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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your reasoning, but I don't believe things are "a little crazy", at least compared with how crazy they're about to get.

IMHO, we're at Greenspan's "irrational exuberance" speech of 1996. If you pulled out of the NASDAQ in 1996, you never made it back. (The nadir of the dot-com bust had the NASDAQ at 1139 in Sept 2002; it was at 1133 in July 1996.) In the meantime you would've missed out on 4x gains in the NASDAQ itself, and up to 100x in certain specific assets.

My indicator for when we're near the top of the bubble and it's time to pull out is that folks like you will drop out of the discussion and start keeping their opinions to themselves. That's when it's time to sell; when you're ridiculed for it.

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I do think there are some scary indicators (Value/GDP, CAPE, MAPE, calls/puts) which indicate we're farther along than that, but yes this could take years to reach a top. The GME escapade and the massive rush of retail investors into risky assets with perfect indifference as to whether they are investing or speculating indicate to me we're reasonably close. I have also been ridiculed many times over the last year for expressing hesitation about current valuations of Bitcoin, TLSA, GME or ARB.

Perhaps you're right though, and this has a long way to run... I'm afraid I just can't bring myself to invest in things which are overvalued due to FOMO rather than actually making money or having a prospect of making money. Old-fashioned I know.

Re pulling out of NASDAQ, I'm not sure that's a good example. You never made it back implies you lost something. You might have had indifferent returns in other assets, but not a loss. If you invested in 1999 on the other hand, you made a loss till 2013, over 10 years later, after another bubble burst. To me it is more important to avoid risk of extreme loss than attempt to chase extreme gains.

The Shiller book on Irrational Exuberance is better than the Greenspan movie IMO ;)

In the past you wouldn't put your money in something you believed it would grow faster than. And if you get a chance to make it, you'll be able to make it, with a higher level of risk than before. If you're worried about investing in this thing, I'm afraid the world is much less scary than we thought! To me, investing on a market is like investing on a stock or bond where there is a risk component, but it's also a good way to increase value through the investment of your time. You can make big investments when they are easy, but if the future is uncertain, then you'll have a real life time risk to be managed. If you have problems on your side and are not able to solve it, there's very little chance of a positive return (or loss). So a market is not a guarantee of being a good investment. And in any case, most people (including me) are afraid of risk in the markets in general.

Almost nobody is afraid of risk right now, that's the problem.

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