Ask HN: What's the best investment you've made?
Public or private market — what's the best investment you've made? How sure were you when you made it that it would pan out as it has? How long did it take to pan out? And have your investments (number of investment, amount per investment) increased or decreased over the last ten years?
85 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadThough, in the long run, losing $250 while getting your feet wet in investing isn't that bad.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-seaman/bitcoin-and-ether...
And just to answer the question, I am not a fan of investments, after three failures during the past years where I lost more than 50% of my money after making the bad decision to buy stock from three banks around seven years ago, then with all my patience I waited and waited to realize that the stock was going down by the hour, after five years I decided that I didn't want to lose more money and sold, and lost exactly 54% of my initial investment.
Way to start my adulthood eh? :D
Lesson learned. It was a costly lesson but definitely not something I could easily forget.
Since then I've mostly been putting my money in cheap S&P 500 index funds and the only active trading I do is backed by cold-hard statistics through thoroughly backtested algorithms on Quantopian rather than my own ill-informed gut feelings.
And with this more disciplined approach, I have long since made back those initial losses. So I guess in the end everything worked itself out.
Suppose your suggested future comes to pass and they tax it earlier. At what rate? Which part of it? Fundamentally, it's a brokerage account and you've invested the money. Do they go back and find XX years worth of investments and say you owe that much in back taxes? Do they look at the present value? The former is moronic. People wouldn't have that much cash lying around, that would literally bankrupt the population. The second also fails to make sense because then they'd be taxing unrealized earnings on investments.
This fear over 401(k) (and, relatedly, IRA) savings is generally unfounded.
Edit: Or maybe you;d like to talk about government's straight up taking away assets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 . Sure they gave them cash, but that could have as easily been "401ks are cancelled, they're being treated as income this year"
EDIT: My point is this. If 401(k) accounts aren't safe, then literally no method of investment or saving is safe. There's no point fretting over this one particular one. If it turns out, in 20 years, that our retirement plans have been raided by way of taxation, then likely the rest of the economy is so fucked that the lack of funds in that account will not affect you in any meaningful way, as the dollar itself will have severely lost any value as there will no longer be any trust in the US government and economy.
One, that's an incident from 83 years ago. While it was upheld, legally, at the time it's unlikely it would fly today in a political sense. Especially for 401(k) accounts.
Two, that was about hoarding. The gold in question was money not moving in the economy. The rationale for the two would be entirely different. You want to stop hoarding during severe economic times because moving money means jobs, manufacturing, etc. Sitting money does nothing. Money in a 401(k) is invested money. It's at least moving in the markets, or purchasing government bonds.
Three, see my other post. By the time shit gets so bad the fed needs to consider this option, things will be bad enough that those accounts would be worthless.
Four, forcibly moving money out of the markets like this would necessarily cause massive problems. Do you really think any government with half a brain would do this?
Five, this is literally the people's retirement savings. These accounts exist so social security doesn't have to be expanded. Removing them introduces a major burden on the nation as the population ages, now without their retirement savings.
Six, if you're really this fearful you need to live on a farm off the grid. There's no other way to be prepared for the apocalyptic future you see.
The best investment that I actually converted to cash was AAPL that I bought in 2009, and sold in 2015.
It is pretty straightforward to reach a six-figure profit in consulting over a couple of years, and I'd be glad if I could just "repeat" this performance with a larger amount of money.
An experienced VC once answered my question about why he is flying first class and visiting us lame fucks in a third-tier town in Europe for two days and how he could justify spending so much money on us. He said it doesn't matter if he flies first class or not because if their investments don't work out they run out of money anyways, and if they do work out they make so much money that everything else becomes irrelevant. This put some things in the startup world for me in perspective, and I am trying to be not too harsh and frugal with myself since then.
The problem with stock is that it's very hard to beat the market, unless you work full time at researching what you invest in.
Be careful with real estate. What goes up will go down. Don't assume that "real estate always goes up" when no one can afford to buy a normal home with a normal salary.
Made like 50k.
The real reason our model really liked Philly because they were one of the top teams in eFG% on defense, defReb% and off TOV%. Basically, they were dominant in several of the 4 factors that aren't obvious to most casual observers.
Bought stocks in late 2009/early 2010 when everyone said the world was melting down. I think I got into SPY around ~115, and it's almost doubled since. I just wish I had more money at the time; my return isn't so sexy in absolute terms.
Worst investment: Still am farming after the commodities bust. Luckily I enjoy it.
Having people to give advice has been huge. If I were to do it again, I would want ensure I have that in place beforehand, be it family members or otherwise. The developer part of me is so used to being able to find all the answers online, but a lot of the farming knowledge is simply passed through the generations.
I do have one tried and true piece of advice: invest in index mutual funds over managed ones. Their "average" return routinely outperforms most actively managed mutual funds. Worst case, you haven't paid a lot of management fees to the person who has lost money for you. (This is less true than in the past because traders now arbitrage against index funds. Nimble traders exploit the fact that index funds are mandated to buy certain positions.)
Don't use stockbrokers. If they really knew what they claim to know then they'd be fabulously wealthy without your help.
Burton Malkiel's Random Walk Down Wall Street is a good read.
So the short answer to your question is, dumb luck and sheer stupidity.
I have not been able to buy another income property since then as I had to buy a home for myself in the intervening time.
The biggest takeaway from the experience for me is that you should not buy a home for yourself, then rebuild savings for several years and subsequently buy an income property. Buy the income property first, and then let the tenants carry the mortgage. I doubt I would have bought another property if I had bought my home first.