So? If you want to buy options, it's relatively easy to transform yourself into such an investor, so that should be fair game for evaluating HNers' potential search space.
You don't need to be a multi-millionare to make money on options, I just recently cited someone who put a small amount (relative to a multi-millionare) to disproportionately profit from the market declines that weren't priced in.
Options are even MORE appropriate for the non super rich, because if you put a small amount of money in, you either win big or you lose it all. I'm fine with losing 200$ occasionally.
It's a lottery ticket except when an event happens that you know more about than most investors.
In this case, investors are dealing with something they know nothing about - Epidemology.
When black swans happen, you can EASILY beat the market. We've known that Coronavirus was going to get this bad for months. We know the R0 rate. We know the CFR. Markets completely failed to "price coronavirus in"
Sometimes, you really can outperform the market but its only possible in situations where financial policy and monetary policy are unable to help. I see that supply chains are grinding to a halt and I know that this means the whole economy is going to be in pain.
But it's okay, keep on thinking that it's all like the lottery and see where you are in 6 months. You'll wish you were shorting the market.
Rollback to mid Feb. The stock market keeps hitting new highs. Tesla stock is trading for around 5x what it was trading for just weeks before. Meanwhile China is basically shut down and dealing with a deadly illness. The country where everything is made these days is in deadlock, and there's no reason to think it won't spread everywhere. Cases are popping up all over the world. The stock market keeps going up. I start telling people to get out of the market, and everyone acts like I'm a crazy person.
Stop and think about it, is Tesla worth 4x what it was 3 months earlier, when there was no covid as far as anyone knew? A company that loses money every year and can barely make as many cars in a year as VW makes every 2 weeks worth 5x more than VW? A company which makes less than 1% margin on it's best selling car? A company that could go bankrupt in less than a year in an economic downturn? A company that the market thought was worth 1/5 as much 4 months ago? People were saying it was going to $7000 a share. To be worth that it would have to sell every car made in the entire world every year, and people would have to buy 100x as many cars as they do now, by the year 2021. It's a story told by absolute lunatics.
I'm not saying I thought the market was going to crash today, there's no way to predict that. However, anyone who thought the market was not a bubble waiting to pop should not be investing. There are the people who knew it was overvalued and were trying to ride the bubble, the people who were waiting to short it, and people who are acting confused now and saying 'nobody could see it coming'.
Fastforward to now and my put options are up 300%+, and I'm going to hold them until they are over 1,000% up or they expire in the money. I guess it's just like the lottery, except where they tell you the numbers every day all day for weeks in advance.
It's now the evening of 9-March. I'm watching the US market index futures, which are up by almost 3%, and I'm just shaking my head. People think the market will start going up again? Italy just announced it is restricting every person in the country to their houses and only allowing essential travel. The US does not have a better medical system or a less elderly population than Italy, and we have not put in place any precautions or restrictions, other than strongly encouraging people to not get on cruise ships, which they just announced last night, weeks after the 2nd plague ship was sailing around with no port willing to accept them. In 3 weeks the US will be where Italy is today, and the stock futures are going up? The S&P 500 is the same value it was last October, and given all that we know about how disruptive this virus will be, people with lots of money are still betting the economy is better now than it was 5 months ago when everything was going great, and will be worth more tomorrow.
There are a lot of people with a lot of money, and a lot of them are complete idiots. You can beat the market, at least from time to time.
BTW, for the record, my options are now worth over 1500% more. I've sold 4x my original investment. Probably not going bankrupt, but I'm going to go car shopping with 2% of what I just made. Maybe I'm acting irrationally, but then again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_theory_of_truth
A lottery is ergodic, while a pandemic is not. No one can know the course of a pandemic early on, so the precautionary principle dominates. Also, income/employment is coupled to the market. If the market tanks out, people can lose their jobs, given the downturn a double whammy for "buy and hold"ers.
Personally, I jumped into cash/Treasuries and made some puts/bets on SPY. In the worst case, nothing happens and I'm out a little money. But my job pays me more money every week, so being out a little money isn't such a big deal.
