Not really seeing it. SP500 is almost exactly -15% from peak, which was above $27T. $5T is a little too high, but it’s a hair more than $4T.
Oh btw since nobody ever remembers when I’m actually right on anything, I have to toot my own horn (from 3/24):
Stonks.
I’m up 25% since then in my portfolio (and 8% above my previous high water mark in Feb) - mainly because my random dart tosses landed on MSFT, BRK.B (thanks Riverman), DGX and AMZN, with a little bit of XOM. I happened to put the biggest chunk in DGX (Quest Diagnostics) which is up over 50%. Pretty much just because I used to work there and thought it was a well run company. AMZN and DGX really feel like they’re scraping the ceiling but who the hell knows. BRK.B feels like it still has legs.
Sorry I couldn’t resist being a douche - it’s been a crazy ride.
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Yeah the miracle treatment window out of this is starting look bleak. Maybe they chip away though and find a bunch of stuff that helps a little and adds up to a decent treatment.
Did your wife quit her teaching job without another position lined up?
Or did she get fired?
Gonna give you 100 stonks hearts to you for this.
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oh hey that’s OK man, you weren’t a huge douche so even us buy and hold fanatics were rooting for you market timers, glad you got it in good.
I posted over a month ago I didn’t have a strong opinion on the direction of the market from that point. I’ve been in and out of some individual stocks since then, but the bulk of my money was in a 401k invested 100% in a money market. I changed companies in early March, got my final paycheck in late March, put in the paperwork to roll over to an existing IRA which I never pulled from the market because it was only like 10% of my net worth, and decided whenever the paperwork processed and the 401k funds hit my IRA I would leave it there. So it’s not that weird that I didn’t post my reentry because I don’t even know when it was, but if you’re really curious I can look it up for you.
Also I pulled the last of my money out of the market with the S&P at 3000, so even if I had missed this entire rally I’d still be ahead of you.
As before, I’m still glad you’re way down on the year, but instead of coming at me for being a sadistic asshole, maybe try engaging in some self reflection first, because it sounds like we actually use a similar metric to evaluate who we want to support and who we want to go fuck themselves.
If I give you $100 can you turn it into $1000?
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I’m not actually way down on the year. I think I’m down about 10% this year? No big deal.
As far as the other stuff, I mean you came in here to, and I’m quoting, “spike the football” when other posters were down 30%. Like, what is wrong with you man? If other folks in this thread think I’ve been mean to them they should speak up, but in general I’ve tried to be helpful and empathetic and tried to give the best advice I can. Is my advice worth listening to? Maybe not. Probably not? Folks can judge for themselves.
But you’re just a nasty little ■■■■ and you can go fuck yourself.
oh man sounds like you nailed it btw. Waiting to hear all about d10’s super hot Canadian girlfriend.
There’s no way to get this from my post unless you took “late March” to mean mid-March, and assumed that the process of rolling over a 401k is nearly instantaneous. If you assumed a more reasonable timeline and noted that most of the rally came in the 2 weeks following March 23, you might realize that I implicitly acknowledged missing out on most of it. And if you’re trying to be helpful maybe explain to your new friend why holding a 2x leveraged ETF for a month is a bad idea instead of firing desperate shots at me. Also yeah my girlfriend is super hot, not Canadian though. Anything else I can help you with?
Yes! 20% yearly fee on profits over $1000. Zero fee if I lose your money. If you don’t make money, I don’t make money. Can’t get a better deal than that.
Full transparency on the far out of the money option I’ll put your $100 into. No Madoff BS.
What should be my time span? Genuine question, petty squabbles aside, I’m curious. Never I assume? Otherwise days? Fortnight? Longer than a month? I mean obviously I got owned but hey I got advice from professionals (admittedly professional gamblers is a better term) and obviously we can all be results oriented (just like all poker players) but I thought it was worth a gambol. I am still way long overall.
P.S. The girlfriend barg makes me nostalgic for 22 back in the day (well, I’ve been there since 2009 so not exactly back in the day)
FWIW I was in index funds for 10 years before this little foray into market timing. And it was your comment about getting back in too late and “locking in your losses” that gave me the hair trigger to jump back in. I figured let’s not get greedy, just rack up the nice little gain.
Of course now I’m really not sure about holding on to two stonks that are at their all time high.
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The usual advice is no longer than a day, but more accurately it should be a daily bet. If you think the underlying fund is going in a single direction every day for a full week it’s fine to hold for a week. If you think the underlying fund will be somewhere in a week or a month but will have lots of up and down days before it gets there, you don’t want to use a leveraged ETF. To convince yourself of this try plugging in some numbers to a spreadsheet that generally go up but have some down days mixed in, then match your numbers with a fund that doubles each day’s gain or loss. Or another way of thinking about it is ask yourself if you would manage your own portfolio by selling off some % after every day you lose money and buying some % after every day you earn money. If that sounds like an unsustainable long term strategy, you’re right, but that’s what leveraged ETF’s do for you.
Leveraged ETFs are how I frittered away a lot of my gains for doing something similar to what I did here during the financial crisis.
After getting back in very close to the bottom, I got out thinking it was shooting up too fast. Freaking Scott Brown getting elected in Mass spooked the market and spooked me. So I went short and lost a ton, then went long 3x trying to make up my losses - chasing good money after bad. I was long in a 3x ETF fund for the flash crash - awesome. I was the poster child for idiot who got lucky thinking he can time the market to precision - and it’s all documented in the 22 thread.
I still came out ahead, but if I had just got back in and left it I’d have made about twice as much. Especially if I’d just left it in MSFT like the bear fund guy who I’d followed forever did. Never again. I was much better off in a 401k with very limited options. By that point I had left my job and rolled it into an IRA.
Ok thanks for that. I was buy and hold for ten years previously. Genius move to switch it up.
If oral, over the counter Pepcid reduces the fatality rate by 50%, and can be mass produced enough for anyone who wants it to take it, that’s a miracle for tens of thousands, likely hundreds of thousands of Americans alone… We will never know exactly which ones, but that’s good not bad.
Same applies to nicotine as a preventative. And this actually helps other people too. If 100% of the population in any given area can get it, based on the most recent estimates I’ve seen, we need 82% immunity to get herd immunity. If nicotine and/or Pepcid make even 25% of the population immune, we now only need 57% of the overall population to get the virus to get herd immunity.
We’re not going to get to that point, hopefully or realistically, but what does matter is that the effective rate of transmission should drop the closer we get to that level. So let’s say the antibody testing in NYC indicating ~20% of the community had it, and we were able to use those prophylactics to protect 25% of the remainder - that’s another 20% overall. They’d be almost halfway to herd immunity at that point, and enjoying some benefits of a much lower rate of transmission, I would imagine.
Now, the miracle isn’t poof you’re healed or poof you know 100% you’re safe… But, on the other hand, a month’s worth of twice a day max strength generic Pepcid is less than $5. So… that’s pretty miraculous from a cost-benefit perspective.
Nice!
This made me wonder how I’ve done. My strategy was to dump my AAPL at $295 on 3/5 and add that to my dry powder, then work it all in slowly on the decline at fixed intervals while making some small individual plays on various stocks that should benefit from this. My individual plays are up about 8%, my index purchases are up about 14.6% (but the timing was different so it’s not fair to compare head to head - though I should do that). Overall I’m up 14.15% on my investments. By comparison, the S&P is down 8.1% since 3/5.
Not quite suzzer99 levels of ROI, but not too shabby either.
On the downside, I only worked in a little under half of my dry powder because I tweaked the original plan when I feared I couldn’t buy far enough into a calamitous dip. I’d be doing even better financially if I had bought more, obviously, although the percentages would be similar. On the other hand, if we start crashing again, I do have more dry powder.
I’ll be thinking about my strategy from here, I’m considering:
A) Getting rid of all the dry powder and putting it into indexes, but disproportionately into QQQ (which should drop less if we start crashing again, at which point I could start systematically shifting it into stuff like VTI and VOO that would drop more and bounce back more) and some percentage in GLD or a similar ETF. I could also take some extra exposure to stuff I deem safer in this environment, such as AMZN and BRK.B.
B) Doing A but working it over a couple months (it’s a significant amount of money to me).
C) Continuing to wait and see depending on what happens in the next couple of weeks - this still feels like something we here at Unstuck are ahead of in terms of parsing information, and I’m far from convinced we’ve hit the bottom. I haven’t ruled out dumping everything 2-3 weeks after we are OPEN FOR BUSINESS because of the likelihood of major outbreaks.
AAPL seems like it just has too many fanboys. But then again so does AMZN.
I don’t like index funds right now because there are bound to be some companies really hurting that are dragging them down. But when there’s a light at the end of the tunnel I would assume they have more upside than the high-flier individual stonks I’m in now.
But BRK.B is a managed fund and I’m planning to hold that throughout.