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Re:Stanford CS007: Personal Finance For Engineers by mdorazio on Monday November 27, 2017 @02:02PM (#15790106)
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.
Re:Stanford CS007: Personal Finance For Engineers by Spooky23 on Monday November 27, 2017 @07:28PM (#15793145)
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.
Re:Stanford CS007: Personal Finance For Engineers by eldavido on Monday November 27, 2017 @10:33PM (#15794090)
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.

Re:Stanford CS007: Personal Finance For Engineers by mdorazio on Monday November 27, 2017 @08:02PM (#15793353)
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.