I f'd up on these. Did not research enough and notice they were ROC rather than divs so I sold them today. I will keep them in mind for the future, or if we start going sideways for long period.

I exited that one today at .215. Made 60% return. May regret getting out as it may run for a couple more days but I can’t shake my gut saying this ones a “pump and dump.” Are you a true believer in this one?

Nope, I'm not a true believer in any stock, it's all about the profit. I think you were smart to cash out, it started dropping a little in the last hour, I'm likely doing at least a partial cash out tomorrow.

You and your fancy gas!

I only buy Costco gas if I'm shopping there, I'll put up with the line if I'm there already. We have a Native gas station right off the main freeway near a casino that has the cheapest gas, since they don't have to pay the taxes, it's pretty convenient if you are driving up I-5.

Okay thanks for the reply. Learning as I go but was happy to exit on green

.

My HEMI deserves the good stuff. Sadly I pay over a full dollar more a gallon less then a year ago.

But nothing to see here, all is good and higher gas prices actually help the poor!

Yeah my HEMI gets spoiled as well

Lots of bargain buying going on. BABA is one of them.. Also they're buying the Casinos again. I'm thinking someone js going to have some good news about Covid soon.

Google rose again. Looks like I sold a little early.

What is going on with DELL? Down 50% overnight.

Do yourself a favor and look up "index investing."

You and I and everyone else in this thread are irrelevant. It's not about brains or integrity or feelings or friendship or wisdom or knowledge.

It's all about STATISTICS.

For my entire adult lifetime, I have listened to people endlessly explain what stocks to pick and their reasoning behind it. It always sounds reasonable. Sell this stock and buy that stock because of this and that. Oil prices are up, agricultural prices are down, blah blah blah.

But STATISTICALLY, it is a FACT that if you buy a low-cost S&P 500 index fund from Vanguard and just let your money sit there through thick and thin, your returns will outperform 85% of individual investors and 75% of professionally managed portfolios.

The 500 index is a brisk performer. And it doesn't make human errors. And it's extremely low cost.

Here's a great example:

Back in 2019 went to my tax accountant to do get my taxes done, and I asked the accountant, who is also a financial advisor with college degrees in finance and accounting, what he thought of the stock market.

He's a chatty guy and he told me that he advised all of his clients to get out of the market for the year, the market is overheated, blah blah blah.

For a minute I got sucked in and made plans to pull everything out. But then I said to myself, "NOPE. NOPE. NOPE. DO YOU BELIEVE IN STATISTICS OR DON'T YOU?"

I did the STATISTICAL thing and left my money in my Vanguard S&P 500 index fund and I made a big fat pile of money in 2019.

"The S&P 500 Price index returned 30.43% in 2019. Using a better calculation including dividend reinvestment, the S&P 500 returned 33.07%." My accountant advised his customers to miss out on one of the most incredible years in the history of the stock market.

This was a human error. My accountant got nervous and tried to TIME THE MARKET. Trying to time the market is statistically an error.

When it comes to people's stock advice in threads like this, it's ENDLESS and EVERYONE thinks that he has great magical wisdom.

Just look at this thread. 300+ pages of people talking about gas prices and agriculture and apple and tesla like they have a crystal ball. It never ends.

Back in 2008 or so, the stock market tanked. Every website you can name had 1000s and 1000s of people advising that the end of the world was nigh and YOU SHOULD TAKE YOUR MONEY OUT OF THE MARKET AND BUY GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD.

GOLD IS YOUR SAVIOR IN THIS TIME OF DOOMSDAY! It all made perfect sense. Buy gold at $1900 an ounce so you can survive the coming zombie apocalypse.

I ignored this wise, sage, magical advice and did what I always do: put my money into my good old S&P 500 index fund. For the next ten years, my money doubled and tripled and quadrupled while gold flatlined.

Here's the best part:

Every single time that I tell people that I'm an index investor, and why, they sort of sneer at me and say, "Well, if you don't have any risk tolerance and you're OK with mediocrity, then I guess that's fine for you."

Out of the 1000 people who have said that to me, my returns in the stock market beat 850 of them. If that's "mediocrity", then I'll gladly take it.

AND, when I ask people what their annualized returns are, they refuse to tell me. Because 85% of them can't beat the index.

As I approach retirement and my risk tolerance changes, I'll use one of the vanguard target retirement index funds that has stocks and bond indexes. And I'll continue to beat 85% of my peer group.

Math is your friend. What I outlined above is LOGICALLY SOUND but BORING. People don't want to make 8% annualized returns. They want to make 6% while they are chasing 500%. That's why people reject index investing.

One more thing: gambling is addictive to the human mind. RANDOM rewards are IRRESISTABLE to the human brain. You know how they get the killer whales to jump way out of the water? They vary the size of the bait. Usually the bait is a tiny fish. But every so often, it's a HUGE fish. And the killer whales get addicted to the RANDOM reward. People make a big hit in the market and they'll spend the rest of their life chasing down that moment of glory. Because of how mammal brains are wired.

Sold about 1/2 of my LCID at $35 this morning... everything from my tax advantaged accounts I can day trade in.. Gonna buy back in lower if it goes as planned. Still a long term believer. Bought in at 23 and sold at 35. Not bad!

Most of us are already in index funds...this is a trading thread so naturally a small portion of my (and I'm sure others) portfolio is used for trading..we've discussed indexing ad nauseum here and most people agree with you.

90% of my stock portfolio is in index funds, the other 10% is what we talk about in this thread. No one wants to hear about my steady index fund growth.

Well, AABB popped another 25% this morning and then everyone started selling. I sold 3/4 of my shares when it dropped to 10% up today. I made a good profit on this stock, I'll let the rest ride to see what happens.

Do they, though? I think a lot of people index invest as a default, because they have a 401k at work and they don't know what else to do. They look at the mutual funds that their company offers and pick the 500 fund because it has the best numbers.

Most of the people I know who invest actively in the market are not index investors. Especially the financial people I know, they all pick their own stocks.

I do some gambling. I invest some "disposable" money in crypto, which I regard in general to be a big fat joke. But it makes people rich. For now.

Spinoff:

"what happened is that yesterday after close of trading, Dell completed the spinoff of its 81% stake in VMware (NYSE: VMW), effectively dividing the company into two stand-alone companies and distributing a total of 310.9 million shares of VMware (and a boatload of cash) among Dell shareholders."

https://finance.yahoo.com/m/cee9bc00-c420-3ea9-adaa-a3b87bdab391/why-dell-stock-got-cut-in.html

It's probably good advice to reiterate for new investors looking for direction, but really, anyone serious about investing probably has already put a good portion of their investments into it, unless they yolo'd on FAANG and Tesla / or crypto. Those aren't people you are going to convince. Riding waves of meme and momentum is the hot topic the last few years. Index is boring for most, but as has been stated, people looking for trades in trade channels are generally looking for plays outside of index funds.

You just have to jazz up the indexing story a little bit.

Like this:

"Hey guys! I was making a bank transfer to my index fund and the doorbell rang. I opened the door and Scarlett Johannsen walked in and gave me a lap dance!! Wooooo!"

See? Admit that the indexing story sucked you in there.

Maybe I'm being a knucklehead, but these kind of threads are always so full of emphatic speculation and so full of "toxic positivity" that they leave the impression that the respondents don't know much about investing.

When you see 5 people wrangling back and forth for 10 pages about how the price of baby formula will cause Schmesla to quadruple in price, do you walk away with the feeling that they have a real firm grasp on investing?

Maybe you had to be around for 2008 when every single person on earth said to sell all your stocks and buy gold. That would have tended to eradicate your faith in the average investor.

Everyone had this unshakable notion that gold would buy them penicillin in Defcon-4-Land. I saw a thread about gold buying, and I posted up that if the economy got so bad that the corporate factory farming system broke down, we would all starve in a month or so. So gold wouldn't help you buy anything, because there would be nothing to buy.

People DID NOT like that idea and got VERY ANGRY. Pennsylvania produces 10.3 billion pounds of milk annually, and if there is even a snowstorm the stores run out of milk in an hour. But these people were all convinced that gold, a lump of useless metal, would make them the king of Doomsdayland.

(If you want to stock up for doomsday, I recommend military grade 9mm and 223 ammunition. It never spoils and would be a good thing to trade with.)

To be fair, stocks aren't going to do much for you in those scenarios either. Go talk to the crypto folks about doomsday....as if there will be electricity and networks everywhere to support that. Gold is physical - while some of us disagree to what extent gold will be wanted in such scenarios, it will still be useful, unlike any of this other stuff. Really it will all come down to the extent of said event. 2020 was a good view into what would happen if it got much worse. We didn't even see 'bad'.

Gold is useful only as a medium of exchange. So it's usefulness is proportional to how much the free market place exists.

If we were in the worst case Defcon-4-land, where the living envy the dead and all that, 99% of people would starve in a month. Unfarmed land produces almost no "human food." Factory farming produces HUGE amounts of food. Do the math.

You know how long a deer will feed a grown man who hunts all day? About 12 days. Even the big deer up north. There is not enough wild game to keep people alive.

In the event of a doomsday scenario, people would trade in the remaining stocks of food and medicine and they would need guns and bullets to keep it.

The Donner Party probably had lots of gold coins, but they ended up eating each other anyway.

That's my 2 cents on it.

How good of an investment that gold is, is another riddle. I have no freaking clue. I never had a feel for it. It could do great or it could tank. It's not very appealing to me at $1800 an ounce.

The "head for the hills" mentality certainly sells an awful lot of nutritional supplements, religious books, magic trinkets, dried beef, pails of protein powder, boomsticks, etc... and hey... where there's a market, there's an opportunity! Alas. Dumb dollars (and votes) spend the same as smart ones.

Today we are all so interconnected with one another there is no going back. Not without massive amounts of misery, sharp reductions in life expectancy, etc. Basically a harrowing, brutal, unpredictable, nightmarish existence.

"We're all in this together" ~Harry Tuttle

I love apocalypse movies and my friends and I talk about surviving if there is a zombie apocalypse, that stuff is totally entertaining and fun to talk about. And as someone that camps and road trips alot. I'm generally pretty prepared with supplies and self-sufficiency.

But this in no way influences my investments. I invest to make money. Investing with a doomsday, prepper or "What if?" mindset is generally a terrible investment strategy. Index funds, property, stocks, crypto... that's where you will make the most money right now.

I come off real snotty in this thread so far.

LOL

That's because I'm being lazy. Whenever you are critical of anything, you tend to come off as a negative, critical person.

So you have to couch your opinion very gently, like sandwich the negative stuff in between chunks of praise.

That's what the book, "how to win friends and influence people" is mostly about, in case you never read it. How to be adverse with people without offending them or turning it into an ego battle.

FWIW, I don't mean to be critical of anyone. Just a big big fan of indexing.

I'm an engineer, and stock picking is a big topic of conversation among engineers. I can tell you this for sure: being good at solving physics problems doesn't help people pick stocks. But they are certain that it does.

Does anyone else believe the metaverse will be the next stage in technological evolution and if so isn’t Facebook stock very undervalued?

Okay so is there a consensus of the best Index Fund/Broker?

Also a consensus of which is better for the bulk of your money….Index funds vs ETF’s?

Here's where the curmudgeon in me comes out. Fuck FB and fuck the metaverse. Their idea of the ideal internet is not the same as mine. As far as I'm concerned everyone should dump their shares and close their accounts and let that company shrivel up. Same with Google and Apple as far as I'm concerned. They've shown what their version of the future is, and it's all about tracking, controlling, and selling you to the highest bidder.

I’m agree with you on that but the fact is that’s where the future is headed wheather we like it or not.A fully digital world has been the plan for a long time.

I think Tesla and Facebook still have massive growth potential and seem like no brainers to hold for the next 10 years,am I wrong?

Disclaimer:I just started investing and have no idea what I am doing!

Check this out for some good advice. https://grow.acorns.com/why-just-invest-in-an-index-fund-is-useless-advice/?&qsearchterm=index%20funds

n/m the news is misleading on this.

It's just a push by facebook to sell a gaggle of vr headsets, as of now they haven't really made a real effort in that regard. I personally don't mind them trying to push the technology forward, however realistically most people don't want to wear a clunky thing on their head that is a sweaty mess for even short periods of time. I have the latest Quest, played it a bunch the first few days, and even though the experience is great, it's just not something that you really want to use often.

I love VR and don't mind the hardware. I hate the idea of FB being who is paving the direction, because for them it is all about tracking and pushing ads and being a locked ecosystem like Apple. Their interests are not about making it better. I'll wait and see if any of the blowback makes them rethink things.

It's not. Oculus allows (and encourages) third party developers, and they unlocked it from facebook.

As an early VR adopter I think Facebook is pretty undervalued given their vision in this department. It's likely the way many people around the world will work in the relatively near future. You don't need a big sprawling desk with mutliple monitors in your home - just plop on your goggles and you have infinite screen space, and a presence in a virtual office.

I don't have much free funds to throw at it right now, but if I did, I'd throw some money at it.

I don't like 'facebook' either, or at least not the way my mother-in-law uses it. It was fine when we used it to discuss assignments and plan parties.. But they've accelerated VR as a platform more than any other company.

Did they? If so, that's new within a few weeks/days after announcing all hardware would require facebook accounts/logged in.

Sorry, getting off topic at this point. That being said, I still have no interest in putting any money into FB. I don't care if they make money. It's not where I want to get mine from.

Sure, but they did buy Oculus, and the other headset manufacturers aren't lighting the world on fire. Anyways, your assumption seems to be that this will take off and Facebook, er "meta", will be in control of it. I really don't see it catching on to that degree, but maybe it will help VR in some way, I know Microsoft, Sony's and Steam's attempts haven't really caught fire though, so to say this is a slam dunk is a stretch.

It's still early and niche, and as you say, people don't really like the requirements or the costs at this point. The direction the quest is going is not bad, but again, they have a specific idea in mind, and to do that, they defer cost and performance so if that is the direction we are headed, then it's going to be a long time before it will be at the level that most people want it to be. Do I think any of this will move their stock? Not really. They are looking for more ways to gather data to sell and spam ad revenue, so it might help with numbers, but as you state, I don't think adoption rates will be that high.

Welcome to the thread...the more the merrier. Which index funds are you in?

Facebook is going to act as portal onto Sandbox, Decentraland, etc.

I hate FB and don’t have an account there, but I see big future for metaverse, think ready player one.

Everyone I know hates that we live in 1984 but no one throws away their tv. Metaverse is coming.

I mean that's fine, but then why comment on the company with incorrect info? Doesn't that sort of misinformation belong on..... facebook?

4 days ago
VR outfit Oculus is planning to ditch the need for a Facebook account to use Oculus Quest hardware. ... During the keynote, Zuckerberg also revealed that Facebook the company will be renamed to Meta, to reflect its plans to "bring the metaverse to life."

Zuck didn't call me and tell me he had a change of heart.

I think Ready Player One was a glimpse into the future,like it or not.Imagine how addicting it will become for people.The more I think about it the more it makes sense.Crypto currency,NFT’s, all this never made sense to me until you realize we will be living,playing,working,and shopping in a virtual world.

Glamorous.
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To be on topic: bought some more EPD, NET, CRWD, and XLE today. Then looks at crypto and says I should have just thrown everything into that a few weeks ago.

I've loved the idea of the Metaverse since I read Snow Crash in 1992, where I think the term was first coined. That was before most people even new the web existed. I'm sure Ernest Cline read the same book and it was a huge influence on Ready Player One.

That's the thing though, this isn't Ready Player One, what they showed isn't even a realistic portrayal of virtual reality. There is plenty of evidence that even with the software support people aren't drawn to VR. This would have to increase productivity for this to have a chance, when current VR points in the opposite direction.

Maybe people have gotten so used to wearing masks that they think people will love wearing a headset all day, but the tech needs to advance on a parabolic scale to get to a reasonable place. And on a side note, AR is pretty terrible now too.

Oculus Quest 2 is an AMAZING piece of kit. I've shown it to numerous friends. Nearly everyone bought one afterward.

I now play Walkabout Mini Golf with friends in VR. We chat, we play golf, we marvel at the sights and sounds of the imminent future.

Fact: The real and virtual worlds are merging. The process has been underway for a long time, largely in parallel. But soon, fusion.

You used to go to your PC and use dialup modems. Then broadband. Then smartphones. Next, the glasses and AR navigation. Everyone will have a heads-up display.

No telling if FB or some other entity will rule this space... but it is most definitely coming in a most impressive way. I just hope all of this will be for the better.

I hope people were careful about investing in that company Netlist that was touted a few days ago.

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What dat MAC money do doe?!