This is not at all like what the parent post implied. You're basically saying to pick sectors/companies that will net a slightly better than market rate of return on average. Which is great. However, this is very far from a 10000x return on true outliers, long shots, and market bubbles.

I think he was taking some license.

Knowing your shit and having liquid cash is key to those opportunities. My play portfolio made a 10x return after the financial crisis because of knowing key sectors and having cash.

Likewise, I had a nice bitcoin hit that could have been a 1000x play, but to be honest I got out to buy a car, which in retrospect was a very dumb decision!

Reminds me of the HN guy who sold his sun stock to by a car..

By the time I had Sun stock, I would have had to pay someone to take it. Still loved working there.

I cashed out a bunch of bitcoin for what I thought was going to be a near peak price at the time, $800. Fortunately, I never agree with myself completely, so I saved a few for the long run. Thinking back, I can't really say I would do anything differently with the information I had at the time.

Not that it matters, but 100000% is 1000x.

This isn't investment advice. I think the idea is that you'll have some investments that yield 1000x and some that yield 0x so you'll average out to something that's better than the market, but not 1000x.

I agree. However, the original question was more like, "if it's easy to see what will yield a huge return, what should I invest in today to get that return?" To me, it's pretty clear that investments yielding huge returns are only obvious in hindsight, and even an astute tech-savvy investor will, on average, only do slightly better than a normal diversified portfolio.

Those two statements don’t jive. It’s not impossible to trade hours for a return significantly better than a normal diversified portfolio, but less than being an early bitcoin miner.

It's important to realize the global macro environment is pushing up prices of everything: houses, stocks, just, all of it.

I'll admit I'm surprised by Bitcoin, I actively avoided it thinking it would crash long before now. But I wouldn't treat the past five years as anything remotely "normal". We're in one of the longest bull markets the US has ever seen and there are a lot of macro forces that will eventually end it, e.g. boomer retirement, student loan debt overhang, pension obligations. I was just reading some of Dalio's daily observations on some of this, they're quite good.

No, but it is unlikely. Hence the "average" part. Also, if we're talking about trading hours we're effectively talking about working rather than investing. Of course you can make more than a market return if you spend your free time consulting on the side, for example, but that's not really comparable to spending 5 minutes buying bitcoin or Tesla stock in 2011.

Your instincts about pharma may be badly wrong. Many hackers are shocked that pharma stocks generally go up when they downsize in research -- it seems wrong to our builder instinct but it makes sense in terms of short-term opportunity.