What sort of other advice is out there that’s somewhat conflicting but equally plausible? The only one I can think of is that you should basically just stick your money in whatever diversified index funds have the lowest feeds. But even if this advice is just as plausible as your advice, your advice still seems worth taking. This is because if you’re wrong and I follow your strategy anyways, pretty much the only cost I’m bearing is decreasing my returns by only a small amount due to increased management fees. But if you’re right and I don’t follow your strategy, I’d miss out on a much less small amount of returns.
Here are a few examples of strategies that look (or looked) equally plausible, from the usually thoughtful blog of my fellow LessWronger Colby Davis .
This blog post recommends: - emerging markets, which overlaps a fair amount with my advice - put-writing, which sounds reasonable to me, but he managed to pick a bad time to advocate it - preferred stock, which looks appropriate today for more risk-averse investors, but which looked overpriced when I wrote my post.
This post describes one of his failures. Buying XIV was almost a great idea. It was a lot like shorting VXX, and shorting VXX is in fact a good idea for experts who are cautious enough not to short too much (alas, the right amount of caution is harder to know than most people expect). I expect the rewards in this area to go only to those who accept hard-to-evaluate risks.
This post has some strategies that require more frequent trading. I suspect they’re good, but I haven’t given them enough thought to be confident.
What sort of other advice is out there that’s somewhat conflicting but equally plausible? The only one I can think of is that you should basically just stick your money in whatever diversified index funds have the lowest feeds. But even if this advice is just as plausible as your advice, your advice still seems worth taking. This is because if you’re wrong and I follow your strategy anyways, pretty much the only cost I’m bearing is decreasing my returns by only a small amount due to increased management fees. But if you’re right and I don’t follow your strategy, I’d miss out on a much less small amount of returns.
Here are a few examples of strategies that look (or looked) equally plausible, from the usually thoughtful blog of my fellow LessWronger Colby Davis .
This blog post recommends:
- emerging markets, which overlaps a fair amount with my advice
- put-writing, which sounds reasonable to me, but he managed to pick a bad time to advocate it
- preferred stock, which looks appropriate today for more risk-averse investors, but which looked overpriced when I wrote my post.
This post describes one of his failures. Buying XIV was almost a great idea. It was a lot like shorting VXX, and shorting VXX is in fact a good idea for experts who are cautious enough not to short too much (alas, the right amount of caution is harder to know than most people expect). I expect the rewards in this area to go only to those who accept hard-to-evaluate risks.
This post has some strategies that require more frequent trading. I suspect they’re good, but I haven’t given them enough thought to be confident.