I've been wondering this: How many damn pillows does 'My Pillow' sell in order to afford all of the commercials they air?

There is a strong correlation between gold bugs and guns... In a SHTF gold bug scenario, they will be the ones doing the shooting.

Until someone with a bugger gun comes along

Well yeah, reductio ad infinitum. You can like always say this right?

The point is gold will never have the practical value the end of the world types love to fantasize about

Central banking ha been around for 100 years. I wonder how it will fair in the age of Information and AI? Hyperinflation is a real risk.

As an uncorrelated, third party independent, asset its a good part of any investment portfolio. Crytpo should be in there too. In fact, this is the exact argument used by the establishment to include bonds in an otherwise equity dominated portfolio (and in a sense they are right...).

Further, in many ways the US is great and can stay on top indefinitely. But the demise of the petro dollar with the move away from fossil fuels, the rise Chinna-Russian alliance that could settle trade in gold...its like stupid not to think that something bad could happen to the world overnight.

So long as the game remains the same (basically just read central banking + growth required to service current liabilities, think social security) & we continue to innovate technologically (think AI) and financially (think derivatives, correlated global assets) the stakes will continue to rise.

Someone will **** up, someone will blink. The machines, even unconsciously can turn on their masters and unwittingly blow the whole thing up.

This is like central in game theory. How like tons of individual actors pursuing their own best interest can create socially sub optimal outcomes.

Are you going to turn off your AI and momentum ignition algos for the greater good while its earning 25% PA risk free? Where do you think all that money comes from?

As an example, the wise guys make up sub prime, insure it, spread it, offload it. Get their pound of flesh. It blows up. Who is left holding the bag? Uncle sam, which means the tax payer.

Rinse wash, and repeat. This is happening everywhere. Make no mistake about it we are on the edge, it has always been this way. But that doesn't mean that we cant fall off the cliff...

rand- I think I disagree with literally every paragraph of your post.

"Mike Lindell spends $1.5 million a week on commercials to make sure that you know about his pillow. He's sold more than 41 million of them."

"Over the last six years, Lindell estimates he's spent $100 million on infomercials. The results? He's sold 30 million pillows, and revenues have grown from around $100,000 a year to close to $300 million."

I guess I could've looked that up myself so thanks for taking the time. At 'only' 30 million sold I suppose he's still got plenty of customers in the U.S. before he has to try to penetrate the Indian market.

Well, not exactly thinking that haha.

Good hedge against inflation

MY PRECIOUS!!!


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How shook should I be by the recent market movement as a 28 year old mostly hands-off, long-term, index fund investor? My guess is not too shook but thought I’d get some opinions from people who know wayyyy more than I do

Zero shooks given

As someone who has some extra money to be putting into long term index funds, would you guys recommend holding off at the moment?

I'd buy. I'm not exactly sure why the market is so finnicky right now. Perhaps fear of all this new regulations, tarriffs, and trade wars possibly coming up? Earnings reports so far have been not amazing, but not really bad, per se, yet stocks are dropping big. They're looking for like anything that's not crystal clear perfect to sell. It might also be just a natural pullback from some decently high valuations in terms of simple metrics like P/E ratio. Some big hedge funds may have calculated the risk/return is a little off for US stocks vs some other asset class, so they may be shifting money. Who knows really. IMO, people are overreacting. This stuff may sound scary, but it just means you get a little better price after it's dropped like 8% in the past month, despite no real change to fundamentals. In the short run, there's always some good reason not to invest though: valuations are too high, stock prices are at record highs, stocks have just dropped a lot and they might go down further, wars, bank failures, interest rates going up soon, etc, etc. But markets go up in the long run. Which is why if you're a long term investor, I say just hop in whenever. Sometimes you get burned and should have waited. Sometimes you buy at the low and waiting would have cost you. I did not want to put anymore money in from like 2009-2014 (markets about to tank again) but did against my better judgment because I believed in the long-term strategy of "time in the market beats timing the market."

If you're nervous, you can always just dollar cost average in. Meaning, let's say you have 100k to put in, put 10k in a month every month until it's all in. Slightly reduces your expected return, but has less variance.

Having money in stocks is +EV over holding cash. Therefore you are losing money every day you don't invest. No one can predict what will happen to the market in the short term but in the long term historically it has always gone up.

#thingsthatarenottrue

Did you lose money not investing today?

Absolutely.

Thanks for the response, I think I'll start doing something like this then. As a n00b I am a bit nervous about the trade war stuff going on.

Are you guys all brainwashed or are you trolling me?

It was not a trick question.

if gold is such a bad investment why do so many governments have huge hoards of it? Russia just dumped US bonds and bought tons of gold. India, China, US, England, Germany, etc. all have big piles of it.

So I don't understand why people advise the small investor to steer clear of physical gold as part of a portfolio.

Was your question, "if I bought stocks in the am yesterday and sold in the PM yesterday, would I have lost money?" then the answer is yes. But that seems like a stupid question to ask.

My question was in response to someone else's post that said something like, "therefore you are losing money every day you do not invest."

While this may be blasphemous in this thread, the point was that it is not so simple. There are good times to buy things and bad times to buy things.

You can believe the EMH and MPT all you want. But the fact is that that is a convenient mental crutch and an excuse to not actually learn what you are doing.

As an example say you want a PS4. Your theory: I want a PS4, therefore I should buy one.

My theory, I want a PS4, but PS5 is coming out next week. Therefore, despite the fact that I want a PS4, I should wait a week and get a PS5 instead.