Right, people often look to companies like Intel, AMD, Nvidia and think 'If only I held!'

They don't look at 3DFX, Transmeta, Centillium, Virata, or the numerous other companies because they are dead in the graveyard of failed companies that have lost full valuation.

Depending on how much you invest in each, if you panic-buy/sell, etc changes all that. You're also ultimately betting on whether or not there will ever be another bubble/hype in the industry, and that you are betting wide enough into fully speculative companies like Nvidia instead of just aiming for power players. People forget that the market for luxury PC hardware barely existed at the time and was populated by a very small group of wealthy consumers. Expecting that to take off against the cheap prices of console offerings and against the technical know-how of assembling/disassembling PCs is closer to faith than any rationale.

Just by law of probability and total number of actual bagholders, the vast majority of people didn't bet that way. But I guess if you think you're special or have some lucrative insight into the industry, you might think you're an exception to that rule.

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BiraIgnacio a day ago | parent | next [-]

Right, the other case seems to definitely be happening

> 'Yikes': CoreWeave stock sinks after its bond yield touched 15%

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/article/yikes-coreweave...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50090791

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bushbaba a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure but if you bought a broad index you were fine

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paimapi a day ago | parent [-]

Again, that depends on how long you hold and when you cash out. Most people don't get rich: https://archive.nytimes.com/screenshots/www.nytimes.com/inte...

I'm sure there are studies out there on the ratio of upper-middle-to-upper class households vs not, adjusted for inflation, with surveys on how they invest (if they do at all) with other factors accounted for. I know for sure that the total number of households who hold index funds (50+%) [0] far exceeds households that have a million+ in assets (10+%) [1]. If index funds were some magic bullet investment vehicle for multiplying your money, we'd see better ratios than 1:5 with only the top 20% becoming wealthy-adjacent (and that's provided that 100% of the millionaire class got rich via index funds and not other means like real estate).

[0] https://www.ici.org/news-release/ici-report-shows-mutual-fun...

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/guess-percent-people-1-millio...

edit: as a corollary, I was just talking about this with someone who works in finance and the sentiment amongst ICs like them, they say, is that this is definitely a bubble that will pop at some point. The only contention is how devastating the effects will be, if it'll be a slump, a recession, or a depression.

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KellyCriterion a day ago | parent [-]

WOW, MANY thanks for linking the NYT graphic!

Its very good and tells a lot!

Thanks for sharing!

	▲	lesuorac a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I’m not so sure. It’s showing how much better or worse than inflation. That’s not an apples-apples comparison. Like if you don’t invest into say SNP500 then the money grows (or not) at what rate and is that rate better than the SNP500? It’s way better to get a 10% return when there’s 11% inflation if the alternative was 0%.
	▲	twoodfin a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It’s weird to the point I consider it deliberately misleading: - Anybody wise enough to invest in the S&P 500 is likely also wise enough not to invest their entire nest egg in a single year, 20 years before retirement. - The massive bulk of “ordinary American” 401(k) / IRA funds are in low-fee, no-tax-on-growth accounts. This chart has a nebulous “taxes and fees” component, which in this already artificial context makes even less sense to apply to annual returns. - Counting only real growth without comparing to other investment options (real estate, bonds, cash under the mattress) fails to capture the relative value of diversified index funds. In short: Impossible to beat reliably no matter how you set the metric.