>Would love to hear from others who’ve tried to strike this balance
I think it's exactly that - balance.
In my experience the most important aspect is avoiding recommendation feeds. They are hyper optimized to be dopamine driven feedback loops. In a parallel universe these feeds would be customizable (sort for great discussions, thoughtful or uplifting content as the user sees fit, but most feeds are black boxes that are explicitly designed to maximize engagement, which means of course to maximize addiction.
The second most important aspect is turning off the notifications.
Another angle to attack is the hardware itself. It isn't for everyone, but there is a little corner of the tech universe with minimal phones like, well, Minimal Phone, and Light Phone. Unihertz is also coming out with a BlackBerry Passport keyboard phone soon (Kickstarter campaign coming later this month) that looks quite promising. Again the hardware is just badly suited for feed doom scrolling.
Then carefully choose the services you interact with. HN rather than Reddit home feeds, etc. Tildes is another good small one, as is Discuit.
Now if you're seeking visibility, perhaps there is a devil's bargain that you have to submit to to some degree. That said, one half of the equation is the presence that you are providing, and you can control that. For example choose to host a minimalist blog rather than a swarm of social media engagement. I like Blot.im, although there are many like it that can make simple markup style pages.
Also instead of freeform constant engagement with social media, try and use formats to your advantage. In a world with endless noise on social media a great weekly newsletter can actually get quite a following (I've noticed that I love simple weekly newsletters that curate thoughts and content for me). I would imagine that if you were trying to pursue an online following, it's probably healthier to cultivate a following through something like this rather than brute forcing engagement metrics.
Lastly, be creative! The social media space is bounded in a tight box, where black box recommendation engines optimized for engagement are considered the norm, despite there being a world of possibility out there. Don't be afraid to be a bit silly either. Sometimes that can help with taking a stand against what can otherwise look like a bit of a dystopian nightmare at times in the digital space. Those minimal phones are silly. Twitter's 160 character limit was silly. Hosting a blog that looks like it's from 1999 is silly. But it's also a bit rebellious which can actually bring more value to the table, even when it comes to things like building a following, then you lose by refusing to engage with the hyper dopamine hacking landscape.
This is exactly what we said was going to happen. It's a regressive tooth tax after considering the opportunity cost (let's not pretend a quarter has any meaningful value).
Proc gen can be engaging if emergent content is complex, dynamic, and novel. But again that goes back to Radiant AI being a vessel for generic fetch quests in the newer games, while in a proc gen game you would think there would be a major, if not the major dev focus on fleshing out the system in other ways (from dynamic tribes and factions to more fully fleshed out STALKER-esque persistent fellow space travellers with agency). The final missing component would be inspiration in design of the pieces, so they interact together in interesting but emergent ways, which is of course another element that the game sorely lacks.
First of all, SpaceX's market share in tonnage does not immediately make it an anti-competitive monopolist according to anti-trust law like the article claims. In fact I find it extremely unlikely that an antitrust case would find that SpaceX is a monopolist as the final ruling. Furthermore, even if this was the case, the remedy wouldn't be nationalization, it would almost certainly be breaking it apart (ex: Starlink spun off).
Moving on from there, the entire article hinges around Steve Bannon's idea (an ardent far right extremist) hijacking the "Defense Production Act to nationalize SpaceX. Of course it's blindingly obvious that this is a grossly far-reaching reinterpretation of what the defense production Act was meant for. Even if crewed spaceflight squabbles put the entire nation in danger in the interim period before Boeing Starliner is back in action, NASA does still have exchange agreements with Roscosmos in place.
Taking ideas from far right extremists to repurpose laws for political aims (and considering the source, this is clearly originating from the anti oligarchy angle rather than true concern with a National Security Emergency) is not a reasonable solution, nor is it acceptable in any way. Bannon's idea literally sits alongside twisting other laws to get Trump elected for a third term.
I don't like Musk either. Perhaps an anti-trust case in a court of law would be appropriate, but stop sane-washing this. People like Bannon don't care at all about NASA concerns either. The literal reason they're out on social media stirring the pot is to *normalize" things like this.
I think if you're talking on portfolio level a lot of these things are used as signals and parts of a greater whole.
In that sense, they can indeed add value. My current project is a modern version of a classic Harry Browne portfolio with even asset allocations to gold/bonds/equity/commodities, with optional layers of sophistication according to spec needs.
Something like systematic macro could be analyzed as a standalone return stream, but it's more useful when considered as an input into allocation/leverage adjustments (ex: if geopolitical uncertainty readings are high, cut down the trend following exposure). Even the more robot/quant stuff like vol trading feeds back into the wider portfolio management and portfolio construction level to some degree.
>Expected compound interest is not high enough to justify the risk of a catastrophic crash
That's just not the case. It may be a lower yield world, but you can still find companies with relatively stable and growing 10-15% cashflow to EV ratio even in the US. Outside of the US old-school "easy" Value is still very much alive as well.
What you were advocating for is market timing, and market timing demonstrably does not add alpha unless it's done very mindfully, mostly because the opportunity cost of sitting out is great. If you look at core alpha sources through a factor lens like trend following, most of the profit comes from participating in the big trends (read, most of the easy returns come from "expensive" getting "more expensive/"overbought"). From another lens that takes into account fragility/crashes - vol trading - selling vol is paradoxically highest sharpe when vol is low and most vulnerable to severe disruption.
Part of what you're disregarding is how market participants are far more sophisticated today than they were even 20 years ago. If you're building a 60/40, it doesn't look attractive, but even accounting for survivorship bias, the baseline has risen.
The "crash case" remains relatively similar when it comes to portfolio planning - you need to prepare for 60% crashes, and 10-year "lost decades." The tools to manage that equity risk and still access smooth returns are far more powerful and accessible than they were in the past though.
There is alpha in markets. I did a lot of relatively unsophisticated SPAC relative value warrant trading during the 2020 period, and I think a big part of it is the question of scale and slippage. If you're a prop firm that makes "real money" your universe is limited by these constraints. IE "not worth the time" would be a common response to trading opportunities.
For example, there were high sophistication players in the merger/stat arb phase of the game, and they would layer out their warrants like an onion of dark liquidity (the orders were hidden/not directly listed on ARCA/etc). They were involved in just about every SPAC name out there. But when an SEC filing came out, or you learned some specifics about a certain sponsor team (maybe they have very high quality lockup partners who don't dump shares on lockup date, as shown by their last 3 SPACs), then maybe that implies a higher warrant valuation, or maybe that should be priced into the option chain. And they will happily sell to those pricing in that "hair" and sell their inventory because they don't want to deal with some 5 dollar warrant that trades 50,000 volume per day.
The profitable futures traders I know are also more or less just riding off the back of the machine volume and participating when machine trading from option flow is moving/pinning markets. They are of course just exacerbating the situation, which is partly why we see this increasingly bifurcated market where robots/options are entirely into control, interspersed with violent price discovery/mini vol events.
P/E just isn't that useful an indicator to look at. It is near useless for anything focusing on growth rather than profit generation. It's a figure that misses out on NVDA, Monster Beverage (not all growth stocks are tech!), etc. These are the names that have driven the majority of market returns over the past decades. There are entire sectors like SaaS where PE is pretty useless.
That's the first (big) reason why PE is increasingly a weak Value (in a broad sense) signal. Another huge one is that companies who are free cashflow monsters that shunt cash towards some sort of internally compounding flywheel (ex: Amazon with AWS CapEx and warehouse buildouts) screen terribly on PE ratio even though the cash they are throwing out is being plugged into a compounding engine far greater than one can find in the broad market. That's a value in and of itself, and obviously demands a premium and is well understood today.
Personally, most of the more fundamental oriented stuff I read seems to focus more on figures like sales to EV when ranking "value" in a peer group, not PE.
That said, it can be useful. I grabbed some Abercrombie because it's at a PE of 8 and all of the free cashflow goes to buybacks. Mostly chose to discount growth and focus on near term value, so there's no tricky modeling there, and again the cash is just shunted into buybacks and there is no complicated debt situation either. In an "old school" value proposition like that, PE can work decently.
But I'm also in a Canadian gold miner which is a far stronger Value proposition, yet it will screen horribly on PE... Go figure.
Why should I care about growth rather than earnings though?
The more I focus on growth the more I'm gambling on unknown future earnings. Sure I might miss out on NVDA, but whether I'm better off missing out on it depends entirely on how that company ends up doing over my time horizon.
Focusing on earnings is more predictable. That doesn't mean its better and it isn't to say that today's earnings directly predict tomorrows earnings, but it is much more tangible today and is less risky as an investment compared to focusing primarily on growth.
Edit: when considering growth rather than earnings, how do you distinguish the investment from a ponzi scheme? When I ignore earnings and focus on growth, or hype etc, I can't help but feel like I'm just trying to ride the wave and sell to the next schmuck before it fizzles out. With earnings, and ideally with dividends, I can at least point to a reason the company may be worth that value other than point at what others want to pay for it.
Because you will be missing out on return. Less risk and less reward. Ideally you would not be buying NVDA but instead an index. By focusing on dividend stocks you are taking less risk so less reward over the long term. Totally up to you and kind of the same situation when people pay off a mortgage early even with an extremely low interest rate.
This isn't a small point... If you are involved in the equity market and miss out on names like this, you're almost certainly going to massively underperform. The vast majority of returns comes from a small slice of names. And again, if you want to properly do value investing, you have to precisely understand the growth component of value, as well as the weird debt and cap stack situations that usually come with value names (the market is efficient and they trade at discounts for a reason).
I trade full time, and my personal long term account has no stock picking. Value or otherwise. The medium term acct does, but not the decade+ timeframe one does not. So ultimately I don't really know what to tell you. Picking the next NVDA is practically impossible, yet missing out on such a name destroys your relative returns against an impossibly simply approach (index investing). Therefore don't try. Simple conclusion.
If you are strictly focused on a very limited view of "value" such as free cashflow, asset value, and PE (which ignores important aspects like debt maturities, industry cyclicality, quality of internal compounding, etc), then you're frankly directly competing with private equity. The names that stand out on these terms get bought by private equity, and the scraps of "value" are left on public markets. PE has 500,000,000,000 in dry powder currently, and much more efficient access to Capital markets than you do, with the ability to lever up those easy "value" tilted cash flows many times and immediately sell the debt on to pension funds and such. Trust me, if the value opportunity was truly there, they would take it. What you're seeing on markets is fairly priced on a risk adjusted basis.
Just use an up to date factor overlay on top of efficient equity beta exposure if you want diversified value that won't pigeon hole you in weird value traps. Frankly. Figuring that out is going to be much easier than cracking the value investing code and somehow beating the index. I remember an interview from one of the smarter firm owners that I've heard and he uses "short junk" (which generates extra cash to deploy efficiently) to slightly lever up his equity portfolio while giving him a broad based value tilt (it's long short portfolios all the way down). Over a long time frame something like that is going to crush any form of stock picking for the vast majority of participants.
I think it's exactly that - balance.
In my experience the most important aspect is avoiding recommendation feeds. They are hyper optimized to be dopamine driven feedback loops. In a parallel universe these feeds would be customizable (sort for great discussions, thoughtful or uplifting content as the user sees fit, but most feeds are black boxes that are explicitly designed to maximize engagement, which means of course to maximize addiction.
The second most important aspect is turning off the notifications.
Another angle to attack is the hardware itself. It isn't for everyone, but there is a little corner of the tech universe with minimal phones like, well, Minimal Phone, and Light Phone. Unihertz is also coming out with a BlackBerry Passport keyboard phone soon (Kickstarter campaign coming later this month) that looks quite promising. Again the hardware is just badly suited for feed doom scrolling.
Then carefully choose the services you interact with. HN rather than Reddit home feeds, etc. Tildes is another good small one, as is Discuit.
Now if you're seeking visibility, perhaps there is a devil's bargain that you have to submit to to some degree. That said, one half of the equation is the presence that you are providing, and you can control that. For example choose to host a minimalist blog rather than a swarm of social media engagement. I like Blot.im, although there are many like it that can make simple markup style pages.
Also instead of freeform constant engagement with social media, try and use formats to your advantage. In a world with endless noise on social media a great weekly newsletter can actually get quite a following (I've noticed that I love simple weekly newsletters that curate thoughts and content for me). I would imagine that if you were trying to pursue an online following, it's probably healthier to cultivate a following through something like this rather than brute forcing engagement metrics.
Lastly, be creative! The social media space is bounded in a tight box, where black box recommendation engines optimized for engagement are considered the norm, despite there being a world of possibility out there. Don't be afraid to be a bit silly either. Sometimes that can help with taking a stand against what can otherwise look like a bit of a dystopian nightmare at times in the digital space. Those minimal phones are silly. Twitter's 160 character limit was silly. Hosting a blog that looks like it's from 1999 is silly. But it's also a bit rebellious which can actually bring more value to the table, even when it comes to things like building a following, then you lose by refusing to engage with the hyper dopamine hacking landscape.
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