You did a stint on the helpdesk at your college? I can't quite tell what you learned -- did people disclose material non-public information to you and you were afraid the SEC might come after you for acting on it?
Maybe I’m phrasing poorly. More like you learn someone’s deepest hopes and dreams, the psychic “initialization vectors” that allow you to predict how they’ll act.
(And then by extension how large groups of people with similar backgrounds will act.)
Index funds are pretty much the only thing worth investing in, so in a weird way by trying to avoid "good" investments you probably saved yourself a lot of money. Also what school was it? I can't imagine a university is a hot bed of insider trading information. Certainly mine wasn't :) Or were you working off campus somewhere?
>Index funds are pretty much the only thing worth investing in, so in a weird way by trying to avoid "good" investments you probably saved yourself a lot of money.
On the other hand, I also used to joke “someone’s gotta adjust the Vanguard” back before I knew “Vanguard” was also the name of a neo-nazi group[1].
Someone has to at least pick high level things like the ratio of stocks to bonds, national to international, that sort of thing… and I’d remarked to many people in many contexts that one downside to index funds is that folks selling off shares might have a disproportionate effect on the market.
Especially if the person selling explicitly mentions they’re purposely selling over 10k’s worth to trigger a report to the feds, because they feel they’re facing persistent issues with irrational actors, so it’s time to get cash into your checking account in preparation for emigration, since the state refuses to honor its promises unless you make them think the alternative is… well go look at the returns for VASIX[2]since about October 2021 and use your imagination :-)
People disclose a lot by accident and you can not repeat what you see but it’s hard to forget what you’ve learned.
(It’s partly why I didn’t want to be a systems admin or forensics tech and focused on censorship circumvention.)