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Stocks and money should be boring for most people. I'm not a financial adviser and this isn't financial advice but I believe no one with a net worth less than $2m should ever buy an individual stock. Invest in a target date retirement fund for your 401k. Same for Roth Ira. If you have more money to invest after that, invest in an index that aligns with you values (for example I invest in an ESG index for environmental, social, and governance, ie no weapons or drugs). I've kept my money boring for over ten years and my boring investments have over tripled in value. I consider it a point of pride that I don't know what the DOW is at or how much NVIDIA is trading at right now.

It always boggles my mind when someone who is middle to maybe upper middle class tries to time the market or buys/sells stocks in reaction to random news like this. At best you're going to be up maybe 50% on this trade, and you're going to pay commission to your broker, and may even need to pay taxes. At worst you're going to be down a lot and still pay the broker.

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It’s because you just lived through a 10 year period of the best growth for passive, and there is a tremendous amount of marketing online for passive.

I don’t disagree with your basic idea, but not being able to articulate alternatives so that you know when they make sense is going to hurt you.

We are possibly seeing a major failure mode for passive for the first time.

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>and there is a tremendous amount of marketing online for passive.

There’s a lot of advocacy for passive investing because it’s practically the only good option for retail investors. Managed funds can actually afford to advertise.

There are problems with passive investing becoming such a large portion of public investment, it is practically corporate welfare. But when the alternatives are at or around 2 and 20, with most performing worse than index funds, it’s irrational for the average person to do anything but passive investing.

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That's true, but what are the alternatives? Personally I do have alternative investments (crypto, random held stocks) but it's because it's fun money - if it goes to zero, I'm not going to lose the house.

If it's the first time it's failing then there's really nothing anyone can do to prepare for it, and I certainly wouldn't recommend laypeople to try to time the market.

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Alternatives include - paying a mutual fund manager (who will skip the SpaceX ipo) - other assets classes like real estate and bonds - less diversified stock holdings

In this story we determined that S&P is going to choose a path different that other ETFs. Does that mean these ETFs differ in quality? Which should you pick?

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On the contrary: People with a low net worth have very few opportunities to scratch and claw their way out of their holes in this global feudal system. They are the ones who need to be able to make high-risk, high-reward investments.

A conservative 10% return on a 2 million dollar investment is a very nice 200 000. A conservative 10% return on a 20 000 dollar investment is just 2000.

If you're not born rich in this world, there are but a few doors that are open to you to try to improve your station in life. Hard work will never help you out of the hole. Not even dangerous work. Nor will an education. At least with high risk investment you have a fair chance, and at worst you loose your savings and are back where you started. You're not going to lose your life or your limbs.

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just be sure do it in that order and not the other way around
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Feels like there’s little danger either way. How is he going to get back out of the bottle?
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What's your SKILLS.md? Is your flow multi-agentic?
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`--dangerously-skip-hype`
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Yeah yeah we're all above such gauche matters, it's only the entire reason SWEs have high paying jobs, paper wealth, and all the comforts that come with both, including the freedom to earn enough to walk away and act like you're above it all.

(I obviously don't know your circumstances but am commenting about a general phenomenon I see parroted by many professionally successful SWEs who seem to take glee in being ignorant of economics/finance while enjoying the spoils.)

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The GP is flexing the idea that he isn't from the US.

What is naive in a completely different set of ways. We really don't need more instability coming from your side.

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Sir this is a message board run by an US-American venture capitalist organisation; frankly what do you expect
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I expect the balancers to judge and some car batteries mysteriously catching fire as a counterweight.
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i fully fully agree with you.
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Dude, are you me? :D
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I will go ride my horse, and get a bit drunk off some ale at the local pub. You go enjoy your automobile, electricity, and telephony.

Electricity is overhyped anyway. Nikola Tesla is a scammer with his crazy ideas. Not to mention the scam that is Bell's telephony. Electricity is causing a copper shortage for us common folk. This electricity bubble is built only on hype, and will pop soon enough!

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You've named technologies that people were heavily speculating on that did experience bubbles. A useful technology and a painful misallocation of resources is far from mutually exclusive.
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