Investing General Discussion

Furry

Furry

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Seananigans said:
Prices aren’t supposed to go up. Your entire frame of reference is warped, as is everyone’s.
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Hard to consider accepting reality for what it is as a warped perspective.

Im against owning gold, mostly because any situation I see that paying off id rather own bullets and guns, the truest form of money.
 
Blazin

Blazin

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Gold has never gone up, it's still just Au. Just more fun than saying the dollar went down...again. That is what unproductive assets are for, to keep being the thing they are, while the dollar does what it does best being a two bit whore.
 
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Blazin

Blazin

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Was thinking the other day about some comments and wanted to offer a different perspective. We don't even need to beat inflation to be better off. Not when your NW is beyond your annual need. My NW doesn't need to outpace the dollars loss. I don't spend my NW so it's buying power is of interest to me at a smaller scale. If I spend $50k a year to support my lifestyle and inflation is 5% then I need to gain $2500 more to maintain my position , I don't need 5% on my NW to retain my position.

The point of this is that living below your means is a far bigger factor in being better off than your investment returns. A person could become better and better off for decades and not once out perform the S&P or inflation, then you want to tell that person, "Yeah but adjusted for inflation you're worse off!" But the actual lived experience might be, "guy I have enough money to live my current standard of living for the next 80 years."

I believe it's important to circle back to that every once in awhile, as chasing performance can be exhausting and we have much more control over lifestyle choices than we do chasing top gains. I'm sometimes mad at myself, should have made more etc. Returned 8% of NW damn that should have been 15% had I just done this and this, meanwhile that gain alone is more than I spend in years. Sometimes the real life application of all this matters.
 
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Kirun

Kirun

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"Gold is money, everything else is credit" sounds profound, but it only holds if you assume gold has some special, near-mystical property that makes it the one true measuring stick across all eras, technologies, and institutional setups. And that assumption is… weird. Gold isn't magic. It's a scarce commodity that worked as monetary collateral under very specific historical constraints of slow communication, physical settlement, limited state capacity, and localized trade. Those constraints don't exist anymore.

Using gold as the benchmark to declare that stocks "lost money" over 25 years is basically saying - if an asset doesn't outperform my preferred monetary relic, it didn't create value. That's not an objective truth, that's a choice of numeraire. You could just as easily say stocks massively outperformed wheat, copper, or labor hours. Why is gold the one sacred reference point? It's like a bunch of people read The Creature from Jekyll Island, decided they'd seen through the matrix, and now treat gold as some kind of secular religion. I don't get it.
 
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Tirant

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Point taken, but the reason to use gold as the reference point vs the other commodities you listed, is that gold has a history of being money. The others do not, to a remotely close degree (I know I know, copper pennies). Does that continue? I don't know, but central bank buying and gold being a Tier I HQLA under Basel III sure makes it look like it will. You have to pick SOMETHING to have as a reference point. As Blazin said the dollar is a two bit whore, so why not gold? Certainly has it's own dynamics that can be manipulated but comparing returns priced in dollars vs returns priced in gold is illustrative, at least to me.

For the record, copper also beat stocks over the last 25 years, but not by a lot.
 
Borzak

Borzak

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AI and the companies I work with keep machinery going for many decades. Some have been upgraded over the years with new controls. Some computer/CNC and some still on tapes and punch cards from the 60'. Of course a lot of stuff is made in China or Korea due to machinery. One shop uses a vertical lathe for making repads for manways into vessels and such. It came from the Beaumont, TX area where it was used to make driveshaft fittings on destroyers in WWII. Even light machinery now comes from Turkey or of all places Canada in their partner with Lincon Electric.

I'm sure if we had machines that could run all day doing the same thing over and over the market would be there, but it's not. Everything is a one of a kind.

Serious not just looking at Silver prices is crazy. A month ago spot was in the $50/troy ounce range. It's just under $70 now.
 
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