Basically regular people are doing real shit like growing corn and mining and fixing computers and all that, and then you’ve got this like teeming mat of busy busy parasites that lays over everyone and figured out they could generate money by playing games loaning, withholding, or just guessing what the regular people will do. Then you’ve got another layer of parasites over that one who do the same thing but just with the lower parasites, and they’re even more useless and richer than any of the others combined.
insemination is the biggest slot machine
It may look like gambling, but it’s actually fraud.
Could not find a less jpg version :/
Pornography is either fraud (nobody looks like that, nobody fucks like that, etc.) or gambling (you’re looking at something hot and sexy until, catastrophically, you aren’t).
what about the drawn verity?
Like real gambling it’s all fixed by the mob.
The mob used to be cool, pretending they were in the god father and feuding amongst themselves.
Now it’s all peptide blood boy tech moguls who always look wet for some reason.
The telltale sheen of SHARK TESTOSTERONE
The real mob… The state.
Yeah, when you are a politician you can legally cheat the system. And many do. Trump and his cronys of course, but Democrats like Pelosi too.
It is gambling attached to a ponzi scheme. It kind of works so long as growth can keep up, but if it ever stops and reverses for any reason…
Unrelated, how are sea surface temperatures going nowadays?
Glad you asked!
Line goes up so this has to be good, right?
Is this what they mean by ‘Line must go up’? 😕
Shoreholders want it warm
How do I invest in sea temperatures? $SST?
It’s pure profit! That line just won’t STOP going up!
Honestly… Yeah. Outside of insider trading, there’s no real way to know what the future holds, so every stock and every bond is just a gamble with varying levels of risk (or Crypto if you like getting rug-pulled over and over)
Life in of itself is way more about being lucky than most people at the top would like you to think about
While this has changed, used to be you could look at the financials of a company and determine whether it was a reasonably good long-term investment, so you could pretty consistently build wealth with a diverse array of investments. With algorithmic trading down to the millisecond, much of this has gone out the window
Yeah, I was going to say something similar. What job you take, where you decide to live, friends you make all have a risk/reward element to them.
That being said I do believe there is a big difference between polymarket/prediction markets and stocks (or at least some stocks). Prediction markets is either betting on pure chance or against insider knowledge. Technically stocks should be seen as investing in a company (especially ones that pay dividends). Could a company run into hard times and lose you money, sure, but there is at least a bit more freely available information on that available to you.
Andrew Beyer’s horse racing book “On Speed” (from the 70/80’s iirc?) showed that a long while ago the basic math for the stock market is very much similar to how paramutual horse / dog betting works.
it is gambling all the way down.
I wouldn’t say that common stock trading is gambling, but futures and options trading definitely is.
The way stocks are meant to work, it isn’t gambling. It is an investment in a company in order to help them grow and gain a return from that.
The way people use it now, it is gambling.
As a futures trader, I can confirm that trading futures is gambling. Like poker, if you know what you’re doing, you can make a living. Most people can’t make a living playing poker, and 95% of traders are not profitable.
it’s educated gambling where the house has significantly less of an edge (or at least appears to)
gambling has negative expected value, the house always wins in the long run.
the stock market has pretty much always trended up over time so if you just buy a bunch of stuff and wait a while you will pretty much always win. (you can still gamble with stocks, it’s just that stocks are fundamentally different and you can also not gamble)
yes, however it is at least theoretically possible for those with a controlling stake in enough companies to manipulate the entire market in a way that makes that strategy lose
“Appears” being key.
(VTV+VXUS+BNDW)×(Roth) the most boring winning strategy. Get modestly rich slowly through consistently disciplined and simple contributions. It’s your best bet for beating the house (because you’re in the house, or at least its mudroom).
What happens when the AI companies get into the indexes? Big tech is already heavily represented and the AI bubble popping will probably destroy sensible index fund portfolios.
Probably bad things, which is why I feel (marginally) safer in VTV, Vanguard’s large cap value fund, focused on consumer staples, insurance companies, holding companies like Berkshire, defense contractors…basically large companies with the lowest P/E and P/B ratios. I’m not saying it won’t hurt when the bubble collapses, but it intentionally excludes the FAANG and overpriced tech.
It ain’t perfect by any stretch, but it at least tries to capture profitable and (relatively) underpriced companies with proven records instead of market darlings.
VXUS for exposure to foreign markets. BNDW for the ginormous market of bonds.
The crash will hurt. It’ll be a good buying opportunity for anyone with cash. I have a few more decades to weather the storm, so I’m just staying steady. I’ve already tried my hand at picking stocks (gambling) and learned the hard way (because I ignored the books telling me what not to do) that I suck at gambling. Technically, any normal person is supposed to suck at gambling, otherwise it wouldn’t survive as a venture.
That serms like a sound plan. It’s all gonna be terrible, but that should at least be a hedge against the insanity in big tech. I suspect that defense will have a slow decline as our former allies contine to back away from our unreliable dumb asses, but it won’t have the spectacular crash out like AI related stocks.
a fellow boglehead 🤝
All hail Jack
I’m having trouble looking up all those acronyms. I know about roth 401ks, but not the other stuff.
Ah! Thank you muchly!
And be very wary regarding any person telling you something is “Economics 101” - they are full of shit.
Thanks for sharing!
I was watching the World Series last night and made a comment in a chat about how ads and companies these days in the US are just one grift after another. Seriously, the ads were:
- AI (multiple companies)
- Medications that are borderline poison but somehow get approved anyway
- Kalshi and other betting platforms
The US creates problems for its citizens and then finds ways to sell them the cure. All of this has accelerated over the years and it’s just going to get worse.
Spouse was just watching something on some free streaming app and all the ads are ai generated and scams aimed at old people. This one was about some fake life insurance claims when it flashes a 1-2 second picture of this at the end where it tells you if you call they will add your information to their databases and sell it and you choose to void your rights and take yourself off the national do not call list…
My mom got hit with this kind of shit. It’s the reason she ended up with 10 car warranties. I overheard her answer the phone one day while I was at her house and it was the parasite warranty company again. I ripped that motherfucker a new one. Made him tell me exactly how many warranties he can see that she had prior, made him cancel them all while I was on the phone, all with the threat of legal recourse. After all of that, I told him to get a real job and to stop fucking over the elderly.
A country that allows this, knows exactly what it’s doing. Just like the US government knew what it was doing when it repealed gambling regulations in 2018.
Jokes on you, I put all my savings in USD in 2000 and I’m only down 50%. I just gotta keep putting more in, I’ll win eventually.
Agriculture is gambling.
It’s also the origin of interest.
I’m pretty sure hunting and foraging is gambling too.
No, that’s gaming
No, because you still have to do work and make a product when farming. The same can’t be said for gambling.
the activity of risking money on the result of something, such as a game or horse race, hoping to make money
Agriculture fits: you put in resources and hope that weather/pests/etc. will leave enough for you to survive
Agriculture is a low risk bet that is that reduces variability and isn’t all or nothing. Gambling is a high risk/reward zero-sum game.
Reducing variability is just how we are doing it now, not what it is. And I can just as well not bet all my money in one go. Besides, seen recent (last decade) news on climate changes? Doesn’t look like low risk for agriculture to me
Yeah, everything is gambling. Real deep.
It actually is, unironically. Goes to “your breath is gambling” level deep and more
It’s not gambling for the people that the state will bail out.
It’s not gambling for the House, because the odds are already stacked in your favor.
It’s not gambling for the state, because this is guaranteed tax revenue and campaign contributions, off the backs of people who are more than willing to feed the beast.
It’s not gambling for the players, either. In the end, they always go to zero.
I love shitting on the markets as much as the next person, but saying the Nasdaq is like polymarket is deliberately flippant.
It’s flip but the AI bubble makes me feel like it’s not totally out of pocket. Nasdaq changing it’s rules to let recently IPO’ed companies in sooner seems wildly reckless to me.
Yes. It is wildly reckless.
/s ?
Ya, it should probably say NYSE.
Yeah the coins on Nasdaq are all closed-source, wtf.
I didn’t even notice loot boxes. Jfc.
We need a Stakeholder economy, not a Shareholder economy!
