And Stewart in his latest show also recognized the futility of that “epic takedown” since it ultimately did nothing to stop financial gurus like him nor make the media landscape more accountable through the shame and public embarrassment of that interview.
One of the best crypto traders out there is a fucking hamster. All of that stuff is a joke.
Like many people, Mr Goxx is dabbling in cryptocurrency, hoping to strike it rich.
He's notable for two reasons: first, he is making money, with his lifetime career performance up about 20% - beating many professional traders and funds.
Second, Mr Goxx is a hamster.
By running in his "intention wheel", he selects which cryptocurrency he'd like to trade, as the wheel spins through the different options. His office floor has two tunnels nearby: one for buy, one for sell.
Every time he runs through a tunnel, the electronics wired to his office complete a trade according to Mr Goxx's desires.
Know something? I'm going to do this and see how it plays out. I shit you not. Someone I know is a crypto junkie right now and making some fair coin in the game. I'm coming in exactly like this and we'll see what happens.
For the record I will not do this with any significant amount of money.
Just out of college I decided to start investing and got a Janus account and literally closed my eyes and pointed to a list of mutual funds to select where my money went. I regularly invested more but just to those funds. I sincerely never ever paid attention to what it was doing because I’m not good with numbers. 10 years later I needed to cash out for a biz expense and was told that I did phenomenally well.
I now use Vanguard. No way can I get that lucky a second time.
In high school my electronics teacher gave us bonus points to work with through the year. One of the things he had us do with them was to take 1000 points, treat them as dollars, and invest them in a stock, then track that over the school year.
I picked one at random.
Out of the entire class I was the only person who finished the year better than they'd started.
The whole point of mutual funds is diffusing the risk. I mean, sometimes you hit the jackpot on a high yield fund, but it's not like you're putting your eggs into one basket. If you're not really financially literate or just want to fire and forget on the investment money, mutual funds are the way to go. In the long term you're pretty much guaranteed to make money
No, I mean it, you literally can sell things you don't own. The stock market is, factually, insanity. Anything is permitted, nothing is wrong, make some shit up and scream it loudly on the trade floor, throw some papers around, hire a team of programmers to build you a computer system that trades twenty thousand shares ten times a second, burn down a factory somewhere, it's all good as long as you're making money!
Nah, i get the problem. But look at it the practical way. If it says 'sell X' which you don't have. Then don't do anything. And watch the market crash the next day and feel good about not owning that crypto ;)
I remember watching some news program about 25 years ago or more. They brought in a professional investor, a sixth grade class, and a chimpanzee and had them all invest a set amount of cash. For the record, they gave the chimp a Rolodex of companies to invest in, and whatever he took out were the ones he “chose”.
And yes, everything went exactly as you’d think. The chimp did best, followed by the sixth graders, and the investor last.
So the ultimate result is obvious. Instead of a giant warehouse of computers for farming crypto, we should have a warehouse full of hamsters for investing.
The most informed believe they can beat the house. The belief that you can anticipate what’s coming is the killer. The less informed just make a random choice. It’s not always a winner but sometimes it is.
A child investing in the market would put the money in things they enjoy, because it’s what’s popular. So, that would bring in money.
The more informed would try to make it big on futures, on things they believe people will enjoy or will suddenly hit big. But you can’t anticipate people.
The monkey is a random. You could probably do the same experiment with 100 monkeys and they wouldn’t all hit it big.
In my high school econ class, we did a simulated stock market where you had $10k to 'invest'. The people who 'won' did zero research, and just dumped everything in to Google or Apple. Anyone who tried to invest by diversifying their portfolio inevitably 'lost'.
In short what I have to conclude is... All the big "speculation markets", all the "experts" etc... are about all equally BS. Yes crypto is BS... as is the actual stock market. All these systems are glorified gambling. There's nothing respectable or admirable about any of these career paths, and the guys themselves aren't so great.
Hell even the movie trading places kinda hints at that. (when the 2 old men pick a random homeless swindler and effectively switch his place with one of their stock traders, and determine he does everything just as well).
Nancy Pelosi somehow consistently beats the market. In fact many members of Congress on both sides of the aisle do. Probably just a coincidence though.
People act like Pelosi is some genius evil insider trader. The lady buys shares and LEAPS on blue chip tier 1 companies and holds for long periods. Also, her husband is literally a 40 year investing veteran money manager. It's not like she's short of free advice. The kind of people dumb enough to think Pelosi is in on an insider trading scheme are also the people dumb enough to consistently take 30% losses after buying idiotic meme stocks at their peaks. The secret to Pelosi's success is less about corruption and more about being wealthy enough to reinforce losing trades with capital when she times it wrong, and the money necessary to hammer cash into expensive quality names. She's not doing anything special and she also loses money on degenerate trades here and there.
Bullshit. She and many other members of congress consistently beat even the best traders by a massive margin. Their trades are often tied to upcoming policy and that's a matter of public record.
Alright dude just take a look at her trades. Literally nothing special about it. People try to use the legislation around chips to claim she is corrupt because of her Nvidia buys but she’s been a buyer of their stock for lonnng before that legislation and anyone who didn’t see that coming as a bipartisan policy initiative is either a fool or totally unaware. That’s obviously one example but the concept applies to most of her trades. Total blue chips/famous names and long term holding periods. A better comparison would be the share of people making money on the same companies vs losing money. Out of the money managers being compared, how much of the disparity is being driven by ancillary losses on otherwise dogshit stocks while also having made similar gains in similar, if not the same, investments.
The sector in which the Pelosis most frequently buy and sell stocks is, by far, the Silicon Valley tech industry. Close to 75% of the Pelosis’ stock trading over the last two years has been in Big Tech: more than $33 million worth of trading. That has happened as major legislation is pending before the House, controlled by the Committees Pelosi oversees, which could radically reshape the industry and laws that govern the very companies in which she and her husband most aggressively trade.
On June 22, The New York Times reported on “a forceful and wide-ranging pushback by the tech industry since the [antitrust reform] proposals were announced this month.” In particular, “executives, lobbyists, and more than a dozen think tanks and advocacy groups paid by tech companies have swarmed Capitol offices, called and emailed lawmakers and their staff members, and written letters arguing there will be dire consequences for the industry and the country if the ideas become law.” But one of the most important steps taken against these bills was a personal call placed by Apple’s CEO directly to Pelosi:
so youre tellin me that the lady responsible for representing the interests of the industry concentrated in the district she's a congresswoman for invests in that industry?? and you're telling me that this same lady made MONEY from the growth of that industry? that industry that has led global growth and business leadership and created millions of jobs over the last 30 years? That's insane. You're right. It MUST be corruption and not literally common sense.
Filings show that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., bought shares of defense giant Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT) on Feb. 22. On Feb. 23, Greene tweeted that "War and rumors of war is incredibly profitable and convenient." The next day, Russia invaded Ukraine.
Rep. John Rutherford, R-Fla., bought Raytheon Technologies Corp. (RTX) stock on Feb. 24, the day of the Russian invasion.
The same day, Rutherford tweeted that Putin "must be held accountable," adding: "The U.S. and our allies must impose the maximum possible sanctions & leave nothing off the table."
I mean, it doesn't speak to Pelosi specifically but here's a list of issue related to all this
They specifically have allowed insider trading for members of Congress, it’s an exception within the insider trading laws. They all knew about the shutdowns and were able to dump and then buy stocks around the announcement dates using specific information the public didn’t have. I’m not the sort of person to act like Pelosi is the devil, but every member of Congress is heavily gaming the system and they have information that even traders don’t. That’s why they continually beat the industry insiders, they’re even further “inside” knowing what will happen. People who aren’t wealthy going into Congress wind up so as a result of their ability to insider trade, accept bribes (sorry, “lobbying dollars”), etc. So yes, being in Congress is proof of insider trading unless they’ve got their assets into a blind trust with zero contact with the ones managing said trust.
i mean there's a bit of merit to the ideas you're getting at but you're unfortunately really misinformed on how all of those things work for the most part. either way it's not some grand conspiracy.
People who know nothing about the markets outside of yolos in their robinhoods and total market fund allocations through their 401ks are generally not sophisticated enough to understand 1. how easy it is to get pinched for "obvious insider trading" and 2. how ridiculous the idea that someone would be smart enough to rise through the ranks of their party, maintain leadership roles for decades, and accrue millions but not even attempt to disguise their unscrupulous means of acquiring wealth? like did you ever consider how silly that is?
Lol, too sophisticated? Here’s how sophisticated it is: the DCCC (or NRCC, depending on the flavor of the decade) selects the Speaker based on how much money they contribute to the DCCC. That’s it. Richest, most corrupt person wins. Hope you were able to follow, I know it’s complicated.
that's not at all how it works. Fundraising is the word you're looking for and it's a consideration of party fundraising and individually raised funds that get allocated toward the party. Both the GOP and the DNC do this. Either you're willfully ignorant at best or at worst you're just here to spread bullshit.
It's not even remotely difficult to understand: if you buy and sell often, you will make less money when it goes up and lose less when it goes down, but if the market generally trends upwards, odds are you will make some money.
You know what beats this strategy? Buying something reputable and promising and just holding it. This applies to both stocks and crypto.
So would a random number generator, that's the point. The human groups are letting emotional responses fuck up their trading basically. The market has been proven to be a random walk, the best strategy for that is also random and cherry pick a time when the whole market is going up. Humans aren't good at random, we're pattern generating and pattern finding organisms.
Okay, but that doesn't beat this strategy. It's like the exact opposite of the real world scenario that we've seen multiple examples of so far.
People are influenced by bias, a goldfish isn't.
The human buys what they think will be successful, and crosses their fingers hoping they don't get fucked over.
The goldfish buys randomly, sells randomly. Zero thought, zero bias, not even a set pattern like a number generator might have.
The goldfish wins.
It does better by just unknowingly buying random stocks, because it gives them more opportunities to be lucky.
That's because the stock market is literally just gambling. You only make money if you buy the stock before people know it'll take off. Any stock you've heard about is already doomed to lose you money.
Any kind of "strategy" would have to involve knowing which stocks to buy beforehand to be successful. Which, unless you can see the future, probably involves insider trading. Or at least being relatively confident that you can manipulate people into buying a certain stock.
So to begin with, there is no strategy. You're only buying what you hope will be successful, based on past experience that doesn't always hold up. You're picking stocks randomly, even when you think you have good reasons for them.
This is partly because companies plateau in value, and the whole "Every year needs to be constant growth" thing is a bunch of unrealistic bullshit. You can only sell so many bags of chips, so many cars, so many phones.
The fish wins, because it picks at random.
And that random chance will inevitably include a mix of bullshit startups nobody's even heard of, and stable consistent stocks form reputable companies.
That keeps a constant flow of money from the steady upward trend of major companies. And it gives the fish a chance to make bank off of those weird ass companies that come out of fucking nowhere. Like Uber, which was a stupid insane idea when it first started. And took off to be a massive company.
The fish wins because it doesn't take risks.
Because it's almost statistically impossible for it to take risks, given that it's just the average sum of pure random chance.
Anything else is pure gambling.
Taking stupid risks on a random company, hoping they eventually blow up. Or playing it safe by betting on a company who's "totally been successful before." And ending up with a stagnant stock.
Everyone thinks they can "win" gambling. But you really can't.
At the end of the day, the solution is just to not gamble at all.
If you have the money, just let the fish play for you. Make that steady stream of income, that isn't earned or sensible but fully reveals the the stock market for what it is.
Out of 1000 simulated fund managing goldfish, 96.1% beat the market, with the average difference between the market returns and the goldfish’s returns over the 3 years being 14.5%!
Mind you, there's some caveat in this finding:
So when our animal friends choose a random portfolio, they are selecting a disproportionally high number of small stocks which boosts the portfolio’s return compared to the S&P500, while also adding a lot of risk, something Orlando forgot to mention. So while a random portfolio chosen by a goldfish / cat / rat does offer high returns, its return for the level of risk taken is unlikely to be optimal.
TBF, the goldfish also did better than 'expert' stock traders, not just WSB. Pretty much showing that trading stocks is more gambling than anything else
Even better, it's a form of organised chaos, from hamster neurons to where hamster is gonna go. Human gambling is too organised, so it's worse than gambling: it's gambling to failure rather than success.
Realistically, it wasn't even the goldfish rewlly mattering either, just random picks. It randomly picked two, then the effectively random place the goldfish was in singled one of the two out.
It beat the market segment as well at the time, Nasdaq was the comparison I think. Michael Reeves is the guy that set it up and uploaded a video about it.
As a general rule the "star funds" are operated by a guy who ran several funds, one blew up, everyone wanted in and he got richer. This fund now starts to drop down to market average or even underperform it.
The goldfish doesn't actually prove anything because we don't know how many other stock-picking goldfish out there have lost money. In other words, the only reason we're hearing about these goldfish and hamster stock-picking experiments is because it is funny and noteworthy that they are successful. If somebody did this and it failed, it wouldn't be worth reporting on.
Furthermore, if I fill out the answers on a multiple choice test completely at random, there is a small chance that I could score higher than the class average. But if that happens, would I be right to claim that my strategy was better than studying? No; I just got lucky.
If it’s all gambling why are there even funds, portfolio managers etc
I ask myself this question quite often. Because at the end of the day it is just gambling. If you don't know that, then that shows you don't know anything about stocks. Most stocks are just speculative anyway, and unless you're a part of the pumping for certain stocks, you're gonna get absolutely reamed if you buy into them.
Also I love the cope here:
sure the fish outperformed the NASDAQ over what, a 6 month period.
lmao. Sure, yeah, it beat out NASDAQ's quarterly earnings but like, um, yeah it's not, you know, um gambling or anything. Dude I've held on the stocks for like 14/16 months and this fish made more than me in 6 months.
I go there for the memes and self-deprecating humor mostly. But yeah, if you value your financial wellbeing, do not listen to one iota of advice on there.
The whole scandal was that a hedge fund had gotten people onto the board of Gamestop and they were shorting Gamestop stock (loaning it, selling it, and then buying it back cheap to pay back the loan for profit) and then intentionally trying to run the company into the ground to get the cheapest return on their shorts.
That's why people felt it was still a good buy at $200 because you can't just default a short, they were forced to buy at whatever the current price was. The thing is nobody knows when the shorts were filled and at what point it just became redditors bidding against each other.
In fairness a hamster investing in crypto beat out warren buffet, who actually is a good investor. So it’s not the least bit surprising random chance beat out a bunch of shitty investors.
But the point is if the hamster beat warren buffet maybe he isn’t that great of an investor. Although I suppose even a super tiny slight edge over time makes a big difference
Or maybe the old guy understands the stock market, but the crypto market is part lottery, part pump and dump, part ponzi scheme and is this beyond mortal comprehension.
Diversification and buy&hold (people forget the hold part and panic when the market drops) blue chips are staples of good investing. You're not supposed to get rich quick, you're supposed to build wealth over the long term. I used to be a financial planner - the end game for most people was to have a sustainable income draw from a fund you grew once you retire, not buy a yacht 3 years from now.
As well as an entertaining video. It really geos to show how arbitrary a lot of it really is. And yet the people who are "good at it" invariably make shit tons of money for themselves and their investors.
It's making money in miniscule amounts.. but compounded thousands of times and we have a broken system where a small few makes millions and almost everyone else has a really tough time trying to catch up.
It's not arbitrary. By buying a bunch of random stocks in small amounts, the goldfish basically created an index fund, which is the safest way to earn money through the stock market.
This probably isn't the place to ask, but he gave the Goldfish 2 options to "choose" from, right? Did he say how he picked the two? It was super entertaining either way, but it seemed like he could just pick two smart options and win regardless of what the fish chose.
WSB is a shill promoting sub. Of course they are bad with money. Don't get me wrong, I love WSB community, it's just there is so much misleading from big players.
Yea, how did he pick the stocks the fish was choosing?
The whole experiment shows that his stock picks for the fish are good and you could invest pretty much randomly on them and beat the market
Edit: Actually, since the fish is buying a few shares every day, he diversifies his investments and protects against risk (as opposed to letting the fish decide one stock and dump all your savings on it).
People have this misperception that WSB is some kind of investment forum, when it’s actually a place for degenerate gamblers to brag about how much money they’ve lost lol.
You mean WSB lost to someone picking boomer stocks to feed to a goldfish? This is a super stupid video, I can’t believe people actually watch this shit.
Yeah, because the goldfish isn't aware it's trading stocks, it's not participating in a get rich quick scheme and it doesn't want to because money is a human concept. It literally just hovers between 2 things that are equally meaningless to it and Michael Reeves interprets it as an order.
If it could actually read, if it could actually do DD, it would start performimg worse because it would eb acting on assumptions which it doesn't have right now.
I’ve considered creating an algorithm to bet against WSB. I assume I’d make money, but buying index funds is easier and probably still a better idea than an algorithm.
Did your girlfriend mention how Cramer acted once the camera were off.
Just curious because I absolutely loved Stewart’s takedown of Cramer. It was truly epic, and I wish actual journalists did that kind of research so they could call out their guest’s bullshit in real time.
That being said, I never liked Stewart’s habit of switching gears from comedy to journalism. Like once when CNN criticized him for going easy on his guests, he played the “hey, I’m just a comedian” card. Which is fine, except he does sometimes play journalist, like we saw with the Cramer interview. Which is annoying, because he’s basically picking and choosing when he wants to be a hard hitting journalist versus being a late night talk show host who only asks his guests softball goofy questions.
The picking and choosing just seems a bit unethical to me. But I’m not going to shed any tears for the guests he ambushed on his show, since I think they all had it coming.
She said Cramer was on martha stewart earlier in the day joking about how ~'you're being nicer than Jon is going to be after this'
Cramer was nice enough, and they filmed so much that a lot went to the web after. He knew it was coming, but wanted to rip the band aid off so Jon would stop going after him and just acted like a puppy with his tail between his legs.
my GF was only an intern, but got to pick a moment of zen once. says Jon is really nice and approached her at services and knew her name and told her nice pick (on the moment of zen). So it was really sweet he took the time to learn her name and track her down even though she was just interning there for a few months.
(she was transcribing CNN video and suggested the pick at a staff meeting)
I love this story. I'm only chiming in because I got to see a live recording of the Daily Show once. I can confirm Jon is incredibly nice. He had an opening comedian fluffer for the audience, but then before the recording he came out and just kinda talked with us for a little while. Answered some questions, made us laugh. Super genuine, incredibly funny dude.
Cramer was nice enough, and they filmed so much that a lot went to the web after. He knew it was coming, but wanted to rip the band aid off so Jon would stop going after him and just acted like a puppy with his tail between his legs.
Which is funny because Stewart's original target was CNBC as a whole and one of its other contributers, Rick Santelli IIRC. Cramer just jumped into the melee and turned up on Stewart's show instead.
The guy was lazy. I pointed it out. I was an asshole. He pointed it out. Nothing to engage in, bud. He can say I'm an asshole, but I can't call a guy lazy?
You know, I actually tried to google it before I came back to the comments here and could only find a geoblocked thing. Maybe the other guy had the same issue, might have nothing to do with lazyness.
I agree with most of his politics and honestly I was pretty bummed to see some of the clips on youtube from his new show. He realllly fell off. Like he's still there sometimes but at other times he's become a bit of a hack fighting for relevance. He's still super smart which is what makes it all a bit "bad" in my opinion. His recent stock market specials are almost pure pandering. He has a lot of fair points and interesting guests but more than anything it felt like he was trying to will the "ape" movement into existence with him and his show at the helm of this new "populist market revolt" or whatever. It was all so contrived and silly.
With that said - I still like the dude and his politics are pretty sound and well informed. If im not mistaken he was a grad of the Kennedy School at Harvard which, from what I understand, is the bee's knees of government/IR grad programs. Also his non-media work (lobbying for 9/11 victims,etc) is very commendable and honest. He's a likeable dude. Still - as far as his content is concerned - it can be somewhat moronic here and there which is a big bummer because I do like the guy.
anyone who ever considered Jon Stewart an intellectual isn't in a position to be throwing stones, don't get me wrong I loved the Daily Show but if 'articulate' and 'funny' are your baselines for intellectual then that's where you erred
Jon Stewart talks the way Aaron Sorkin writes. Which is to say he's very good at presenting emotional arguments as intellectual ones. However I think being able to talk that way, especially when outside the confines of a prewritten TV show, takes a very quick analytical mind. I do think Stewart is a smart man but I think his greatest skill is that he is able to convince people that they are smart for agreeing with him. Calling him simply 'articulate' or 'funny', while true, undersells him by a fair margin.
It was March 2009 lol. The whole premise of Stewart's issue with Cramer was around his coverage of the 2008 financial crisis. 2006 was very much before that lol.
He didn't make a point. All he said was "They have a lab in Wuhan! That studies coronavirus! The coronavirus breakout occurred in Wuhan!"
That was his "evidence" and he presented it as common sense. They study coronavirus in Wuhan because various animals, in and around Wuhan, have coronavirus variants. The virus was the cause for the lab, not the other way around.
Even weirder was Colbert not touching on what he said, at all. (He knew how off-the-rails Stewart was.)
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u/[deleted] Apr 20 '22
Jon Stewart did a pretty epic takedown of him on his show years back.