The funny thing about that thread is that the best answer is "by not holding cash."

Inflation hurts cash. Conversely anything denominated in cash is "helped" (nominally) - debt, equities, etc. If you, like parent comment, have "most of my money is in index funds and FAANG companies" then you have benefited from inflation (NASDAQ is up 35% from a year ago). On the other hand, people who are hurt the most by inflation are low net-worth savers and wage earners.

It might be counterintuitive at first but while you are exposed to a potential crash by holding equities, by holding cash you are guaranteed to lose purchasing power equal to the current rate of inflation (and it's worse than the official CPI makes it seem).

For your cash positions, which should be kept as small as possible (examples being upcoming purchases, dry powder for investing ideas, emergency fund, etc), liquid US dollar alternatives exist that you can consider diversifying into. These include other currencies, some crypto, precious metals, etc.

Go back to the lost decade before and is what you are saying true when SP500 traded flat for ten years?

https://inflationchart.com/spx-in-cpi/?time=20%20years&show_...

You had to wait until 2013 to have what you had in 2001, which is awful. Better than cash for 13 years yes haha but a diverse portfolio with other things like gold which went nuts over that time would be way ahead.

> Another great resource I use is https://inflationchart.com

Thank you for the great resource! However I have a small comment.

What the site is using is actually M2 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S

The real M3 money supply report was discontinued - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M3

See here for the ShadowStats estimation of M3: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/money-supply-chart...

I'm the maker of https://inflationchart.com and I use the M3 for the U.S. from the Fed which is active:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S

Please correct me if I'm wrong!

That chart shows what the Fed wants you to use in place of the M3.

Note that the values are the same as M2:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/discm3.htm

Your site should say M2 instead of M3.

Just wanted to say thank you for making your awesome site! I know it was probably a lot of work, but it is one of the easiest to use and best resources I know of for quick, easy to understand comparisons. The world looks different once you have seen it through inflationchart.com.

So nice to hear, thanks a lot!