I just like yapping - plus, there might be someone who has done this and can share their experience.
This reminded me something I’ve been thinking about for a few decades: my experience at work and education is that by and large the people who make a fuss out of actively going against the grain are underperformers. Their faux rebelliousness is usually covering for some fault (e.g., laziness to do things properly). You get the odd genuinely (and not poser) unconventional person who is a superstar, and their weirdness is tolerated exactly because they are outperforming everyone else, but they are rare. I think this could apply to investing too.
Gosh, I need to learn something about that, then. The two most important women in my life are like that!
I think this is a bit too deep - I have never really done any active trading, so naturally my resistance towards doing so is quite high. Asking for people and their opinions doesn’t mean insecurity - I anticipated most of the reactions when posting here, that doesn’t mean I can’t learn new things I wouldn’t have thought about.
There again, I may be wrong, I don’t hold any universal truth and I have not studied it. I’m just an amateur with personal observations.
My experience is that:
Lack of experience shouldn’t create resistance toward doing something. It should lead us toward building a plan which includes learning toward getting the thing done. If along the way, we realize we need to change course and not do the thing, we can reassess but going into it with a mindset of “I am doing that” vs “I don’t know whether I should or should not do that” is a game changer.
Of course, you have to assess your own character. Convincing yourself to go while still hesitant inside can lead to experiencing dread at way too many turns and that can be very detrimental both financially and for your health.
Schwarzenegger has good thoughts about “Plan B”:
So you have been kind of trolling us after all? ![]()
This can actually be a powerful force for positive (assuming it’s combined with intelligence, pattern recognition, good judgment skills, etc.) as you’re not held back by constraints in your mind which are not necessarily valid.
I recall reading once that creativity, for instance, is in fact largely a matter of having less ‘walls’ in your mind so you are able to see things that others don’t.
What’s the name of the company that made the best soundcards ever? SoundBlaster? (it’s been a while that I don’t pronounce that word).
So again lucky?
Ah, don’t remind me of Creative Technologies (proud makers of the Soundblaster cards and other fine audio products). They set the industry standard back in the day, “Soundblaster or Soundblaster compatible”, also had great speakers.
I bought their products in the 90’ies, then their stock in about 1998, nice 3 or so times gain on paper into the dotcom bubble IIRC, then crash, a bit of a recovery, flat for some years and subsequently disappearing into oblivion. I always felt they could have done so much more, they had a really great sound brand, made one of the first really good MP3 players in early 2000s, but alas, they made it look just like a Discman out of the 90’s (why-o-why, it looked so crap!), could have combined that with great headphones, but didn’t… so Apple came with the iPod and the rest is history.
Sold my shares for about 70% loss in about 2008. Still didn’t buy Apple then instead lol.
Sound cards are a market that quite obviously matured much earlier and products got commoditized. To a point where most cards (or chips) satisfied most customers as „good enough" with little incentive to - or perceived benefit of - upgrading to newer, better, more expensive products.
20-year old ICs sound just as fine as today’s - whereas GPUs have made huge leaps in improved rendering images.
Agree, but I was trying to explain that a grandson that says “they make the best graphics cards” isn’t always enough (most of the time not enough). Otherwise, just to highlight my grey hair, I could say that 3dFx was in a “better” position. They didn’t even start with graphic cards but with daughterboards ![]()
On a similar fashion I know someone that mistyped a ticker and bought the wrong stock by mistake and made probably 10-20x the money back.
You’re right, but it is a fun anecdote. Somewhat Peter Lynch saying he noticed Starbucks (or Dunkin’ Donuts) always being full despite a recession.
Sure. But then one could diversify into music players (they did), speakers/soundbars/etc. (they did), headphones (not sure if they did) and even use their good brand & synergy with sound cards to develop & bring out graphic cards (they did).
Unfortunately for them, they were on the wrong continent, or had more engineering than marketing/design management, or got caught wrong-footed at the wrong time (2 big crises in 10 years), etc.
Anyhow, going back in time I would’ve bought this up-and-coming search engine and news site (great ad income) every one under 25 was using instead, Yuhoo or something it was called.
3dfx ! OMG, you make me cry ![]()
I just remembered I “had to” buy a Diamond Monster 3D 3dfx Voodoo - to be able to properly play Quake / Unreal - and obviously sold it to my parents as a university related expense… ![]()
I had that one too, but can’t remember which game I whined to my parents for, maybe FF7! And was there a graphics card called something something 550 at that time?
550 was a model number for a chip from Cirrus Logic maybe?
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