AMC, GME, other meme stocks… these things are not the backbone of wealth building over the long term. GenZ thinks of themselves as YOLO long-term hodling “apes”, but at some point they will panic and sell at or near the bottom and avoid both meme and quality stocks for years to come, which will hurt them.
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What an opportunity! If there’s a time to make up for a screw up, the time is the best
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That’s the conventional wisdom, mess up while you’re young, but on the other hand, many Greatest Generation kids (say those born around 1920) who grew up in the Great Depression never touched stocks for life, which made them poorer. My GenZ kid I’m advising to YOLO after the next large bear market, whenever that is, for now she’s set up pretty conservatively.
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For us Geezers who have done well in the market but are behind the times.
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What is YOLO slang?
YOLO - acronym meaning you only live once , used to express the view that one should make the most of the present moment without worrying about the future.
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YOLO = put it all in on something (usually something risky with a very high expected return).
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And every generation does it - Boomers / GenX did same with tech in 1999 - 2000. Tech crashed and only broke even in 2015 was it? Buying at the wrong time can create a severe retirement challenge.
Silent Generation and Nifty Fifty stocks in 1970. Then there was the Roaring Twenties of course. “If only … people wrote down what happened and we could learn from their experiences!”
My YOLO investing period was between the ages of 18 and 50. During that time my investments consisted of fast cars, boats, airplanes, diving gear, and surfboards. Oh… and one $75K TDSP that I was shamed into by my wife. I DID have a defined benefit pension that matured when I was 52.
But I’m a geezer… 
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Very, very few have a Defined Benefit Pension any longer… That’s one of the problems. 99% of people suck at portfolio management. And yet we are cast in to the wilderness and have to do it
Defined benefit plans were offered by many large employers as a way to discourage unionization of their employees. Salaries vs hourly compensation plans were also used for that purpose. That arrangement allowed me to take full retirement (50% of my prior 10-year avg income + medical coverage) at the age of 51. It made the task of getting to retirement much easier than most.
But you are wrong about 99% of people being poor market players with their own investments. The number is 100%. The reason for that being the case is that everyone driving the market is under the delusion that they are making logical sound choices. They are not. They are making guesses about other people’s guesses about what has yet to happen. It’s fool’s game.
A more reliable, and a more potentially successful strategy is to diversify your portfolio among several investments like mutual funds, bonds, metals, real estate and currency without borrowing any money.
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Shares of AMC have fallen more than 85% so far this year, sinking below $4 as of Wednesday afternoon.
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The stock’s high for 2022 was $21.09 in March.
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The stock drop comes after CEO Adam Aron announced a pay freeze for himself and the company proposed a 10-1 stock split.
When Resorts Casino opened the casino in Atlantic City, I attended a conference there. I had learned blackjack and sat at a table where I had a bet down. I was playing and my friends said I looked like I was perspiring and going to faint. Yes, I admit it, I had the equivalance of the cost of a pack of cigarattes at risk! So, not a big risk taker. My first stock purchase was 1 share of H.P. (HWP) at $90 a share. I paid a premium above that for buying a small lot. I was in and out of Apple and made some money.
So years later I heard about a drug trial. I attended the presentation and came away with the idea to buy heavily (well heaveliy for me) in the company. Over many, many decades (even a century) snake oil salesmen were selling fake cures but this drug company had a drug whose side effect was well-known in the industry and it worked. The blood pressure drug was already approved for internal use and now the company was trying to determine if topical use was safe and whether it would also lower blood pressure in people who rubbed it on. This was a conservative and respected drug company, not known to make outlandish claims.
I did not participate in the trial but I bought the stock and encouraged friends to ‘mortgage the house’ and buy it. In 9 months I trippled my money. I sold the stock just before the FDA was to announce whether it would be approved for topical use. I figured that people like me would sell to take a profit. The stock went up more after but trippling my money and getting out was a safe bet. I think I was smart.
So what happened with the product and company. The drug was approved for topical use and Upjohn made a ‘boatload’ of money. The drug was prescription at first with but now sold over the counter (I see it as a generic at Costco and Walmart). Monoxidil is well-known to help many people grow hair and also marked under the Rogaine (similar to the word regain 
).
So I think I made a reasonable investment because the doctors called it the ‘werewolf’ effect; people taking the medicine internally grew splotches of hair on their body after taking the drug. It made sense that topical use might do the same thing in some people. I knew that this product would be the first one in history to actually grow hair.
I think this is different from what many people do today. They hear about massive profits in crypto or something else and just dive in. I think I did some common sense thinking and research to determine that what I was investing in was not another snake oil product.
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I put a little money in a biotech IPO back just before the tech bubble crashed. I doubled my money and sold. It went down after that because the FDA did not approve their product. i was married then and our taxes were more complicated so CPA did our return. He saw my gains and asked how I managed to do that. I honestly told him - luck.
Everyone remembers Value Jet which morphed into Air Tran and was bought by Southwest.
At the same time Value Jet started, a rival named Private Jet started. It was just as hot with investors. It bankrupted while Value Jet survived. Who knew then?
Hindsight is always 20-20. In retrospect, prospects for Global Crossing at the time looked as bright as for any other company. Lost a lot of money on that one.
Tulip mania too. But the market is only down 9%
Im back to where I was at the beginning of last year
I can assure the Gen-Zers that I have a proven system which guarantees them to leave any casino with $1 million dollars!
They go in with $2 million and leave when they have lost half.
Works every time and guaranteed!
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The Fedelity reddit sub now has 100k followers. Every other post is:
“I’m a GenZ, I know nothing about investing, but I want to invest in VOO…”
Shoeshine boy stock tips time.
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I am conducting a contest with a full service broker using two large accounts. So far I am way ahead on the account I manage.
In my account, I buy dividend-paying value stocks. I buy them on limit orders so I get decent prices. I buy stocks when they are down. The hardest part for me is deciding when to sell them.
The broker buys big-name stocks whether they pay dividends or not. I check the price charts when he buys, and he almost never gets a good price when buying. Plus I must pay a commission. Some hot stocks he bought like FUBOTV have crashed. But they were darlings in their day.
I have come to the conclusion that dividend paying stocks are more stable, and by reinvesting dividends, allow one to dollar cost average.
Nobody takes better care of your money than you, assuming you have discipline and at least a little investment knowledge.
Dividend payers are good - not only because of the dividends, also because they don’t represent overvalued sectors.
An IPO or startup company that pays no dividend is very, very risky. I invested in a promising medical technology company named Novacure with a cure for certain cancers by beaming electronic waves at the tumors. Early trials of the device looked good. It gained FDA provisional approvalI even had a friend using the device. But turned out it only temporarily slowed the cancers. They rebounded with a vengeance. My friend died.
Now the company is heading into bankruptcy. It was a one-trick pony. People always talk about their “10-baggers” like Apple, but never tell you about their big mistakes that went to zero.