This is a common issue with people who have Ph. D’s that have zero to do with finance, economics, and investment.
My brother is the same (Ph. D in Physics), and his investment strategies are terrible. I have tried many times to explain to him why this is the case, but he just won’t budge. He is convinced that he is right.
70 something year-old family friend still owns Tesla shares. Had a successful career running his own business and has made a lot of money off of it. Surprisingly, he’s also anti-EV.
Medical doctors here are also notorious for often having bad judgment with respect to investments.
I’m starting to meet up with people I knew in high school and chatting with them. One guy is now an accountant and I’ve got a PhD. We chatted for a couple of hours and then ended up talking about our stock investing (mis-)adventures. We both ended up laughingly acknowledging that we aren’t nearly as brilliant investors as we thought we were in 2022.
I’m trying to be better about investing primarily in broad ETFs, rather than single stocks. The massive gains I’ve had in a couple of stocks make it hard to stop as they’ve more than corrected for most of my missteps. Still trying to convince myself that buying BRK.B was kind of like buying an ETF (sort of a private equity ETF). NVDA just seems like a pretty good bet for the next few years. Was just about ready to sell off my gold and silver equity investments to simplify to broad ETFs, but partly on the massive gains this year and partly on @The_Polymath I’ve stuck with them for much of the year.
Gold is definitely going higher at this point.
The more Trump attacks the Fed, the more demand there will be for gold as a safe haven asset for inflation/FX risk.
In reality, its not that gold is going up, its thats the USD is being debased by Trump and his tariff/Fed antics.
Americans are effectively getting poorer.
I have switched to CHF/EUR denominated Gold Funds. That way you get the benefit of dollar weakening and gold strengthening.
All it takes is someone to come up with a chip that solves a couple very basic computations like dot product or slope, and nvdia’s toast. And I’m sure there’s a lot of people spending a lot of money doing just that.
My understanding is that the GPU’s are very very good at about 2-3 things that are used in AI models - dot product of matrixes (could be cross product, I’m not going to try and remember) and doing the calcs to find the slope of the model given the data. That’s about it. Normal computing takes a ton of sequential calcs to do that stuff, the GPU’s do it in parallel. All it takes is a mathie to come up with a way to solve those things quicker and boom, there goes NVIDIA’s lead.
And of course, a million other funky things could happen.
I think it’s a bit slower process than you suggest. It took Intel awhile to fail, where AMD started gaining ground in 2019/2020 and didn’t actually fall until 2022.
First the mathie has to come up with the chip. Then they have to build it. Then they have to start grabbing marketshare. Grabbing marketshare seems to be a hard thing where space at chip foundries seems to be limited.
I have no thoughts of catching NVIDIA at it’s all time peak. On the other hand, it seems like I should be able to catch it when it starts stagnating.
Regardless, we’re talking about 1% of my investments and I’m currently up 37% since I bought it back in the spring. Even if I only get a 20% gain over the next 3 years, I’m fine.
Which one(s)?
Swisscanto (CH) Gold ETF EA CHF (ZGLD)
EUWAX II Gold (EWG2LD)
That or the AI hype rocket falls to earth.
My great financial regret is that I didn’t play this silly stonk game 3 years ago when I was dead sure that AI was about to change the world. Admittedly I probably would have made the wrong bet anyway and bought Google or something.
You would have still.doubled your money over the last 3 years.
ETA: I can see where it would be disappointing vs a more than 10-fold increase with NVIDIA.
Thoughts on investing in gold miners vs gold?
Thats a good question.
Could make sense if you need income (from dividends) but also want to get some of the upside of gold (and other metals) shooting up in price via some share price appreciation.
Much harder to quantify the FX impact of USD FX tanking though, as these are obviously complex businesses vs say buying only Gold ETFs.
Companies are continuing to largely absorb tariff hits through lower margins. This can’t last forever.
Can we believe it? Falsely lowered to incite fed rate reductions? I dunno, but I think believable given all the headlines of layoffs during the time period though.
Would love to see the revised post-March numbers.
So basically everything Biden released in 24 was a lie and the recent revisions really haven’t been that bad if they were baselined properly?
I’m really not sure. I’m hoping that someone will dig through the report and clarify. I’m not the one to do it. I can definitely see the motivation to fudge the numbers based on the last person being fired.
