FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for March 26, 2021

hang in there, Roger

Day trading is the same thing as gambling. Most of the time the house wins.

If I could quantify two emotions, fear and greed, I’d own Wall Street and D.C.

I suppose you can make a lot of money and gain a lot of power using fear and greed, but it must be a miserable existence.

On the bright side, his employer should have no problem with taking him back at a lower salary.

If that actually turns out to be what happens, it’s not a spoiler. I know these are old strips, but I don’t have them memorized.

There was a story on the radio this morning about a guy who invested $2600 in Bitcoin several years ago, without telling his wife. Now it’s worth over $200,000!

I did that in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Took my profits and got out before the dot com crash. Got very very lucky.

Ah, keep on “investing”. It’ll have to turn around soon.

The tragic aspect of this is that this behavior has existed for so long and is so common that it is mathematically described and taught in undergraduate stats classes – and has been for something like at least 50 years. It is called, “The Gambler’s Ruin Problem”. People still get their Ph.D.s occasionally in research on novel applications of the problem to life.

Gambler math!

So far, in 2020, I made over 70 grand off the stock market due to picking the right stocks. I picked them well before the pandemic but that helped boost them. My two secrets: inherit enough money to start big and not spend it on junk instead, and then buy stock in things you use daily. Amazon and Apple were the two biggest ones I bought, and they have gone through the roof.