I'm not sure if they're still around, but I remember back in the 1990s there was a family of mutual funds that aimed to do exactly what you're describing. They actually advertised the fact that they won't have the best returns in bull markets because they were protecting people in down markets.
The idea was that people benefitted more from staying in the market over a long period of time rather than maximizing their returns in any particular year.
So the fund was aimed to smooth out the peaks and valleys along the ride so investors would be more inclined to leave their money parked in the fund rather than getting a statement that said that they're down 30% and going to cash and missing the next run up.
>the default bubble is potentially a lurking time bomb
Many things are potential lurking time bombs. I can't think of a single period during any bullish market where you could not point to something and claim that that could be a potential end to the bull run.
The problem is when you are in the business of making predictions, if you just scream "Bear" long enough, eventually you'll be right and then you can write a book subtitled, "By the man who called the 2021 (or 2022 or 2023 or 2024 ...) stock crash" and people think you're some sort of genius.
> The problem is when you are in the business of making predictions, if you just scream "Bear" long enough, eventually you'll be right and then you can write a book subtitled, "By the man who called the 2021 (or 2022 or 2023 or 2024 ...) stock crash" and people think you're some sort of genius.
I think the point the article is making is that successful Bears, even though they can't call the peak accurately, are able to say "I am reasonably certain that if I exit the market now and wait for the bubble to go higher and then burst, the correction will drive prices below the current high, and I will have made money overall, even though I'll miss out on the tail end of the bubble rising."
If you call the bubble too early (and if you are always screaming "Bear", you are by definition always too early) , the prices after the crash will still be higher than when you exited, you're completely screwed, and so is anyone who listened to you.
It isn't particularly difficult to say that the next crash, even if it happens a year or two from now, will probably drive the market below the current level. You would experience major FOMO by exiting now and watching the market continue to climb, but you won't actually lose money. If it happens sooner than a year from now, it will certainly dip significantly below current valuations, and you'll be ahead by quite a bit.
In this particular game of Chicken, opinions will differ as to whether it is time to lock in your gains yet, but it shouldn't be too controversial that it is definitely time to start thinking about it.
If I were currently in the market, I would keep an eye out for large and quirky M&A activity along the lines of AOL+Time-Warner. Eg. Tesla decides to buy a consumer appliance, rideshare, or financial services company. Or all of the above).
I don't see that as fundamentally different than any other large Forex transaction. A bit unusual for a manufacturing company, but hardly unprecedented, and for all we know this is just a signal that Musk is betting he can call the Bitcoin bubble, rather than an actual hedge against USD.
I think that's Musk realizing that the announcement that Tesla bought Bitcoin will boost Bitcoin's value. And therefore cashing out that reality by making the trade.
It's not technically illegal afaik, but it certainly is making a trade because of realities inherent in the trading, rather than the underlying.
Or, it could just be that far more people are investors today than there were in 1929. According to this site, only about 10% of Americans owned stock or speculated in the markets in 1929.
>In fact, only approximately 10 percent of American households held stock investments and speculated in the market; yet nearly a third would lose their lifelong savings and jobs in the ensuing depression.
Yet, this poll seems to indicate that around 55% of Americans now hold stocks.
>Thus far in 2020, Gallup finds 55% of Americans reporting that they own stock, based on polls conducted in March and April. This is identical to the average 55% recorded in 2019 and similar to the average of 54% Gallup has measured since 2010.
So if slightly more than one out of every two people you meet owns stocks, I would assume you're bound to run into a lot of people talking about stocks.
I presume most of today’s stock owners are actually owners of 401k account which invests in something like Vanguard Target retirement fund. As a result, they know pretty much nothing about stocks, yet they do own them.
I would presume that as well. However, that doesn't negate the fact that 10% vs 55% is a considerable gap.
In 1929 if the shoeshine guy was giving you stock tips, it signaled a very different level of market euphoria than today when your gym trainer is talking about stocks.
Also, today we live in a world where there's just so much more accessibility to information. Only about 1.3% of the planet has ever owned Bitcoin. About 13% of Americans have ever owned Bitcoin but 90% of Americans surveyed have heard of Bitcoin.
I don't mean this to be about Bitcoin, only trying to point out the massive gap between something that is relatively niche, and the number of news articles/stories, discussion, etc about it.
>With one study suggesting ~25 million cryptocurrency traders outside the USA & Europe, it seems quite likely there are over 100 million owners of bitcoins.
>If true, it means about 1.3% of the world's population owns bitcoin.
I've seen a few other sources make a similar estimate using different methodologies.
I’ll also add to my previous comment and say that the reason you’re taught slow, diaphragmatic breathing is because your lungs impact your buoyancy in the water.
Breath in, you begin to ascend. Breath out, you will sink.
Your goal is to find a breathing pattern that allows you to stay neutrally buoyant so you’re not fighting the rise and fall by swimming against it.
Part of the instructor exam, at least when I took it, was a pool session where they tested your ability to achieve and maintain neutral buoyancy.
You would sit cross legged holding your fins for balance like a meditator half way between the bottom and the surface and you could not rise or fall more than a foot.
It’s something a lot of divers also practice when doing safety stops. Even if there’s an ascent line, many will simply stop at 15 feet, and watch their dive computer trying to maintain exactly at 15 feet using only their breathing.
The reason for that is often there will be no ascent line or you may have to do decompression stops in open water with no physical point of reference.
As a former SCUBA diving instructor and dive master, teaching students not to hold their breath is simply easier than teaching people a technique that would take a considerable amount of time to master.
I have 5 classroom sessions of about an hour each and two pool sessions and 4 open water dives to take you knowing nothing to keeping you from killing yourself.
When I first got certified as a diver, I would suck down a tank in 15 minutes. By the time I became an instructor, my longest dive on a single tank was close to 1.5 hours and I had plenty of air left.
It would be pointless for me to try and teach breathing control techniques I was using by the time I became an instructor to an Open Water Diver student who will be lucky enough to remove and replace his regulator to pass the course.
We teach not holding your breath because most inexperienced divers will default to panicked fight or flight the second anything goes wrong.
Believe me, I’ve had to physically restrain students underwater when the reg fell out of their mouth and it took them more than 2 seconds to find it. They immediately want to shoot to the surface and 100% they’ll be holding their breath (another aspect of panic) if I don’t hold them down, put the reg back in their mouth, and calm them down.
While I also believe what you’d at to be true, I fail to see how this is any different than Tim Ferriss or many other people like him.
If Tim says X works, how many Silicon Valley types suddenly start doing it?
In fact, given that former Navy SEAL Jocko Wilnick is all the rage in the business world and Tim Ferriss is also followed by the same crowd, the crossover between those two groups is probably larger than you think.
I've been thinking about getting back into coding after a multi-decade hiatus. I taught myself to code in my early 20's. Coded through my early 30's and have been in management roles (involving software development or for technology companies) ever since.
I went from Perl to Java (hated Java) to PHP and have played around with tons of languages (just enough to complete the project) in between. Right now, PHP is my go-to language for my own projects simply because I'm used to it.
I still hack stuff. I run a few websites. I write plugins for WordPress. I write little PHP or Bash scripts to automate some stuff on my server.
Recently, I've been diving into Swift. I hope to get good enough at that, that I can get a remote job and semi-retire. For me, working from home would be almost like working part-time. I don't mean that it's that easy, just that a lot of management and office politics is so soul sucking that it feels like you're working 24 hours a day.
It's tough coming back. But, I've never strayed too far from coding to begin with.
It seems the advantage I have is experience. I've been there and done that before, even if I wasn't the one writing the code. Even being in management, I still enjoy sitting in a room with engineers and white boarding solutions.
And having worked in management, I have a better understanding of the "why" behind features and can suggest different paths to get to the same outcome.
I guess I'll find out if you're too old to code when I start looking for jobs :-)
Remote jobs can be tough too. It's hard to get paid what you're worth, and you have to do extra work to be visible to the non-remote employees so that you aren't perceived as the guy who does 2 hours of real work while wearing pajamas.
I thought I had the perfect remote gig a little while ago, but the organization was so insipid and backwards that I had to leave. I found a job that's perfect for me and is a short commute and enjoy it way better.
I'm not overly concerned about getting the best rate. If I wanted to make the maximum possible I would stay in management and ride things out until retirement.
I have savings that I don't want to have to tap into so I can just let it grow for another 10 years or so. Really, I just need to make enough to cover my monthly expenses and have health insurance.
Also, I've managed development projects across multiple continents (US, Europe, Middle-East, and Asia), so I'm hoping that I have a pretty good understanding of what management needs to make them feel comfortable.
It's probably a little different for me because I'm not necessarily looking to advance my career the way someone earlier in their career might. Obviously, I want to do a good job and add value, but I could just as easily teach scuba diving or something.
I code because I like it. It also pays better than average. A good combo.
I used to believe that as well. I have business and family in other countries and the traditional approaches were way too expensive ($50 for a bank wire, $X fee plus horrible exchange rates via Moneygram, etc). I used Bitcoin a few times to move money from my US accounts to my overseas accounts where I could then transfer it in local currency through the local banking systems.
But then it started taking longer and longer for bitcoin transactions to clear. And the price was often moving during this window between when I bought in one currency and I could sell in another currency.
Now I just use TransferWise. Less hassle. Costs are much more reasonable (a few bucks for small amounts) and I don't have to have do multiple transactions to get money from Point A to Point B.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I also experienced the long confirmation time issue, but it seems to have settled down after the segwit fork, which allowed more transactions per block.
Anybody who owns real estate isn't concerned with foreign buyers. They help keep prices for real estate higher which amongst real estate owners creates additional wealth. For people who don't own real estate, those higher prices make it more difficult for them to get into a home so there are positives and negatives in this.
That said, I think the old "unoccupied houses" thing is way overblown. It presents the most ugly side of foreign real estate ownership so that people who are priced out of the market get angry at all of the foreigners buying property. Even if you removed every unoccupied SFH (single family home) from the market, prices, generally, would still be rising.
It's sort of like saying that the reason that a car costs so much is because the demand is high based on too many families owning more cars than they need. It gives people a target for their dissatisfaction with current auto prices but really isn't the main issue and even if you solved for that issue it wouldn't dramatically impact auto prices.
But having a target for your anger is a wonderful way to distract people.
The idea was that people benefitted more from staying in the market over a long period of time rather than maximizing their returns in any particular year.
So the fund was aimed to smooth out the peaks and valleys along the ride so investors would be more inclined to leave their money parked in the fund rather than getting a statement that said that they're down 30% and going to cash and missing the next run up.