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Comment by rmah | Hacker News Reader

There are always bears who are predicting the next stock market crash. They always have various reasons that make sense on the surface. They're almost always wrong. But they're always eventually right.

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When it comes to finance and fashion there's no difference between being early and being wrong.

Maybe that's true if you sell too early, but if you buy too early then wait you'll generally do okay

What is “buying too early”? Is that even a thing?

You could buy something when you think it's a good value, but it might go down a lot or stay low for a while before it goes up. One of the advantages individual investors have is that they can wait, rather than chasing short term gains

> But they're always eventually right.

Can you really call it "right" if the market goes up 40% before eventually going down 15%?

This is why you don't rely on broken clocks to tell you the time!

Are you implying the market will go up ad infinitum?

The "race to the bottom" (to devalue fiat currency and drive inflation) is a big reason why stocks, gold, real estate, and bitcoin are valuable to hold. The market will definitely go up ad infinitum, since that is the policy of all central banks.

It’s just a take on the old, “They predicted twelve of the last three crashes.”

If you can’t act on predictions they’re not meaningful.

or picking the guy with the right prediction is not much easier than making correct predictions

In the AI era, you just spin up 1024 bots making substack posts prophetizing the future. That's ten binary predictions. Delete the 1023 that fail. Keep the one account that perfectly "predicted" the future.

I rather have one extreme win than 100 smol wins that get evaporated once the market crashes. There’s an expression that goes ”Eating like a chicken, shitting like an elephant”. That’s the beauty of puts.

Down 15%... so far

The derivatives market wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t a legitimate economic need to insure against unexpected crashes. Aka it’s not just bear speculation; crashes happen all the time in markets around the world.

Even the Covid crash, as bad as it was, was over in a month. Stocks rocketed to new highs faster than anyone could have ever anticipated.

This stock recovery was so fast because of an external factor, governments injected money into economy, but the price was inflation.

" Fiscal stimulus during the pandemic contributed to an increase in inflation of about 2.6 percentage points. "

https://reason.com/2023/02/02/covid-stimulus-spending-played...

It is also inflation this time. Inflation hasn’t slowed down for a few years now

That’s usually the case when you make borrowing money free, the Fed cut the FFR to 0% on March 2x, 2020.

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