop working entirely, just to be able to work on my own terms. Let’s say I get $1,000,000 saved up, giving me a $40,000 baseline income. With that in place I could get by on part-time or seasonal work.
    1
  243. I can't find the exact quote, but I believe Lincoln requested that if we must put his face on a coin, let it be the coin of least consequence and greatest inconvenience to the Union. Of course, if we've replaced Mercury and Liberty with Roosevelt and Kennedy, why couldn't we bump Lincoln into the dime (FDR's nice and all, but we gotta cut somebody) and Jefferson onto a dollar coin?
    1
  244. 8:23 Many cultures figured this out on their own. In the Bible there are several mentions of the oldest son having (and sometimes losing) the right to twice the inheritance that his siblings would get. Another place you can see this division of resources is farmland. Sometimes you’ll see it arranged in thin strips. This happens because long ago someone had a big parcel where one side faced the road or a river, then when they passed it got split up. It wouldn’t be much of a farm without access to that road or river, so they kept slicing the land thinner.
    1
  245.  @Wistbacka  She’s also conflating deposits with investment returns. Tesla’s best-ever year was about a 750% gain, which is fantastic but wouldn’t turn $200 into $29,000.
    1
  246. I see it the other way around: mining provides a profit motive to build renewables, which of course is how anything gets done anymore. But also that profit motive depends on us caring enough about crypto to keep the price propped up for however many years.
    1
  247. Hadn’t made that ten mill yet.
    1
  248. Exactly, that’s what Mr. Boyle cautions us about with the caviar example. Some of this is effect rather than cause. People who have money can invest it, creating a second stream of income. People who can outsource chores have time to volunteer. That said, volunteering can be good for your career, especially the way executives do. They’re not scooping litter boxes at the animal shelter, they’re on committees with other executives.
    1
  249. They don’t even need to be limited to their own money. ARK Investments charges 0.75% of assets per year, so for every billion dollars they can get people to invest they collect $7,500,000 in fees. If an investment manager can demonstrate better than average performance for even a short while, like ARK did in 2020-2021, investors will flock to them and their cut will multiply. Why are they instead selling YouTube courses for $500 each? (Their answer is usually something about standing up for the little guy, but if they cared about that they’d charge a percentage too, so any rich people who want in have to pay more.)
    1
  250. Oh yeah, they know you’re suspicious, probably been burned before, so they throw something like that out to reassure you. “This is not a get rich quick scheme. Now here’s how I make $10,000 a month with no investment or skills.”
    1
  251.  @JRRob3wn In Rich Dad he straight-up advises making successful friends and asking them for insider information. For reference, Martha Stewart went to prison for using third-hand insider information. The ImClone insider and her used the same broker, and the broker said “Hey this guy’s selling, maybe you should too.”
    1
  252. Brian Hugh O’Neill. You’ve probably seen him around, he’s done a bunch of one-episode TV appearances.
    1
  253. She said it would be okay!
    1
  254. Oversharing too, e.g., "It's not just you, LinkedIn has gotten really weird.", Business Insider, 9/25/22.
    1
  255. 5:00 (Technical analysis of a fake stock chart) - If the reviews were consistent it at least suggests there’s a method to TA, and it could just be that the coin flips happened to randomly create a pattern they’d see as bullish. I think the real gotcha would be if different analysts all gave different reviews, indicating they’re just seeing what they want to see. An example would be the NOVA system that’s supposed to help classify foods as more or less heavily processed. There have been studies where researchers asked trained professionals to rate various foods and there was very little consistency to their responses. That’s the kind of result that tells you a metric is arbitrary or so vague as to be unhelpful.
    1
  256. Totally, that’s why Wirecard, WeWork, and arguably Tesla insist on being valued as tech companies rather than something more boring and concrete. They can be valued on lines of business they haven’t even started yet.
    1
  257. He uses various pieces from Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.” Mostly the first couple tracks: Peter in the Meadow, The Bird, and The Duck. There’s also “Tequila” by The Champs when it’s raining money.
    1
  258. 1:30 There’s been some research on stock splits and how it affects the company’s value, and the average rally is like 5%. Of course the folks on Wall Street know this already, so the second the split gets announced they buy in, so…
    1
  259. 6:29 She’s kind of telling on herself here because her number one pick is up 245%. Nice, but not nearly enough to go from a few hundred dollars to millions. So either she’s been doing rapid-fire trading with her one hour a week and gotten extremely lucky, or she’s conflating deposits with gains.
    1
  260. “Bombardments and impacts might become common.” On what, our Mars base?
    1
  261. 13:34 I’m glad you mention this, but I’d take it a step further. What I see in finance social media is kind of a self-fulfilling version of the vanishing middle class. According to these gurus it’s not good enough to save up and build a comfortable life over 30 years. The goal is to get rich quick. Like absurdly rich, casually buying another sports car rich.
    1
  262. Even if you just have a hypothesis that sounds good you could invest other people’s money and take a percentage. Half a percent on a $100M fund is $500K per year.
    1
  263. 4:41 “There are no ethical billionaires. Also I want to be a billionaire.”
    1
  264. 9:30 There’s a scene in The Big Short that’s basically about this. Larry Fields comes into Dr. Burry’s office to talk about the huge premiums he’s paying on his swaps. Burry defends his decision by saying “I may be early but I’m not wrong,” and Fields responds that early is just as bad. That’s typically how leveraged positions work: you can’t just be right, you have to be right enough soon enough.
    1
  265. To some extent yes, and originally it was. You had bits of thousands of mortgages from people all over the country. A downturn in certain cities or industries might spark some defaults, but it would take something big to cause people everywhere to default all at once. The diversification decayed ovee time because risk-averse investors stuck to the higher-rated tiers and the banks made “seafood stew” with the rest. Also of course the quality of the incoming mortgages was getting worse once the easy loans had already been made. That’s where the rating agencies failed to do their jobs.
    1
  266. Personally I like a lighter hand with legislation and penalties because that runs the risk of arbitrary enforcement. That said, I’d make a terrible social media guru because I’d want to give more nuanced opinions and clarify that they’re just my opinions. I couldn’t just shout “if you want to get rich in 2024, buy these five stonks now.”
    1
  267. Social media in general tends toward self-promotion and self-congratulation, but on LinkedIn everyone’s doing it in the same direction, bragging about how disciplined they are and how much they love work. And of course they do that because they’re thinking about their next job: a promotion, more clients, a new gig as an influencer, or whatever else.
    1
  268. I’d love for my current job to become redundant. That would mean that behavioral health services could get enough money to keep the doors open without begging the state for grants or navigating dozens of insurance bureaucracies.
    1
  269. Congrats, but six months isn’t a very long track record. Maybe you do have a winning strategy, maybe you were just in the right place at the right time.
    1
  270. Say what you want about the person who invented parks, but I had a highly reactive dog who couldn’t be around anybody but me. Public spaces were a whirlwind of threats and it was just a matter of time until she would have hurt somebody and gotten taken away. Renting out a private space was how she got her exercise.
    1
  271. Exactly why they wanted to be seen as a tech company. With old-economy businesses there’s an identifiable point where you should be breaking even. For these “disruptive” companies you just keep throwing money at it until it somehow becomes profitable.
    1
  272.  @guitardadsinc Also men’s fashion.
    1
  273. Why wouldn't it track the asset price? That's how it works for other commodity funds. Only rarely and briefly does GLD get more than 1% off its net asset value. This happens pretty much on its own; if the price varies too much from the underlying, some investment analyst notices and buys or sells until that gap disappears. With heavily traded funds there are people and algorithms that'll intervene if there's even a nickel of profit to be made. In fact, these ETFs should track BTC better than prior solutions. because they hold exactly one asset: Bitcoin. Prior solutions like GBTC before this change or BITW (a top-10-coin index) used futures and swaps as a proxy for holding Bitcoin. Why buy a fund at all? - For someone who keeps their own wallet and doesn't trade often, no reason. In fact it may be preferable because you're cutting out intermediaries. - For someone who's been keeping their coins on an exchange, trust. If I held BITB (or any of the others) in a Schwab account and Schwab collapsed tomorrow, the SIPC would ensure that my BITB holdings get transferred to another brokerage. Compare that with FTX, where as far as we know the money's just gone. - For those who do trade regularly, cost. Even on day 1 of these funds, the spread was about 0.5%. Over time I'd expect that to drop to 0.1% or less for trades (on blue-chip stocks the spread is usually a penny or less per share). That plus 0.25% per year is cheaper than Coinbase in many cases*. - Probably the biggest reason is retirement accounts. Workplace retirement plans (about $7 trillion total) generally haven't had a mechanism by which employees could hold crypto, and now they do. * Don't worry too much about Coinbase; as long as their fees are denominated in crypto, anything that's good for the currencies is good for them.
    1
  274. 5:41 And that’s exactly why I don’t like the jerky double zoom-in (example: episode 1 when Ken goes into the bathroom). It’s a distinctly “camera” thing to which I have no mental analogue.
    1
  275. Why would they? Interstellar space is huge, and who wants to be the middle part of a generation ship?
    1
  276. “Because I’m passionate about helping ordinary people achieve financial freedom.”
    1
  277. Short answer, it’s legal because we haven’t made it illegal. Slimy, sure, but legal until someone identifies the problem and we work up the political will to get a law passed. Probably by replacing some people, which unfortunately voters are hesitant to do because seniority is a big part of how Congress organizes itself.
    1
  278. Big thing is search engine optimization. Search algorithms rank short stubby pages lower than longer-form content because for most of the things people search, short pages aren’t as useful. The algorithm also notes how much of the article the visitor reads. If the author put the recipe on top and the photo essay underneath they’d get penalized in the search rankings. And if you’re not on the first page of search results your page may as well not exist. Why does the search engine company care if you find the results useful? Even if they don’t serve ads on the receiving pages (which they often do) useful results keep you coming back to them instead of a competing engine. Another reason for the photo essays (that most people don’t care about) is that this usually is somebody’s blog. Even without the SEO concerns some authors would write those photo essays for the sake of self-expression or sharing with their community. You’d be surprised how many parents actually read other parents’ cooking or cleaning blogs. Not just because they want to know how to cook biryani or get gum out of carpet, but because they’ve connected with the author and other commenters.
    1
  279. 2:45 That 'ask' joke is awful, I love it.
    1
  280. Fascinating👨🏻‍🔬
    1
  281. Maybe it’s just because I’m old, but direct-to-consumer advertising for a stock strikes me as suspicious to begin with. In my day they’d at least hide it a little bit by framing it as a softball cable-TV interview with the CEO.
    1
  282. It’s standard WallStreetBets terminology. Gotta throw it in whenever possible.
    1
  283. They usually have an excuse for that. They don’t need the money, they just “want to empower everyday investors to achieve their dreams.”
    1
  284. Ma’am, that is some very aggressive spelling. If you insist on communicating such ideas, I’d prefer that you do so through mime.
    1
  285. Yep. I also learned that Kal Penn shares that birthdate. But you don't have to take my word for it. I'm about that age too, and I see that physical disparity in my peers. Early forties can mean a lot of things depending on genetics, circumstances, lifestyle, and sometimes just presentation. I know guys from the gym who can squat 300 lbs (135kg) but you wouldn't know by looking at them. They train for strength rather than mass and they don't dress to show off their muscles.
    1
  286. 3:15 Did dude just livestream a pump & dump?
    1
  287. According to the SEC, only three of the Seven are tech companies. - Amazon is Consumer Discretionary because of their retail operations, - Meta and Alphabet are Communications Services because of advertising, and - Tesla’s an Industrial like other automakers.
    1
  288. 9:20 side note, there’ve been some people working on the problem of how to properly label those waste burial sites to warn people about what’s inside. As much as language has changed in the last 500 years, imagine how different it could be over the next 10,000. Also, what media do we use? Will anything physical survive that long, or might we be better off starting some kind of oral tradition?
    1
  289. 10:40 At least in my school district, personal finance was a required topic. That was mostly about setting expectations, what banking products are and do, and how to make a household budget. Trouble is, what can you really teach high schoolers about the stock market? In our case it was what a stock is (partial ownership in a company) why we care (high returns but with higher risk and volatility) and how to read stock quotes (what Volume and Market Cap mean). Trouble is, what more can you teach teenagers? It’s probably not that relevant to most of them and won’t be for several years, especially once you dash their hopes of getting rich quick. Likewise, if they’re expecting advice for how to pick winning stocks… there’s an entire industry of people trying to do that and even with their resources they’re only doing an okay job of that.
    1
  290. The point isn’t just to avoid getting acquired, but to avoid getting acquired by someone who’s going to turn everything upside-down. The “corporate raiders” of the 1980s were famous for this: they’d buy a company, break it up, and sell the parts for a profit. If a sale is inevitable, hopefully you can sell to someone who’ll at least let the company live.
    1
  291. Is that a Powers of Ten reference at 10:10?
    1
  292. Paper trading is a good start, but it still can’t capture the emotional angle when one of your picks gets hammered. I’m writing this in late 2023 which has been a very positive year overall, and I’ve still had several 5-10% drops in a day. - Solar companies that can’t add capacity as quickly because of higher interest rates. - A tech company that reported they “only” expected 18% growth next year instead of the 24% people were expecting. - A retailer whose stock fell because a competitor’s press release got investors spooked about the industry. And then there are industries like biotech where companies could live or die based on a single regulatory hearing.
    1
  293. Maybe the feds are different, but from what I’ve seen of state and local government there wasn’t all that much that could objectively be called waste. It’s more about values and hypotheticals: Does this program really help people? Does this job deserve that salary? Do the fraud-fighting measures cost more than the fraud they prevent? And so forth.
    1
  294. 0:45 Be careful with making your hobby into a job. The sense of obligation can suck the fun right out of it, and then how do you unwind?
    1
  295. Personally, I think it's fine to like NatGeo and dislike Fox News if that's your thing. The most important take-away (I believe) is that the purpose of any campaign is to make you do something. What do they want you to do? Dove doesn't care whether your comfortable with your body; they want you to think, "These people understand me. Buying from them makes me feel like I'm supporting something positive," and then follow through on that thought.
    1
  296. It’s just visibility bias, same reason people think airplane travel is dangerous. The media focus on the EV fires because they’re shocking and will attract eyeballs. Fires are far less common with electric cars than gas: «Australia’s Department of Defence funded EV FireSafe to look into the question. It found there was a 0.0012% chance of a passenger electric vehicle battery catching fire, compared with a 0.1% chance for internal combustion engine cars. (The Home Office said it was unable to provide data for the UK.)» «Elon Musk’s Tesla is the world’s biggest maker of electric cars. It says the number of fires on US roads involving Teslas from 2012 to 2021 was 11 times lower per mile than the figure for all cars, the vast majority of which have petrol or diesel engines.» — Jasper Jolly, “Do electric cars pose a greater fire risk than petrol or diesel vehicles?”, The Guardian, 20 Nov 2024
    1
  297. Each Doctor has regarded his passing has a sense of finality, but I think we're in an interesting situation now because The Doctor no longer knows how many regenerations she has left. I'm sure the older Doctors knew they could be killed entirely like in "The Impossible Astronaut", but they at least knew that if all went well they'd come back (or conversely, Eleven knew he wouldn't and was able to plan accordingly.) We just don't know now; from the Doctor's perspective, any death could be the last. How will that change the Doctor? Would Thirteen sacrifice herself like Ten did, knowing that this could be once and for all?
    1
  298. Hedge funds are a great example of this. They have a reputation of being super aggressive and pursuing growth at all costs, but for the most part they’re defensive investments. A market-neutral fund’s benchmark typically isn’t the S&P, it’s Treasury bills.
    1
  299. 4:07 Tangent, but this also relates to the psychology behind false confessions to crimes. If the suspect has never had reason to mistrust the justice system, they may confess to a crime just to get out of the interrogation room. In research and case studies confessors have reported that they believed that something else would kick in, the truth would come out, and it would set them free. Unfortunately that’s not how it works. When someone confesses, both police and juries believe it. Unless someone really pushes them to, they don’t consider whether the confession is forced or inconsistent, or how their story may contradict other facts of the case. We’re social creatures, so when someone tells us themselves what happened, especially when it’s unflattering, why not believe it?
    1
  300. Maybe I am just along for the ride, but I’m glad to be here.
    1
  301. 2:46 So they sell your data and you get a cut? Revolutionary!
    1
  302. I’m gonna guess the real purpose of that Fidelity letter is to let seniors know their kid’s stealing their money.
    1
  303. Nah, those years he would have said it’s 12-15%. This is a thing, some guy wrote a blog claiming the BLS changed the CPI formula in the 80s (true) specifically to understate the inflation rate (questionable) by a huge margin (false, it’s a fraction of a percent difference). It persists in crypto circles because it tells them something they want to believe.
    1
  304. Yeah, and if you go back further even retail traders were expected to trade in lots of 100 shares. A starter position in IBM forty years ago would have required something like $12,000.
    1
  305. I was wondering about that. If it's a 5% confidence interval and there are 252 trading days in a year, the consequences for occasionally going outside the lines must not be that severe.
    1
  306. It’s a trick, send no reply.
    1
  307. 3:20 So we live on a giant Spirograph?
    1
  308. I suspect one of the roots of this hype is the assumption that wealthy people have access to secret or gatekept asset classes that produce enormous returns. Aside from being an early investor in a company that happened to wildly succeed, that’s not the case. Their rate of return is probably lower than you’re getting from the S&P, it’s more about their ability to invest a huge share of their huge income.
    1
  309. Given the opportunity. I will always wear a funny hat.
    1
  310. 7:10 Don’t Physicist Open Inside.
    1
  311. Is that how he normally sounds? I’m getting a digital-distortion thing here. I thought Coffee was going to say it’s a deepfake.
    1
  312. 1:16 I suspect this is part of why dark pools are regarded so skeptically. The big boys have access and we don’t, therefore it must be something that benefits them and hurts us. It can’t just be a convenience or cost savings, it has to be some shady back room where the collusion happens.
    1
  313. Both are good. The key traits your emergency fund should have are liquidity and stability. Could you access that money quickly if you needed to, and is there a chance it'll drop in value right when you need it most? The tradeoff is that money market funds tend to pay a slightly higher rate than high-yield savings accounts, but they're not insured by the FDIC, CDIC, NCUA, or anybody like that. That means there's the possibility of your investment losing money, though that's very low if you're working with established companies and they're buying safe investments like US treasuries. (There is SIPC insurance, but that only covers things like the brokerage itself becoming insolvent. If your fund manager decides treasuries are boring and YOLOs your money into Gamestop options, that'll probably have to go through the courts.)
    1
  314. 2:33 Isn’t that what inexperienced investors have always done? Warren Buffett has said that about his own beginnings, where he saw a stock as a thing that went up and down rather than anything to do with a company.
    1
  315. ​ @vegbeg9170  Even today the major networks are filled with advertising. A primetime half-hour sitcom in the US these days is 18-21 minutes of show and 9-12 of ads. That's up to 40% ads. See also: "Fast forward: Networks speed up TV shows to play more ads" (2015) on CBS News, or "CBS's Mom has an ingenious solution to TV sitcoms' biggest problem" (2016) on Vox, where they compare the runtimes of the sitcoms "Cheers", "Friends", and "Mom" to illustrate how sitcoms have gotten more compressed.
    1
  316. Tangent to my other comment: Advertising during NFL games often gets called out, but there's a bit of a mitigating factor there. The contract between the network and the league specifies something like 10 ad breaks per half, and the networks front-load those ad breaks so they don't have to be wedged in at crucial moments, which tend to be toward the end of each half. So yes, you are seeing kickoff - ads - 3 & out - ads - touchdown - ads, but what you may have noticed is where they didn't take an ad break during a two-minute drill.
    1
  317. I had a dog who was incredibly anxious and reactive. She couldn’t be around other people, dogs, basically anybody but me. A public park wouldn’t cut it; she needed a private space to play. Without rentable yards and similar play spaces, it would have been really difficult to give her the exercise she needed.
    1
  318.  @shane_rm1025 That would be negative correlation. Uncorrelated would be like a savings account or T-bills. The market could be +30% or -30% and those T-bills are chugging along doing their own thing. Which is kind of the point. Hedge funds can be volatile but they’re probably not swinging up and down in sync with the market. As long as you’re not keeping all your money there (university endowments keep about a quarter of their assets in hedge funds) you’re unlikely to have a situation where all your investments suddenly lose half their value.
    1
  319. ⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠ @josejesuspalmerin8554 ​​⁠Top 4 or top 10 would have made sense in this context because there are generally-understood tiers of auditing firms. The top 4 are worldwide and have $30-70B in revenues. The next six are still multinational but not everywhere , and their total billings are more like $3-8B each; it’s a big drop off. After that it does get blurry because there’s not much difference between the 11th and 15th, but that just testifies to what our host said: if they felt a need to specify Top 12 it almost certainly means they didn’t make the cut for Top 10.
    1
  320. Crypto tries to replicate this when people lose their keys, but it’s just not the same. America needs the hole.
    1
  321. True, there are three essential elements to fraud: 1. They lied about something important 2. You trusted them 3. You were harmed as a result. At this point all Ozy have done is wasted Goldman’s time and tanked their own reputation. What I find ridiculous is that short of outright fraud or something else that makes their name toxic to everything they touch, these people will all fail upward. Even an abject failure of a CEO is more valuable in the market than someone who’s never been a CEO.
    1
  322. 6:10 Second sleep often gets misrepresented (not here, elsewhere) as if it were universal, like that’s the way we were meant to sleep and industrialization took that from us. That’s not the whole story. Whether people slept in one or two phases was more a function of what people had going on. If they were up late planting crops or out partying with friends they’d just have the one sleep. Biphasic sleep was more for days when they didn’t have anything going on so they may as well take a nap.
    1
  323.  @GhostlyNomad130 Semi-retirement is pretty much what it sounds like: you get some level of income, maybe not enough to live off of entirely but enough that you don’t have to work a “normal” job. Instead you can dial back to part-time or seasonal work. Sometimes it works the other way around, people go back to working out of economic necessity, but for others it’s a way to “downshift” to a less stressful life. Not everybody hates working in and of itself. UBI experiments and workplace survey suggest many people like work; it’s a good outlet for their talents or a way to contribute to society. What sours the deal is the obligation of it all, the idea that they have to put in 40-plus hours a week 50 weeks a year for 40 years, basically nonstop, or else risk a swift descent into homelessness. Semi-retirement is essentially being able to work on your own terms. I knew some Silicon Valley guys who did that. Not the folks who got IPO windfalls, but regular programmers and designers. They’d grind for ten years and live as cheaply as possible, saving up half a million dollars or whatever. Then they’d move somewhere cheaper like Oregon (cheaper relative to Silicon Valley, of course). They could partly live off their nest egg, supplementing it with a couple days a week working at a coffee shop. Or maybe they’d keep programming but as a contractor, only taking as many gigs as they felt like. That leaves plenty of time to put toward parenting or hobbies.
    1
  324. A few minutes later
    1
  325. Exactly. If you have no edge, why bother? When the house has an edge, on average the longer you play the more you’ll lose.
    1
  326. 9:27 What dude fails to mention is that on that day (Nov 4 2022) DBGI stock underwent a 1:100 split. That means that if on November 3 you had 100 shares worth $0.07 each ($7.00 total), on November 4 that would change to 1 share worth $7.00. The total value of your ownership stake didn’t change. He’s taking advantage of the fact that Google’s stock market display doesn’t immediately catch on to this stuff, at least not for penny stocks. Eventually it’ll retroactively adjust prices to reflect the split, but at the moment it just knows yesterday closed at $0.07 and today closed at $7.00.
    1
  327. I’d also recommend the Whitehall Studies. They looked at British government workers (to normalize for workplace hazards and access to healthcare), and found that higher-income workers lived longer. One of their hypotheses was that higher-income workers (often being higher-ranking too) generally had more of a sense of control over their lives. You can call that happiness, but I’d say it’s more like stress relief. On the low end, just getting up to a living wage means you don’t have to do without necessities (pretty much by definition). Above that you can get out of debt and save for emergencies, which take a further load off. Then you get the nice-to-haves like a proper vacation. So it totally makes sense that there would be diminishing returns in that respect. The research on happiness finds that the same few things matter: meaningful personal connections and a sense that they’re doing something meaningful with their life. Money can’t buy that, it’s more a matter of having enough money to remove the obstacles.
    1
  328. Not that I expect Grant Cardone to be consistent, but commercial leases are often structured for quarterly payments. The reason apartment rent is almost always monthly is because your landlord doesn’t trust you. (And in many cases because they’re leveraged up to their necks and relying on you to pay their bills.)
    1
  329. 14:08 When a business advertises itself as “the Netflix of [unrelated industry]” I pretty much immediately lose interest.
    1
  330. Dude literally just repeated what his meditation instructor said: notice the urge and let it pass.
    1
  331. That’s one thing that’s always bugged me: if he vocally identifies himself as “Cyberdyne Systems Model 101” why do we call him the T-800? I know his HUD shows “Series 800” later on, but that shouldn’t override what he tells us he is.
    1
  332. I appreciate your concern Mr. Boyle, but there are people out there making hour-long videos about the mechanics of 35+ year old video games. If it’s quality, people will watch. Also, were there seriously no ad breaks for this whole thing? Or was that just me?
    1
  333. One thing I’d add here is that while index funds provide market-average returns, that’s way better than most individual investors get following a do-it-themselves approach. If someone doesn’t take the time to learn about the market and develop a solid plan, they’re very likely to buy on hype and sell due to fear. Why is this important? In 2022 Amazon saw a 50% drop in their stock price, but by the end of 2023 when I’m writing this they’ve pretty much recovered. If someone saw the drop and sold their shares, they’d wind up taking a loss. Suppose instead they’d kept their head, reassessed whether they still believed in the company long-term. If they did, they could hold on and recover their money, or even buy more shares at the cheaper price and make some money as the stock recovered. Anyway, index investing. If that appeals to you, a next step might be to look up the “three-fund portfolio” or the broader idea of the “lazy portfolio.” It’s not specific funds so much as a concept: pick a handful of funds representing different asset classes — just an example, but let’s say one for US stocks, one for foreign stocks, one for bonds, and one for real estate — and allocate your money across those according to your risk tolerance. From there you can just keep depositing and maybe check in every few months or even years to see if it needs rebalancing.
    1
  334.  @gagaplex The “Norfolk Four” are another example of these sketchy confessions. The cops are allowed to lie, badger, and threaten a suspect* to get a confession out of them. As long as it’s not direct “sign this or I will punch you” coercion, it’s admissible in court. And as the Norfolk cases demonstrate, once you’ve confessed it doesn’t matter how much hard evidence there is to the contrary, you’re boned.
    1
  335. 1:55 I don’t think our friend has considered how long he’d need to repeat his strategy. If you want a $40,000 salary* and you’re holding stocks that pay 4% (plenty of banks and utilities do) you’d need $1,000,000 of principal. The dividend stock will also appreciate a bit, but he’s going to have to repeat this process of casually doubling his “risky” investment hundreds of times. * which would be equivalent to a slightly higher worked income because qualified dividends get preferential tax rates.
    1
  336. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”
    1
  337. Guten Tag, schön Sie kennzulernen.
    1
  338. 6:20 Rewatching this I’m realizing the “buy a mansion with crypto” kid was expecting the Anchor Protocol’s rate to last for the entirety of his 30 year mortgage. That was always intended to be a promotional rate to encourage UST adoption. That should be fairly obvious when the rate earned on more established currencies is about on par with a savings account (as of early 2024 staking ETH pays about 3% per year).
    1
  339. Who cuts a watermelon like that?
    1
  340. It can vary by employer. Typically your agreement with them (your contract or incentive program documents) will specify how you earn the options (the “vesting” period or requirements), what the strike price and expiration date are, and how to execute the options (for example: Do you buy the shares directly from the company or on the open market? Do you have to come up with enough cash to cover the strike price, or do you just give the order and they’ll exercise the options for you?) And of course they’ll always be call options because the point is to align incentives. If you help them be profitable and increase their share price, you get paid more.
    1
  341. Publicity. If they shout you out on social media or a picture gets published of them using your product, that’s great exposure.
    1
  342. Better days are just around the corner. 🙏
    1
  343. Trouble is, what do you teach the kids (class time is limited after all) and will they listen? Dan Clark (“Nitro” from the original American Gladiators ) mentioned in his memoir that he gives speeches to high school athletes about the dangers of steroid abuse. It’s hard to get them to care about the consequences though: to a 15-year-old 30 is a lifetime away, so they don’t even think of that guy as the same person. Besides, who cares what happens to him? By 30 they’ve already done anything interesting they’ll ever do with their life. Poking around on social media, it doesn’t take long to see the same attitude with regard to investing: spend your money now while you’re young enough to enjoy it, because 60-year-olds are ancient, decrepit, and incapable of things like fun or growth.
    1
  344. Yep. Let’s take a company right in the middle of the NASDAQ-100, Constellation Energy Group (CEG). As of this writing (May 2024) average daily volume is around 2,000,000 and the share price is $220, so that’s $440,000,000 of shares changing hands every day. He could make a million dollar bet on this company and the share price would barely move.
    1
  345. ⁠ @midnightfun1277 I think that contributes to the popularity of apocalyptic media like The Walking Dead and so forth. It shows that in some respects it’s the top social tier, not the bottom, that depends the most on society’s support.
    1
  346. Yep, and that’s how a lot of Ponzis get going. The early investors really do make money that they can withdraw and have fun with, so they believe this is the real deal. That encourages them to invest more and to tell all their friends.
    1
  347.  @adj789 Also they wouldn’t have all bought on day 1. A new fund offering is similar to an IPO, they build up an initial supply of shares, contracts, or in this case beforehand. They have to, so they have something to sell to retail investors.
    1
  348. 8:38 His claim that “almost all models” showed Alabama affected is directly contradicted by the map he attached. Only the lines with markers (little squares and triangles) try to predict the storm’s path. Exactly zero of those lines touch Alabama. Those thin lines flying out every which way are for other data like temperature and atmospheric pressure. Even if you count those (which you shouldn’t), that’s three out of about thirty. To be fair to Mr. Trump (assuming there was some intention of truth), that map is meant for meteorologists; if I were going to talk to laymen about potential paths, I’d summarize it as a “cone” diagram like they do on the news.
    1
  349. True, but does the split cause or predict outperformance? Those shares got to be $2,000+ because Google’s been so successful, maybe Google just continued to be successful.
    1
  350. Doing it for views is crappy, but I will say sometimes coaching be like that. Some clients act like (and maybe honestly believe) a good enough coach will fix their problem for them without them having to do anything. That’s not how it works, so you have to set them straight, and maybe be a bit of a jerk in the process.
    1
  351. These days it would fit right in with Algospeak terms like “unalive”.
    1
  352. This doesn’t affect me, I have no expertise on the topic, and everything I know about Canada’s macro environment comes from a few minutes of reading headlines. Now here’s a 35-minute video where I express my opinions as facts.
    1
  353. This would have been… interesting to test during 2022. 😬
    1
  354.  @survivingthetimes Yep, I’m finding AMZN less and less useful these days. Even when I search a brand name the algorithm tries to persuade me to buy cheap junk instead.
    1
  355. And that’s not even new. In the 90s you could watch this happen with every website that wanted to be a business: - Offer useful service for free - Build customer base - Introduce subscription tier with perks - Remove popular features from free tier - Reintroduce those features within the subscription tier - Repeat until free users have no reason to stick around - Be shocked when new users stop coming
    1
  356. “Retired” is something of a euphemism. HMW has said in his videos that if the channel went away he’d have to go back to a regular job. It sounds more like how an athlete retires from competition but continues working as a coach or a businessman.
    1
  357. Shame too, I really like the idea of a co-op that invests in collectibles. I don’t know enough about, say, sneakers to think I could flip them.
    1
  358. ⁠ @nateosman5915 That’s a big one. Folks like you and I look at absolute returns, but someone with millions-plural of dollars doesn’t need to grow it aggressively. Some do of course because of greed or ego, but the number one thing is just to not lose money. They care about risk-adjusted returns. That’s what hedge funds have historically done well. They’re less volatile than stock-based mutual funds and they’ve outperformed during bear markets. It’s also worth noting that most investors also don’t put all their money in hedge funds, just some so their wealth isn’t entirely tied to the stock market. The normal-folks equivalent would be keeping a chunk of money in bonds or cash equivalents.
    1
  359. Our host talks about this in his video about performance chasing: ARK Invest tries to invest in small companies with billions of dollars, but their own buys & sells drive the price of their investments.They only come out ahead if the company is a runaway success
    1
  360.  @ryuuguu01  Probably, yeah, an infusion of funding to build hype for the subscription model. I wouldn’t be surprised if after the election they slim it down a bit. That said, the new owners have said they’re fans of the site. They’re also a single-purpose company as opposed to a conglomerate.
    1
  361. Glad we’re stopping off here, I need to load up on oxygen.
    1
  362. “It’s easy to think life has always been like this.” Laughs in Gen X
    1
  363. The classical music is from Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf”. The jackpot music is “Tequila” by The Champs.
    1
  364. When the camera’s focal distance changes. 0:05 is a relatively conventional example. First we’re watching a conversation in the foreground, then we shift to Logan sitting in the background.
    1
  365. ⁠​⁠ @sblijheid Short answer, yes, it’s a distribution problem more than a production problem. There are some asterisks to that though, like how much pollution and deforestation we’re willing to tolerate, whether we can get people eating in a more vegetarian direction (not entirely veggie, just more so), or how much effort we can put into reducing food waste. Tying this back to the video, there are also reports suggesting we can feed the world entirely using organic farming methods, but those depend on very ambitious and sometimes contradictory assumptions. For example reducing animal farming for food to near zero but also maintaining access to animal-made fertilizers.
    1
  366.  @thingshappen9199  Ideally you'd continue adding to it, but yes. If you want to get into the details of why, look up Bob, the world's worst market timer. Bob is a hypothetical guy who was good about saving money but he only ever puts it into the stock market right before each crash, consistently for the last 30-50 years. His saving grace is that he never sells his investments, so he gets to ride the wave back up after each crash, and in the end he actually did pretty well.
    1
  367.  @Mishkola If you’re enjoying it and making money, awesome. Many people wouldn’t though, they just want something simple, something that provides pretty good results without much knowledge or maintenance. (Personally I’d diversify OP’s suggestion a bit further into a “lazy portfolio”, a handful of funds covering different asset classes. Maybe they’d have one covering the total US stock market, one for foreign stocks, one for bonds, and one for REITs. That way it’s not all US large cap companies.)
    1
  368. Book recommendation: 2030 by Albert Brooks. Brooks supposes a world where medical advances have made it common for people to be active into their 90s and to live to 120. For those who are lucky enough to be in that first generation of long-lived seniors, this is amazing. For everybody else it's a crushing burden because we didn't make the societal and policy changes necessary to keep pace. If people are going to live to 120, it doesn't make sense to start handing out free money at 65. You can't, it'll send any country careening into bankruptcy.
    1
  369. Classic sales technique: don’t sell a product, sell a problem.
    1
  370. Likewise, some places do gradual vesting. For example you keep 20% more of the match for each year you stay, until after 5 years it’s all yours. Even if you just get one year that could be a 10-20% return on top of whatever the market provides.
    1
  371. This is why I like the idea of keeping a buffer of T-bills for the next few years’ retirement spending. When stocks are up you can sell and refill the buffer, if they’re down you have plenty of cash to wait for a recovery.
    1
  372. Yes, but Moonzilla would make it all worthwhile.
    1
  373. The slogan was awful too. “Just because they don’t tell you doesn’t mean they don’t hurt.”
    1
  374. What kind of energy are we beaming from place to place? I assume it's not as simple (or as hot) as reflecting more sunlight toward the Earth.
    1
  375. The rules are pretty vague since situations differ and investors love to exploit loopholes. The main thing they mention is rebuying the same security or another security from the same company (e.g., BRK/A and BRK/B or GOOG and GOOGL). In my experience with the IRS, as long as your argument isn’t total nonsense or clearly bad faith, they’ll allow it. In this case if they’re held by different companies or based on different indices (say one’s the S&P 500 Growth and another is the Russell 1000 Growth) it’s much easier to argue they’re different. And of course you could always park the money somewhere for a month and come back.
    1
  376. US government bonds can be bought directly from the Treasury, I believe some states do that too. Typically though you'd go through a brokerage. They'll have a section of their website labeled "Fixed Income" or something like that. If you don't have a lot of money to invest, you may want to start with a mutual fund (or its close relative the exchange-traded fund) that invests in bonds. That way you can spread your money across several different companies.
    1
  377. I agree with your overall thesis, over a really long timeline volatility can be a very good thing. However, at 5:00 you’re misrepresenting the argument critics make. Critics aren’t saying leveraged ETFs always underperform. They’re saying leveraged ETFs can tank hard, which most retail investors don’t have the stomach for, and they underperform_in choppy markets_ . Compare QQQ to TQQQ during a sideways market or a drop and recovery and you’ll see what they mean. For example from Jan 4, 2021 (first trading day and the year and yes, also basically the peak of post-plague recovery) to today (Dec 7, 2023) QQQ is up 24% while TQQQ is only up 1%. The 3x fund dropped harder and needed longer to recover. Will it be awesome over 5-10 years, probably. But it’s a huge loser for your average investor who chases yield and panic-sells at the bottom.
    1
  378. Footnoting the Mr. Consistent example: Dividends help, but over a long timeline it’s going to be close no matter what, because whenever it is that you invested in that first year, you’d stay invested for all subsequent years. To use a more dramatic example let’s say you bought Microsoft at some point in 2015. Depending on your timing you would have gotten in somewhere between $40 and $57. As of this writing it’s trading around $370. Granted that’s a 40% difference in entry price, so you could be sitting on anywhere from a 550% to 825% gain. Still, you’re in great shape no matter what because you were there for all of 2016, 2017, 2018…
    1
  379. I guess “10X my money” sounds better than “go $900,000,000 into debt”.
    1
  380. 2:30 How dare you? But yes.
    1
  381. Two nice things there: (1) since dividend investing implies buy and hold, you don’t have to constantly be looking for the next opportunity. (2) You don’t have to pick individual companies. There are funds like SCHD that compile a bunch of companies that have continued and increased their dividends over many years, good weather and bad.
    1
  382. 26:13 There are also a few who see that it’s a bubble or a Ponzi but believe they’re smart enough to be one of the first people out the door. Not sure Bieber’s in that group though.
    1
  383. Okay, but maybe we didn’t nuke it hard enough .
    1
  384. 5:10 Also these people operate in legal grey areas. They’re selling advice and they gave advice, so it’s not quite fraud. They mentioned your results may vary, so they didn’t necessarily lie. It’s just murky enough that until they cross a line or incite a big enough mob, nothing’s going to happen.
    1
  385. 6:00 Real life example of this, compare QQQ to TQQQ for calendar years 2022-2023. TQQQ dropped harder and needed longer to recover.
    1
  386. No, it's up to the company's management. Microsoft pays a dividend, Google doesn't. The general tendency is for younger and faster-growing companies to pay smaller or no dividends because they believe they can put that cash to better use (and help you get a better return) by reinvesting it into the company. Companies can also change their dividend from time to time. There are companies that have steadily increased their dividend each year, sometimes for decades. There are also cases like Hawaiian Electric which recently suspended their dividend because they're probably going to be held partly liable for the Maui wildfires and that means they'll need cash.
    1
  387. There hasn’t yet been an IRS ruling on that aspect of ETFs, like whether you could sell VOO and buy SPY to harvest a loss (which are managed by different companies but track the same index). When there’s a gap like that, that usually makes it a question of whether the taxpayer gets challenged on it, and then whether they can justify their move with a straight face. In my amateur opinion, I think in this case one could point toward the expanded options with lower fees, as well as the fact that GBTC changed its thesis from what they’d originally invested in.
    1
  388. I wouldn’t stop working entirely, I’d just dial back. I could self-employ, do what I do now but as a contractor. If you’re fully dependent on self-employment for income it can be full-time and then some, but with a baseline income in place I could just take on as much work as I felt like. Workplace surveys and UBI experiments suggest that most people are fine with work as a concept, and about 1/3 actively like their current job. It’s the obligation that sticks in people’s craw. What wouldn’t get old if you had to do it 40+ hours a week for basically your whole adult life? Many retirees have observed that even leisure time gets old. A 2021 study combining correlational and experimental data [PMID 34498892] found that 2-5 hours a day of leisure time seems to be the sweet spot. Below that and people tend to get stressed, above that and they feel like they’re not doing anything with their lives. Of course you can always split the difference and find something you enjoy that also builds a skill or helps others.
    1
  389. One thing that really stuck with me was when someone observed that preferred stock for a solid company in a relatively reliable industry (banking, real estate, utilities) offers about the same rate as “junk” bonds. If we believe the market to be at least mostly efficient, there has to be a reason for that. Looking at the attributes of preferred stock you can see why the rate is what it is. Preferred stock is essentially an open-ended loan subordinate to the company’s other debt. The company can just pay a fixed amount per year (which because of inflation makes borrowing cheaper for them and less profitable to you each year) and if they run into trouble they can defer or even skip those interest payments. That’s a good amount of uncertainty to take on, so you’d better get paid.
    1
  390. 1:45 That should be a sign right there. If an introductory video is over your head, maybe you’re not ready to jump in yet.
    1
  391. The fact that we’re all thinking about the same war suggests it’s aging just fine.
    1
  392. They'd have to pay the taxes eventually. May as well start now and spread the sales out over a few years.
    1
  393. I’d like to think I’d be the second kind of winner. I like my work and I think without some sort of work or volunteering I’d lose my sense of purpose. But if I could work part-time to take care of my family, or seasonally and travel more, that’d be pretty sweet.
    1
  394. He’s doing movie summaries, and that wasn’t in the movie. The naked shorting hypothesis came about months later in places like Superstonk. The movie already took some liberties to make Wall Street the villains. They imply as heavily as they can without outright accusing that Griffin told Tenev to disable buying and that he lied under oath.
    1
  395. Making money through an efficient business model is so 20th century. The goal these days is to integrate yourself into the system so deeply that your failure would hurt everyone else. That gives you the leverage to make demands.
    1
  396. Why go to the brain stem? For the abundance of neurons?
    1
  397. That's why (almost) all these funds have been slashing their fees, and in many cases waiving fees for the fund's first few months. They know that investors will veer toward the least expensive funds. That means more transactions flowing through those funds, which means smaller spreads, which will continue to attract users, until two or three funds dominate.
    1
  398. 7:27 - If someone describes their business as “The [Magnificent 7 company] of [unrelated industry]” that tells me they don’t have an original thought in their head.
    1
  399. YOLOs result in losses: “Rogue trading.” YOLOs result in gains: “Unique market insights.”
    1
  400. Yeah, everyone knows SPY and that’s probably the one to use if you’re going to work with options, but VOO, IVV, and SPLG are much cheaper. (And some proprietary equivalents like FNILX)
    1
  401. This reminds me of a musical composition, “In C” by Terry Riley. It’s made for any large number of musicians, and for reasons that will soon become apparent, it can run anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours. The sheet music is a series of phrases (like riffs or loops, if that helps). Each musician starts with Phrase 1 whenever they’re ready and plays it however many times they feel like it. They then move on to Phrase 2 and play that for however long, and so forth until they reach the end. And yet, somehow it works. Dozens of musicians working independently come together to produce a song that will be unique to that performance.
    1
  402. We have a word for people who go out of their way to solve problems that aren’t their fault: Heroes.
    1
  403. I wouldn’t say nothing. Yes, scams like this have long existed, and they could just as easily claim to have a secret strategy trading forex or penny stocks. Still, as mentioned at 16:00 crypto’s irreversability and pseudonymity help the scammers avoid being shut down or the money recovered. When Bernie Madoff’s scam fell apart, over 90% of the money people had put into the scheme was eventually returned. It took years and they missed out on any gains for the time their money was in limbo, but they got something.
    1
  404. No, for an even-odds bet with binary outcomes it’s (2 * p) - 1 where p is your odds of winning. In the case you propose you should bet (2 * .9) - 1 or 80%. You may lose a bunch at once, but you’d recover with 3-4 consecutive wins, which is more likely to happen than not. Another way you could figure it is the difference between your chance of winning and your chance of losing: p - (1 - p), which gets us back to 2p - 1. (And as our host said, for investments you should probably cap your exposure at no more than half that number because investments aren’t binary.)
    1
  405. Usually, yes. Google was a highly profitable and rapidly growing company before the split, and they continue to be that way after the split. That’s probably at least part of the reason for post-split increases. Which are more modest and less reliable than our TikTok friend would suggest. In the olden days maybe that accessibility thing was true. Companies would often split to keep their share price under, say, $100 because when a typical order was 100 shares it could get really expensive to build a portfolio. (Either that or you bought into a direct stock purchase plan with each company. In that case your order would get batched and executed on a preassigned day each month.)
    1
  406. Recently we’ve seen a move toward zero commissions (our host has a video on that and how they make money) but before that it was a couple of things: 1. Some brokerages have tiered schedules so that more active traders pay less per trade. So maybe your first 50 trades in a month were $7, then the next 50 were $5, then $4. 2, There are also some deep-discount brokers that provide basically no analysis or charting tools (assuming you’re already paying for your own) so they can charge less in commission. 3. Having a bigger portfolio helps, so you can make bigger trades without risking too much of your money at once. Let’s say trades are $5 each way. To buy and sell a $500 position means giving up 2% of your money to commissions; that’s going to be hard to beat. Scale that up to a $2,000 trade and now commissions are only 0.5%. Lots of stocks move 0.5% in a day. A couple of side notes: 4. In addition to day trading there’s also swing trading, which is similar in its methods but holds stocks for days or weeks. 5. Traders (who know what they’re doing) also place limit sell orders on the upside and downside to avoid holding too long. Structured properly, your their average loss should be less than their average gain. That way even if they only have coin-flip odds of guessing which way the stock will move they should come out ahead overall.
    1
  407. A lot of that starts on TikTok and gets reposted to FB, IG Reels, YT Shorts… Like all spam, the key is how little it costs to produce. Keep the costs low and you don’t need many views to start turning a profit.
    1
  408. “Every asset creates yield” Yes, even as we speak the souvenir gold nugget on my shelf is spawning more gold.
    1
  409. Basically it was how people passed the time when they didn’t have anything happening in the evenings. Like we can tell from people’s diaries that when they went to a festival or had farm work to do they’d stay up late and sleep straight through. All that to say there’s nothing stopping you, it’s just become more common for people to stay up late and then sleep in one go. You’d probably need to rearrange your schedule a bit: light dinner, sleep 8:00pm to midnight, get up, have a snack, watch some TV, back in bed at 2:00.
    1
  410. It may be intentional. Historic inaccuracies and logical fallacies filter out people who might question the sales pitch.
    1
  411. If anybody needs to be taken down a peg, it’s waffles.
    1
  412. He never said it was an exhaustive list. Videos have a finite length, so maybe he didn't consider the Vatican to be one of the three best examples, particularly considering that people don't choose a religion the same way they choose a brand of soap. Perhaps he just didn't want to start a pointless flamewar when there are plenty of non-religious examples.
    1
  413. Day traders lose money because they overwhelmingly have no training and too little capital. Experienced day traders know there’s a phase of 6-12 months where you’ll lose money while making rookie mistakes, learning the process, and refining your strategy. You could be three years in before your life-to-date return is positive. Novices usually don’t have enough money to endure 6-12 months; they expect to earn a full-time income immediately from their $25,000 portfolio. As for hedge funds, they’re not meant to beat the S&P. It’s a broad category but they’re meant to provide diversification from the mainstream markets. That means either (1) downside protection, investments that’ll gain when stocks drop, which is a minority of the time, or (2) steadier gains regardless of what the market’s doing, but with lower risk comes lower return. Hedge funds aren’t a cheat code for wealth, they’re a place you put a portion of your wealth to reduce the overall volatility of your portfolio. You know, a hedge.
    1
  414. I suspect it comes from a well-founded mistrust of institutions. Big banks and government have shown they’ll sell you out for a nickel, why not take a chance on the unregulated fintech pitched by an influencer with zero understanding of finance?
    1
  415. I suspect some of it is a well-founded mistrust of institutions. The big banks and government agencies have shown they’ll sell you out for a nickel, why not take a chance with the uninsured fly-by-night company promoted by someone whose financial expertise is backed entirely by personal anecdote?
    1
  416. 1:20 I felt that just from watching my investments increase during the plague years. 2:45 I need to rewatch “Brewster’s Millions”. I’m kind of surprised it hasn’t been remade since the Richard Pryor version.
    1
  417. What I’d say this illustrates is that generation aside, half the population are hanging by a thread. Although as the history of pensions illustrates, that’s probably better than the historic average.
    1
  418. And of course Jim showing the self-involvement that came to a head in Porkin’ Across America.
    1
  419. Maybe, but I also suspect overconfidence played a role. When someone gets constantly praised as a genius innovator visionary, they might start to think that all their ideas are great and anybody who disagrees is just a hater.
    1
  420. I like some of those tie paintings. I'm concerned that so many exist though; it makes Judith seem like a lonely shut-in.
    1
  421. That bears absolutely no resemblance to what the host said.
    1
  422. Earning mediocre returns, yes. Which shouldn’t be all that surprising considering they’ve eliminated most of the risk. That’s what people misunderstand about hedge funds. It’s a broad category, but generally they’re defensive investments. In fact you could have approximated the average hedge fund’s returns and volatility since 2008 with a 50/50 mix of stocks and T-bills.
    1
  423. Yes, any decent broker or data feed will adjust the prices retroactively as if the stock had always been split.
    1
  424.  @genghischan69 They all exist in some form, but they take on additional importance when the brokerage can’t rely on commissions. I should also note that brokers pressuring investors to trade so the broker could take a cut, that was highly common in the days of human brokers. If you’ve seen “Boiler Room” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” there’s plenty of truth to that.
    1
  425. I love how Uber’s innovative and disruptive business model is basically the same thing Standard Oil did a century ago: sell at a loss until your competitors fold, then use your monopoly power to charge whatever you want. (And overtly ignore any laws you don’t like. That’s good stuff too.)
    1
  426. Okay, but can we start with why we want a system where every transaction is publicly visible?
    1
  427. I agree we can and should do better, but historically few people have ever been able to retire. Soldiers have long received a pension, then union and government jobs starting in the late 19th century. Prussia provided the first government financial support for senior civilians in 1889, though they set the qualification age to 70 so few people got it for very long. Your best hope to not work in your elder years was to make enough money to become a landlord or a minority business owner (see also: George Orwell's 1936 novel "Keep the Apidastra Flying"). Otherwise you were working the farm until you couldn't anymore and your kids had to take it over.
    1
  428. 2:30 One thing I’d add here is that this is just an example. You should have an idea of much of your money you want in any one company, but that doesn’t mean that every position has to be equal. For example, let’s say most of Alice’s investments are in household names like Microsoft and Costco, companies that may have a bad year now and then but are unlikely to just evaporate. But she also wants to dabble in something with a higher risk-reward, say a little biotech company that could skyrocket or collapse depending on how their research goes. It would be perfectly reasonable to keep that position smaller.
    1
  429. For sure. If you’re not really interested in owning a sliver of 20ish businesses and keeping tabs on those businesses, just drop that cash in an index fund and let it do its thing. Average returns over a long timeline are still great returns. Speaking of which, there’s a lot of buzz about exchange-traded funds (ETFs), but if you want to be Mr. Consistent, mutual funds have a really helpful trait: automatic investment. My IRA is invested in ETFs, so every couple weeks I have to log in to my brokerage and say “See that $250 I deposited? Use that to buy [ticker]. With a mutual fund I could just set it up once and not worry about it. Deposits get added to the fund at whatever that day’s price is, and I could just pop in every few months (or less) to make sure everything’s okay.
    1
  430. I wouldn’t pin it just on him. Boeing is a good example of why the firing of a figurehead can be little more than a distraction. Boeing’s R&D spending relative to its peers has been low for decades. Muilenburg took office in 2015, two years after the latest wave share buybacks had started, and earlier waves go back to the late 90s. Those buybacks were generally proposed at the insistence of their existing institutional shareholders. So it was greed and failure all around. Still, the CEOs and Board members during that time, including Muilenburg, could have done something about it, or to at least called attention to the risk of leaning on an old product line rather than build anything new. That’s what executives are supposed to do, to make those hard and unpopular decisions.
    1
  431. 0:18 So we get near-infinite power, or we destroy the Universe. What’s the downside?
    1
  432. This is the same guy who said you can’t live on a paltry $400,000 per year. Bro’s completely detached from reality.
    1
  433. Too soon. I have no idea when you’re watching this, but in all likelihood a bunch of people got shot just a few days ago, so how dare you and all that stuff.
    1
  434. What I don’t get is the desire to accumulate more wealth than you could possibly spend. Not because you love being a business shark or whatever, that’s kinda messed up but I can understand. I mean amassing money and stuff for its own sake. If I got a $5M windfall, I think I’d actually have trouble spending it all.
    1
  435.  @wholeNwon Realistically yes, if I personally got a one-time $5M windfall I’d invest it and have a $150,000/year base income for life. But that’s kind of my point: I’d like to think I’d be done accumulating. I’d probably work in some respect to remain socially & mentally engaged, but not to make more money. Then of course there are the people who earn and spend millions of dollars per year . I don’t even know how that works other than pissing it away on vanity projects.
    1
  436. 2:50 Yeah, I hired a servant, like anybody would do.
    1
  437. Meh, it’s like Craigslist: not a scam in and of itself, but a convenient breeding ground for scams because of how they cut out those troublesome standards and overseers.
    1
  438. Be careful with that. 15:05
    1
  439. I’d rather have a 9-3, or a 9-5 x 4, but yeah. Self-employment means either keeping tabs on other people or doing it all yourself, and those can be exhausting. Of course if wages kept pace with inflation (or heaven forbid, productivity) we’d also be able to enjoy our time off more.
    1
  440. ​ @harrisonfreund7845  Exactly. Individuals may choose to invest according to the social-justice criteria many commenters are railing against, but ESG reports from rating agencies are more about managing business risk. What might make the company look bad, drive customers away, or attract lawsuits? Common topics include: Environmental: Is the company meeting industry standards for responsible waste management and responsible marketing? If not, they risk attracting regulatory attention. Back in Ye Olden Days, McDonald's used to package their burgers in styrofoam containers, and it was customer demand that led them to switch to paper. Social: Is the company responsive to shifts in consumer preference? For example Monster Energy's ESG report by MSCI notes that demand for low-sugar options has grown in recent years, and the company hasn't done a whole lot to respond to that. They have over 30 flavors and only about five have a sugar-free option. Governance: Are a sufficient number of the Directors independent from the company and its owners? Do they rotate out regularly, or are their Directors so entrenched they may as well be employees? Companies like Tesla and Meta are structured so the CEO also holds a huge share of the voting power, so if you don't like where the company's headed you can't do anything about it. That being the case, it's important to consider what you personally value as an investor. You can't outsource your ethical decisions to rating agencies. For example, Nestle is constantly catching flak for everything from price fixing to child labor. But they score well enough in other areas like data security and product safety that overall they tend to get pretty solid ESG ratings (AA according to MSCI).
    1
  441.  @yeetyeet7070 Maybe, but the news media also know and exploit our human tendency to catastrophize. People hear “de-dollarization” and USAers will imagine their money completely losing value overnight. That encourages panic, and panic gets views.
    1
  442. Another point in favor of buybacks, investors seem to view them as more like special dividends than regular. As our host said, here in the US we have that custom of steady or escalating quarterly dividends. Buybacks have a more distinct beginning and end.
    1
  443. 7:45 Grain of truth to angry 401k bro: if you have debt with a double-digit interest rate, your investment returns wont keep pace with the interest you’re paying on the debt, so the more you contribute the more you fall behind. In that case it may be worth contributing just enough to get the employer match because that’s a 50-100% extra*, but beyond that focus on the debt. And also yes, at some companies the fund options in the 401k stink. When you change jobs, roll it into an IRA so you can invest it how you want. * Maybe. If the matching funds don’t really belong to you (don’t “vest”) until you’ve been there 5 years and you don’t expect to be, then it’s probably not worth planning as if you’ll get that extra. Just work on the debt and maybe drop a bit into an IRA.
    1
  444. 4:10 One thing I’d mention here is that if you want real estate income without having to be personally involved, look into Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). It’s basically what it sounds like: you invest in a company that owns mini malls, medical space, bowling alleys, whatever, which they rent out and service, distributing most of their net income as dividends. But yeah, don’t expect overnight wealth. Even in today’s high-rate environment most REITs are paying 5-7% annually. And since they pay out most of their income as dividends (legally they have to) rather than reinvesting in more properties, they grow slowly if at all. [Personally I stick to commercial REITs. I have fewer qualms about being a landlord-by-proxy to businesses than to families.]
    1