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Comment by rubicon33 | Hacker News Reader

People seem to have a strange way of 'investing'. For me, it falls into 2 categories:

1) Long term investements which I almost never look at. Regular scheduled deposits going into an index fund.

2) Bets. Fun little side gambles which I always do for one purpose - aquiring something in the real world. Example: I want a new M1 macbook, but rather than drop $1k, I gamble $3k bitcoin. If it makes enough profit for the macbook, I sell immediately, and buy. If it drops, I just hang onto it until it goes up. But ultimately, this category of investment is never anything other than a bet, which I am OK losing. And, it's always a means to and end. I have a product in mind, and I justify gambling some money (which is fun) as a means to acquiring said product.

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> which I am OK losing.

This is the most important concept of investing. You should never place an amount you wouldn’t be ok losing. If losing every cent of an investment could cause financial ruin, you’re investing too much.

I would agree with you if you replaced every "investing" word with "speculating" or "gambling". Otherwise what else am I suppose to do with my money but invest it? Leave it in the bank so they can profit off of it? There are entire categories of equity with variable degrees of risk, and a lot of them won't make me "lose every cent" in any situation but the end of the world.

But there is a risk in not taking risk too. If you had taken this advice over the last ten years (my grandmother did, for instance) you’d have missed the greatest decade in stocks and property for many years, and are much poorer because of it.

You can not not invest „money“. If you let the „money“ exists in Fiat money form your money is invested in this exact fiat money.

This is all a big gamble with different risks. But generally: if you have “money” you have a risk to lose it.

I use here ““Money”” as a synonym for buying power, or value that can be exchanged. So it is not like Money because it dose not describe the meta value and is part of the big gamble ;)

I had an economics teacher who very interesting and he taught us exactly this. He also actually owned a shop, so every economic theory he could explain with a real world example.

You are erroneously conflating investing with gambling. Astute investing in index funds is essentially risk-free if your retirement is far enough away. As you get closer to retirement, you should start moving from funds to bonds (or cash if you want to be extra safe), so you are protected in the case of a crash.

I am not OK with losing the money I have invested, but it is so unlikely that I do not need to worry about it.

A situation where the global stock market crashes, and never recovers, is basically an apocalypse. That is not worth planning for.

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