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kulkarnic | 4 years ago

> When we first started investing, we approached it from two beliefs: 1) you are unlikely to grow a portfolio without a small percentage of it allocated to more active investments

I wish you all success, but this assumption goes against about a half-century of academic research. You might say "but it's crypto!" But the law of averages is brutal, and it is agnostic to whether we're in a crypto world or not -- if some fraction of market participants get an above-average return, mathematically, some must get a return that is below-average.

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lend000|4 years ago

Active investing is not the same as day trading. Most people do not realize that "passive investing" is basically zero sum (albeit harder to calculate because of being stretched over long periods where inflation becomes significant), just like short term trading. Value creation only comes from active investing (long term focused, but active and researched). The kind of active investing that Warren Buffett does is more similar to what VC's and private equity firms do than someone who buys and holds an index, spreading their money evenly across all big companies without any regard to which companies are deserving of investment.

kulkarnic|4 years ago

Passive investing isn't zero sum - it's positive sum. If you could buy a fraction of earnings from every business in the economy (i.e. both businesses that currently exist, and future businesses that are founded in the future), then you get a rate of return that is roughly the growth in GDP.

Concentrated portfolios are also positive-sum, and have returns higher than passive investing if you are smart or lucky.

ogiberstein|4 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. I am not sure if markets are a zero-sum game though? If the sector grows, the whole pie can become bigger, right?

sadosystems|4 years ago

(I think) His point is not that investing is a zero sum activity but that active trading basically is. For me to make money day trading someone needs to loose money. The total "growth of the pie" is a slow process that you capitalize on by buying and holding.