> Let's naively assume that you actually can pick stocks. At $10Bn - you need to pick more stocks - otherwise you would drive up the price too much in buying that much of the stock
This refrain is common enough, but I don't think it really bears out in the math. Elon just sold $16B worth of stock and the price barely budged. If you've got enough alpha to work with every beta seller out there will hop off and it's well, well before the peak.
> There were plenty of tech losers. You still had to pick the winners.
Yes because I applied basic reasoning. People were still investing in AOL and Yahoo when I picked Google. Seriously. AOL and Yahoo. It was bananas. Every person I knew that had any amount of tech savviness was on Google. The search results were clearly superior. "Invest in products that are better" should be a meme on WSB or something.
What I didn't mention above was that in the mid 2000s I also made money off of oil because I was following China's modernization and politics in the middle east. People back then pushed me on just how much oil would go up and when I said I thought it could triple they looked at me sideways. But it nearly tripled then I sold. I tried to get into lithium through SQM, because I thought electric cars and widespread computing were going to strain supplies, but they didn't. That's when I learned the lesson that over time commodities go down.
> If you actually followed this advice, you'd probably be worse off than investing in the s&p - even if you did pick good stocks.
Not really? Buying in at the very lowest part of 2009 gives a lot of range to play with. This bullrun is much, much longer than most, but over time I think it's easier to dodge the correction than to call the top. The reason for this is that to call the top is to predict when human irrationality reverses. Something I'm not great at doing. What I'm good at is first principles. And at some point I don't care how much blood there is in the streets. That fucking share of Apple is undervalued enough to where I would sell priceless art to buy it.
> Elon just sold $16B worth of stock and the price barely budged.
I could be wrong, but my understanding that such huge trades are not put on the market the normal way, but run through big investment banks that are able to use different techniques to avoid harming the stock price. For example, they can exchange the shares with hedge funds, ETFs/mutual funds, pension funds, and they can do the trades in batches over several days.
Elon's sale arguably brought down the price of Tesla considerably. He pretty much announced the sale at the peak - it's down almost 40% from that - when the s&p isn't even down 20%.
But, anyway, a wealth manager investing billions would do the same thing in reverse to buy.
And, still, it would drive up the price unless done over a long period of time - and since timing is important - this isn't really an option.
This refrain is common enough, but I don't think it really bears out in the math. Elon just sold $16B worth of stock and the price barely budged. If you've got enough alpha to work with every beta seller out there will hop off and it's well, well before the peak.
> There were plenty of tech losers. You still had to pick the winners.
Yes because I applied basic reasoning. People were still investing in AOL and Yahoo when I picked Google. Seriously. AOL and Yahoo. It was bananas. Every person I knew that had any amount of tech savviness was on Google. The search results were clearly superior. "Invest in products that are better" should be a meme on WSB or something.
What I didn't mention above was that in the mid 2000s I also made money off of oil because I was following China's modernization and politics in the middle east. People back then pushed me on just how much oil would go up and when I said I thought it could triple they looked at me sideways. But it nearly tripled then I sold. I tried to get into lithium through SQM, because I thought electric cars and widespread computing were going to strain supplies, but they didn't. That's when I learned the lesson that over time commodities go down.
> If you actually followed this advice, you'd probably be worse off than investing in the s&p - even if you did pick good stocks.
Not really? Buying in at the very lowest part of 2009 gives a lot of range to play with. This bullrun is much, much longer than most, but over time I think it's easier to dodge the correction than to call the top. The reason for this is that to call the top is to predict when human irrationality reverses. Something I'm not great at doing. What I'm good at is first principles. And at some point I don't care how much blood there is in the streets. That fucking share of Apple is undervalued enough to where I would sell priceless art to buy it.