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Index funds and small investments in things that are still early that you believe in / care about are the way to go.

Day trading and dabbling in $GME, shitcoins, post-2023 NVIDIA, individual stocks, etc. are all bubbles.

Day trading is a scam. Trading firms are more than well-positioned to eat retail's lunch, every single time.

discuss

knappe|3 months ago

What really reinforced this for me was learning to what lengths some hedge funds are willing to go to get an edge. Case in point: buying GIS data on major retailer's parking lots to get a feel for holiday earnings. No retail investor is ever going to be able to match that kind of Intel, ever.

I buy index funds and leave the majority of my money there but allow myself to make small bets on trends in the market that I think will play over long periods. Sometimes it works, like buying lithium stocks in the 2010s and other times it sucks and doesn't, like buying solar stocks in the 2010s and watching the entire industry get shredded to pieces in the last 5 years.

tim333|3 months ago

Small speculators do have an advantage in that the market is much more liquid for them. If your position is $1k you can buy and sell without moving the market noticeably. If it's $1bn, not so much.

fragmede|3 months ago

yeah vast majority is just index funds but I just had to prove to myself than I'm an idiot, so there's a separate account with a tiny bit of money in it that I get to play with. Sometimes you buy GME, sometimes you buy SVB.

zipy124|3 months ago

You don't have to trade against the firms, retail can make up the majority of some markets (e.g not on dark pools etc..), you just have to beat them and join the firms in taking their money. It's far more difficult than buying an index but it is not a scam just because it is hard and most people don't know what they're doing.

Edit to clarify: my portfolio is almost all index funds to clarify, and that is what you should do too, but I'm just saying it is entirely possible to trade and it is a skill. Something can be somewhat like gambling and yet still have elements of skill just like poker.