I do wonder why theres so little investing related content on HN
Arent "hackers" interested in this?
Arent "hackers" interested in this?
There's not a big incentive for thoughtful investors to jump in to conversations centered around "investing = gambling", "why bother because efficient market hypothesis", etc.
It's a fun question to speculate about why that is. My guess is that most of the hacker type people who've grown wealthy (and therefore had disposable income to invest with) in the last 20 years were generally conservative people (i.e. people working at BigTech for 6+ years).
It's perhaps ironic that the source of their outsized wealth was effectively a concentrated bet against the efficient market hypothesis and passive investing strategies.
For me, it's humility.
If from now on, I quit everything else I do and just focus on studying a competitive game, like chess. I'll treat it like a full-time job, spending 8 hours on it a day, for 3 years. That's about 8k hours.
What'll this land me on? Unless I'm covertly the best chess genius ever, the chances are: pretty good, but not great. I'll slay a local chess club, while having 0 winrate against pros.
That's why I'm hesitiate to invest actively.
It's much easier to "double" your money in one of those local games, because the competition is weaker, their attention is divided, and their holding periods are brief.
Until you're playing with 10s or 100s of millions USD or have super short holding periods, there's no need to play against 1800 elo players – the pie of "the market" is absolutely massive. The 1800+ players exclusively play in big markets, on the payroll of people with billions and tens of billions of capital to deploy – but if you're not throwing billions around, why bother playing that game?
You might need 10k hours to bet competently on highly-competitive, complicated financial instruments. But I reckon you'd only need ~100-1000 hours of education to do a surprising amount of damage in simpler markets. YMMV.
If you really want to “get rich quick” you can probably come up to speed on effective real estate investment (aka landlording and leveraging real estate equity to build a portfolio) in a much shorter horizon.
Easy to develop a lack of interest - and/or "lack of scrap".
Much harder than having a healthy discussion over C++ vs Rust (which is already borderline impossible).
A lot of the people here make it seem like they are the type of engineers who make $300k-$3m/yr total comp with stocks and probably don't have to worry about money a lot. They are either super high level engineers, managers, founders who have done well. They probably "fire and forget" into some boring index funds and call it a day. I don't think the "wise" hacker is really attracted to known risk/gambling. A lot of hackers just want to ticker and probably get turned off talking about money. It's probably frowned upon, as if you brought it at a dinner table basically?