Made enough money to fund myself starting a company (Spellbook). Did an average of 40%/year over 8 years. However my active fund only started at 5% of my portfolio, now it's 95%+.
I think people underestimate how much easier it is to win when you're dealing with smaller amounts vs. being a billion dollar fund.
Author here: I do passive invest, with maybe 1/3rd of my portfolio. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. As long as people keep piling in money index funds will keep getting pushed upwards in price.
Passive investing works great when it's a minority of the market.
But it obviously does not work, as the majority of inflows become passive.
There is no case in history where: "Keep buying X, regardless of the price of X" has ever turned out well. We come up with new stories every generation around why it can work. Price matters, and as soon as you introduce a mass of buyers who don't care about price, it distorts markets massively.
Michael Burry has a pretty good article that shows how $1 invested into an S&P500 fund gets amplified into $5 of price pressure through perverse feedback loops.
Also: Active managers have no interest in pricing the market for you. They want to make money. Why would they bother pricing the market when they can siphon money off of passives instead? Passives are like a rock-paper-scissors player that always plays Rock. It becomes incredibly easy for funds to frontrun and take advantage of them, and one day they will be left with the bag.
For now, I am in passive. But I will be the first one out when the narrative starts to crack.
Sorry, there is no silver bullet in investing. We keep inventing them and saying "this time it's different". It's not true.
Everything that makes us feel good is neurochemical in nature, including exercise. Exercise can lead to a withdrawal period of feeling shitty and unproductive, and it can be quite addictive.
Really important not to confuse "feeling good" with being good for you. Have seen a lot of people overdo it and lose their lives to pointless exercise while accomplishing very little else. Also important to realize that most things in life that give you a boost in life also give you a debt to pay back at a later time/date.
It's pointless because of the hedonic treadmill. Any feel good feeling is neurochemical in nature, and any moment of feeling good will be counterbalanced at one point or another.
Where I live in Atlantic Canada you can rent the same for $550 USD, or just buy a brand new modern home for $180k USD. People here work remotely for companies like Google. The government will also help fund your startup’s product development through various programs (hundreds of thousands of dollars).
Always wanted to move to San Fran but starting to feel pretty grateful about being here.
“Remember when we looked forward to every advance?”
No. Humans have always been afraid of change and skeptical of technology. Books and the printing press were considered destructive inventions that would prevent people from thinking for themselves. There were also extremely negative perceptions of television and the internet.
I think that's unfair regarding the last decades. Post war people were pretty enthusiastic about tech. There are always people resisting. As a kid I wasn't obviously. But even adults were running after kitchen appliances, electronics and computers. It was a given.
Encouragement is not a bad idea, and there’s nothing stopping doctors from doing that today.
But the idea of “prescribing” an activity that is meant to be intrinsically motivated seems misguided.
It reminds me of those kids growing up who’s parents forced them to do every extra-curricular activity. They ended up -hating- everything they were made to do. And from my anecdotal evidence, kind of miserable.
Creative activities require a real intrinsic desire to participate in them in order to be joyful. Forcing them spoils them, and can make the participant feel even more down on themselves (I’m practicing, why don’t I like it?).
I think the better alternative is for the dr to flesh out what things the person really wants to do already, and continuously encourage them to go for it.
Maybe what I’m missing is that by making it a prescription, medical insurance will cover it? I guess that would be pretty great, as long as the person has an intrinsic desire to do the thing.
> But the idea of “prescribing” an activity that is meant to be intrinsically motivated seems misguided.
Social prescribing doesn't mean the patient is forced to do something they don't want to do, it means the patient who may struggle (because motivation, health, money) to access something gets some support to access an activity.
The thing about illness is, when you feel crappy you don't want to do anything. Which of course leads to less activity, to exacerbation of associated health problems and then back to not wanting to do zilch.
You can only break that circle by getting your body and brain busy with anything at all.
And with any creative activity, you figure out as you go whether you're any good at it or you prefer to switch to something else. Only you need motivation to do that.
It may work better in helping to get people to start doing something, rather than keeping their routine.
There's nothing that says people may not start liking the activity that is good for them later, and keep doing it regardless of whether they started doing it on prescription or with encouragement/friend recommendation. But there's usually some initial hurdle to get over, and anything that helps is probably good.
The proposed better alternative is more the role of a counselor than a doctor IMO which makes me think they should be encouraging the use of counselors instead. That being said, many people find things like counseling as superfluous or taboo so maybe it is in our best interest to delegate this responsibility more towards general practitioners.
Part of the GPs job is to be a general counciler on their health and lifestyle habits. They certainly shouldnt be diagnosing mental health issues if they don't have the expertise but encouraging to have good habits before referring them to an actual therapist is definitely warented in most cases.
I think people underestimate how much easier it is to win when you're dealing with smaller amounts vs. being a billion dollar fund.