We've seen instances recently where infectious fear on social media has been quite harmful.Thanks all.
I've proven that I can be sucked into clickbaity stuff as readily as the next P.T. Barnum, uhhh, 'customer' ... it's certainly put me off crypto in a big way.
From now on, I shall endeavor to use this forum as my sole source of needed financial info.
So it's a general warning about shock! horror! media. They are the internet equivalent of tabloid newspapers - which view everything as a sign of moral collapse of western civilisation, doom and defeat, etc. (I am particularly thinking of 2 leading papers in Britain: the Daily Mail and The Express; both truck and trade in that kind of outrage & fear; note the Daily Mail online (one of the most popular English language media sites in the world, is much milder and is more celebrity/ gossip focused).
So if you have acquired antibodies, then great. Just remember all of us are vulnerable.
On financial hucksterism, of which I view c****o as a classic example, that it's always the old wine in new bottles. If it sounds too good to be true, or too scary, it probably is.
The last genuine investment innovations I can think of are:
- ETFs - dating from the early 1990s
- TIPS bonds - dating from 1998 (?) but other countries have been doing inflation linked debt for much longer (eg UK about 1982)
- online stockbroking - Schwab, mid 1990s?
Just about everything else I would ignore.
Gold is an interesting combination. It's both the thing that is always being hyped, and one of the oldest investments. Some quite serious and sensible people like gold as an asset class. But there's a lot of nuance to how you use it, what form you make your investment. William Bernstein, in his Efficient Frontier website, had a piece "The most patient asset" which takes you through it.
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Statistics: Posted by Valuethinker — Fri Sep 20, 2024 4:01 am — Replies 27 — Views 1817