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Comment by quietthrow | Hacker News Reader

I hear yea on the microseconds but I am not thinking about hft or algo trading. I am more inspired by warren Buffett’s way and that’s what I would like to do.

Play money is a good idea. Any sites you recommend for this?

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Warren Buffet did not make his fortune as an absentee investor playing the stock market. Not even close.

He invested one-on-one, in businesses he thoroughly understood, after a lot of research and understanding of the business. Think less scanning a spreadsheet or stock data and more CNBC's "The Profit" -- walking around a factory floor, looking through accounts receivable, talking to the assembly team, talking to customers. THEN making a decision to invest a lot of money and steer the direction of the business.

I doubt he was walking through the factory floors of every company he considered. That kind of approach can’t scale. I think he might have done something like that but without being physically there for companies that he narrowed down to 1 or 2. Specially before he was warren buffet. Company’s don’t allow (give time of the day) to rando’s who are investors and want to evaluate them

Actually, yeah, he probably does. His approach doesn't scale -- not at all. He bets big on individual companies. As much as Berkshire Hathaway has scaled, it's by having employees who are similarly _involved_ in the process. They aren't armchair investors -- not now and not in the past.

And no, companies don't give tours to randos. You have to do it with a lot of money on the table. Buffet isn't rags to riches; he's medium-rich to super-rich, and he got his start in much smaller businesses.

Pretty much every site is trying to sell you something - that's one of the trading strategies experienced traders are aware of, buy a security and then pay lots of finance bloggers to write a glowing tip-off about this hot new stock, then sell at inflated prices to all the rubes who are buying on stock tips. It's slightly illegal but you're unlikely to get caught, because the victims believe they're being smart and everyone else in the ecosystem profits from the practice.

If you really want to do it Buffett's way, go check Benjamin Graham's books (The Intelligent Investor and Securities Analysis) out of the library, read through the last 40 years of Berkshire Hathaway annual reports, and then start reading !0-Ks from the SEC's EDGAR database.

That was my intention with the original post. How make a living by value investing. What all would one need to do.

A mainstream one like https://www.investopedia.com/simulator/ could be an option.

This one https://www.quantopian.com/ is also interesting. It's more algorithmic trading, but has backtesting functionality and other nice features.

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