The future of speculative investment

If you take anything away from the Robinhood saga, it’s that decentralized currencies are the future. This might just be my opinion, but it’s a growing one, shared by anyone without ties to the old guard. I’m not going to chew your ear off about the magic of Bitcoin and Ether just yet - we can talk about blockchain currencies another time.

One thing’s for sure. There’s a lot of people out there who would be served extremely well by sticking to the basics and realizing that investment doesn’t have to be sexy. Investment also doesn’t have to be trading. Beating the market is an expensive, time-intensive, knowledge-dependent game that the vast majority of people simply don’t have the resources to entertain. Throwing eggs at rich people’s houses is only fun if you remember to run away before you get caught.

Catherine Rampell @crampell Redditer says he's down $400k in GameStop losses but he will not sell. Tells WaPo he has “been poor for too long” and works “a god awful amount of hours for a garbage company” and sees betting on popular “meme stocks” as a way to potentially strike it big washingtonpost.com/technology/202… February 3rd 2021 24 Retweets 52 Likes

None of these trading platforms will tell you that only about 1% of all-day traders are able to predictably turn a profit net of fees. The average individual investor underperforms a market index by 1.5% per year. Active traders underperform by 6.5% annually. Here’s a great study showing just how bad the majority of individual investors are.