As the saying goes, the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Even if someone can correctly predict a market crash, correctly timing it to make money is extremely difficult. You could go all in on far out of the money January 2020 puts only for the market to continue climbing and then crash hard in February 2020.
One could keep rolling the puts forward, though it would be a drag on returns if the market stays above the strike and the options stay out of the money.
Susquehanna made a killing during the dotcom crash by selling near-dated options and buying longer-dated options. Essentially, the majority of the market was pricing the dotcom crash to be very similar to the 1987 crash. Instead, it was closer to a slow bleed.
The flip side of "The markets can stay irrational..." is "Someone will probably get lucky anyway. But just because they did, doesn't mean you can learn anything useful from them."
>However, if you get smitten by a more western lifestyle in the US or Europe, it will be very hard to return home.
Anecdotal, but I can confirm. I work for a Japanese bank in NYC that has a lot of Japanese expats. A few weeks prior a new expat came over and he was in awe of being able to start work around 8:50 and leave at 6:00, and how easy it is to approach the managers. Meanwhile, the expats that have been in NYC for a while are dreading returning to Tokyo.
My company makes me fly coach. However, when booking business trips I tried to stick to one airline, and made sure to use my personal frequent flyer number I just kept raking up points until I hit platinum membership, then I can use the points to upgrade to business.
I personally view it as the Pareto principle at play.
If we were to equally distribute resources among the entire population, over time we would see those resources begin to bunch up into the top 20% of society due to superior abilities (intelligence, business instinct, skills, etc.)
As time continues, then resources continue to pile up at the top 20% of the initial 20, and so on, and so on...
I might be okay with that, if there was no possibility for ultra-wealth to be inherited from one generation to the next.
Make each generation work hard for their wealth, and you avoid the concentration of wealth that occurs because it is also a concentration of political power, at which point the sole purpose for that wealth and power is to accumulate more wealth and power and give their kids an insurmountable advantage over the next generation of kids.
>I am 100% in favor of tipping, and all of you people calling to ban it don't understand service jobs.
I used to live in Japan where the service is quite better than in the US and tipping is frowned upon. You honestly don't know good service if you think tipping is necessary.
And to those saying to tip in cash, note that a lot of the times those that receive tips in cash typically don't report it as earnings on their income taxes. This is why I never tip cash.
Restaurants and such really just need to up their prices and do away with tipping. The practice itself is inherently discriminatory/racist in that better looking people typically receive higher tips, women typically receive higher tips than men, Whites receive higher tips than Blacks. It's really a disgusting practice.
