Investing (aka GameStonk and other gambling events)

Yeah you never want to be the last one to panic.

If NYC hospitals get overrun I think there’s one more big wave of selling panic, but it might take a week or two. I’m not jumping back in yet.

We are 25 years from retirement. There is zero reason for her to be speculating with her 401k

It’s a fight or flight response. Lots of people have it when you give them a steady stream of info about crashing markets.

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Question from a finance lay-person: If I had a good sized chunk of credit card debt that I wanted to consolidate into a low interest loan, would it be a better idea to do it now, or wait several months for more market fallout?

Based on this article from last week interest rates probably aren’t going to lower by much in the future.

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Ok I’m back in the market. I don’t understand what’s happening in Washington St. but it seems like there’s a reasonable chance this isn’t going to turn into Italy in major US cities except NYC. The Bay Area seems to be flattening out. I’m convinced warmer weather plays a role.

If NYC can get through w/o ventilator shortages then I see the market shooting up instead of going down. I don’t want to risk being out of the market if that happens.

Assuming I hold and we get back to old highs someday I’ll end up up like $50k from if I just bought and held. This thing roaring back in the fall scares me though.

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Can you guys all sell so I can root for it to go down

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Paging all the market timing experts today

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Yeah I’m terribly upset that I moved to 50:50 at Dow 29,5000 with this roaring market near Dow 20,000. You got me.

(And anyway I already moved to 60:40 at Dow 24,000. I will buy more somewhere under Dow 18,000 or just happily hold here if we somehow reached a bottom, which I doubt.)

MasterofthePwn

23h

“At a little over 60/40 stocks/bonds at the moment and going to move about 10% over to stocks at close today. This stimulus bill will get done whether it be tomorrow or 3 days from now. And if $2 trillion before shit really starts to go down doesn’t do anything then WAAF.

To be clear, I’m not convinced that we aren’t all fucked. But if WAAF then the allocation of my retirement account doesn’t really matter anyway.”

Holding cash to buy a cheap house in the country, maybe. Also holding my suburban house. Retirement funds are about 55/45 now, I guess, and new money has been going in at 35/65 for at least 6 months. I might buy more SDY if it goes down to like 65 (currently at 73, and I bought some at 80 and 75).

I don’t think anything has fundamentally changed. It’s all noise. Nobody knows anything. That’s the whole point.

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Seriously. I want the Dow on election day to be lower than it was on inauguration day.

Lol at nothing fundamentally changing. It’s hard to imagine a more clear case of things fundamentally changing.

Then why is the market up 8% today? You can guess…you can tell me the bailout is a corporate giveaway and the markets love it, or they’re buying Trump’s OPEN FOR EASTER bluster. Who knows why? Certainly not you. If it was down 8% you’d be saying duh obviously down look at the economy bro!

There is a reason less than 1% of money managers can beat the S&P 500 over a meaningful period of time, and some of those guys are just really good coin flippers.

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I think this is backwards. If the market sometimes went up/down by 8% for no reason, then a simple counter-momentum strategy would earn extra returns. The swings need to reflect new information for market timing to not work.

If those idiot climate scientists were so smart why can’t I get an accurate daily weather forecast?

I was tempted to sell a lot of my positions or to buy a leveraged bear ETF, but I’m going to hold off for now. I’m still resisting timing things too much, and there’s a chance that if/when this bill passes (tonight? tomorrow?) we shoot up even more. If that happens then I’ll probably pull the trigger on a leveraged bear ETF or buy a put and bet on a big drop.

There will almost literally be blood in the street in NYC soon. The death toll is going to skyrocket soon due to exponential growth. That’s going to rattle the markets when it happens, I would assume. I don’t think it changes the long-term fundamentals, but it’ll put a lot of fear in people.

(Also, I lied, I had $18 in cash sitting in my Roth IRA, so I bought two shares of FINZ, a triple leverged bear financial sector ETF, because why not? Big market timing moves being made!)

Personally I’m not convinced Italy-level hospital collapse is inevitable or even more likely than not at this point in the US. That was always going to be my 3rd wave of massive sell off panic. If it’s only NYC and maybe a few other cities like New Orleans getting overloaded - I would assume we can pull in resources from other regions to help.

Hence I don’t feel comfortable being out of the market at this point. For the first time since this started I see more potential for upside than downside. So I decided to lock in my gains and just go back to buy and hold - unless some new crazy development happens.

I’m not really considering the stimulus either way except that it will probably be mostly corporate giveaways which will boost stock prices.

I do worry about the long term effect to the economy of lockdown/let-up cycles. But I believe it’s likely the virus won’t hit hard again until late fall.

Yeah my president and red-state governors worry me more than anything.

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