Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Sophisticated money is generally not. The average retail investor absolutely is. Most retail investors invest based on emotion not on fact. A lot of tech company employees justify their emotions as providing them an edge because they're in the industry, but they often likewise get hung up on factors that they find emotionally relevant but aren't actually market relevant factors.

Look at this other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39222007 in this thread. A lot of it is just idle speculation based on the commenter's personal values. These are the analyses that drive retail investors to invest. I don't mean to pick on this commenter specifically; I just felt it to be very illustrative of the kind of analysis that the average tech person does to justify or not justify an investment.




“Techies aren’t as smart as they think they are” is always something that I’ll happily get behind.


I think we're plenty smart for real.

But where we go wrong is thinking that our tech smarts translate to other fields like finance.

Personally I know it's one of my weak spots so I stay far far from investments.


The question is how smart is the break-even investor, i.e. the person I have to beat to win in this game.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: