vicarz | (no subject)

Sounding interesting online doesn’t make me interesting. Nor does it make interesting any more important - is interesting happy? Adventurous is interesting, so is sociopathic.

I forgot to buy coffee in b’more, and this morning I opted for environmentally responsible reuseable mug from starbucks coffee. It tastes bad, but oddly I feel comforted by it - less time, no cleanup, but that on-the-road feeling of morning. It’s comfort crappy coffee. If the stuff was complex, rich, and earthy instead of burnt, I would have had an experience. I would have had to think.

Curiously before the coffee has hit me, I’m still filled with the urge to write. I thought I wrote in the AM because of drugs, but it might just be I write in the AM.

Around the same time I realized no really, I spend too much time with my game, and I think by realized the more accurate issue was a relationship between finding success (hundreds of millions of gold in sc and hc), being better at the game play itself, and getting bored with the whole thing.

I can’t just feel anything, I have to analyze the source, legitimacy, and arguments about fallacy of what I think I feel. It’s crazy perhaps, but I think it’s a good thing. Of course, being crazy, you can’t trust my opinion on how my idiosyncrasies...

This drivel is leading to something substantial but utterly boring - important to me, and actually measurably, arguably, important, but not interesting to read or think about except for the part that is funny. My experience buying and selling items in the diablo 3 auction houses has made me think I should apply my lessons to stocks.

Aigh! Have I no sense of perspective!? Do the opinions of people on aid programs, children on parent’s income, and socially maladjusted folks matter so much to me in my deluded state that I risk my real world piles with unrealistic expectations? No, I’m not a twit, or that much of one.

People are lazy, including me. That’s all I learned or was reminded.

I’m so lazy, I can’t resist using punctuation to register conversational pauses. Dot dot dot. Carriage return, new thought.

I have a significant-to-me amount of money invested in the stock market. I have maxed my contributions to the government TSP stock options (index funds) since I started gummint work in 1995. I bought private retirement and non-retirement stocks for years. However, for the last few years I ceased to buy and sell stocks at all, opting each year to max retirement contributions only to index funds (Motley Fool funds though, but funds none-the-less). I educated myself about the basics of investments, have a minor economics and business background of college 100 level studies (not to be confused with knowledge), and read some investy stuffs.

Not-properly adjusted, my retirement returns averaged 50% on things I sold, 35% on what I didn’t (trust me this is a very warped accounting - honestly if it’s 8% annum I’m happy and not sure it is - it may be 25% but I don’t trust my figures). My non-retirement accounts reflect a 16% return on sold items, 36% on retained stocks and funds. Again, my accounting is likely flawed and sloppy at best - and I’m aware of tons of studies in which people overestimate their investment skills and even numerically measurable returns based on attribution biases and poor heuristic models. Still, there are some indications that with only slightly more effort than the average mutual fund holder, I had higher returns over a period of almost 20 years if only through sheer dumb luck.

I have no illusions that I can beat the market, because there are many harder working people than me with decades of education and direct investment experience making a full-time living off the financial markets. I also recognize my poor social skills and lack of mainstream interests makes me less able than most shmoes to predict trends in business (in my world apple went out of business a decade ago).

However, I think I have overestimated, perhaps, how many people are less lazy than me. So rather than clean any part of my house, get the charity run done, or sell off my unwanted furniture, when I’m painfully bored and there are no top gear episodes or cartoons to watch, I have decided to refocus a tad on investments. I’m going to re-read my old books (including the fool guide) to see which predictions worked out, which models described the future, which did not, why, and whether the successes and failures should form new models for the future. Simply said, I’m going to study stocks a little bit, sell, and buy.

Granted my investment models still involve holding for over a year, income generating dividend stocks for the most part, and trolling the motley fool plus other financial drivel from mainstream news to yahoo or google finance, even forums with all their pump and dump trolls. But I have enough out there that I’m foolish for not spending more time seriously pursuing, or guarding, that money-lump.

Lessons from game auctions:
People are lazy, including me, but you can make money skimming the bottom.
Small diversified investments in focus areas in which you specialize can lead to substantial profits, whereas dropping large portions of your pot into potentially highly profitable but risky ventures...well don’t.
Knowledge is available, and has value, but takes time to acquire. OVER TIME, with successes and failures, acquiring knowledge is likely associated with profits.