Ask HN: HNers How Do You Hunt for Fortunes?

[sarimkhalid]

My question is inspired by a blog post by Financial Samurai.

https://www.financialsamurai.com/fortune-hunting-money-making-opportunities-in-stock-market/

In this post, Sam tells the story of how he turned a $3000 investment into $155,000 in 2 months.

How do you "hunt" for opportunities like these?

[kasey_junk]

That article is just brutally (if not criminally) bad advice.

First, the share they lead the headline with went to effectively zero very shortly after they got out. If they’d waited even a little longer the article would be about how they lost everything betting on one ridiculous stock early in their career. And they don’t even have the decency to tell you what their thesis for getting out was, probably because they didn’t have one.

Second, they actively admit that they spent the downturns putting all their investments in CDs and money markets? In the lowest interest rate environment ever. Then had to chase unicorns to make up for that mistake.

If they’d just put their money in a traditional allocation (or better yet a target fund) they’d be up over their “fortune hunting” approach and probably up even including their lottery winning.

Then it ends with ads for dodgy sounding investments. I don’t know those personally but every thing about that article is fishy and bad advice.

[mtmail]

Obviously I would need to buy the author's book and subscribe to his newsletter.

Sarcasm aside we had such an opportunity just a year ago: crypto and NFT. High risk that potentially would've matched his 3000->150000 (50x) return. It was in the open, in all tech news channels, available to anyone with a bit of money. Ok, most lost money it seems but it's the kind of opportunity the author talks about.

In https://web.archive.org/web/20210426154653/https://www.finan... he talks about NFTs, too, with instructions how to buy them. There is a section on caution and skepticism, too. "Now you know a bunch of stuff about non-fungible tokens. We covered what an NFT is and isn’t, how they started, why they’re booming, skeptics’ concerns, how to buy one, and how to create and sell an NFT of your own."

That was 2021. Later the author changed the article https://www.financialsamurai.com/what-are-nfts/ and adds more skepticism and "Invest In Real Assets Instead" which conveniently links to his platform "Personally, I’d much rather buy real assets like real estate than NFTs"

[BlueTie]

Nassim Taleb has advice to follow something called "the barbell approach" where 90% of your money is super safe (all stock market index funds/t-bonds/etc.) and 10% of your money is in some super speculative asset.

I don't think it's bad advice if you're willing to commit to the speculative asset over a long time horizon and you don't have unrealistic expectations.