Do bear in mind the context of that Buffett quote is to not blindly chase market sentiment and the numbers, neither directly nor inversely; Berkshire Hathaway's got quite the pile of cash right now.
I have a feeling Warren Buffet would accept that label, with a chuckle and a smirk!
But I also think Buffet wouldn't characterize the current environment as particularly fearful. We haven't seen a whole lot of panic aside from a couple 1-2% daily swings, which is nothing.
I wouldn't say it's a fallacy. It's just an interesting way to look at the data.
I think more people need to be talking about the fact that the S&P 500 has extreme concentration risks that didn't exist 15+ years ago (and the Chart of the Day demonstrates that). We're in uncharted territories re: market cap concentration.
It becomes less interesting the more the “overweight” stocks correct.
The extreme concentration risk lessens as these 8 stocks fall in value compared to the rest.
I also don’t personally see the risk in the concentration. Risk of what? These companies are legitimately larger and doing more business than other firms.
Pick a median consumer. Which company are they sending more profit to than companies like Apple or Amazon?
10 years ago the average consumer maybe bought an iPhone from Apple every 3 years, so they gave Apple less than $100 of pure profit dollars per year.
Now that same consumer is giving Apple money for the iPhone, but also spending on services that they weren’t buying 10 years ago. If they’ve got an Apple One subscription they’re now sending Apple double or triple the profit they used to get.
These companies are big because they sell more things and are more diversified than they were in the past.
There’s no concentration risk. I’d actually argue that the concentration risk can be resolved overnight through antitrust regulation (e.g., force Apple and Amazon to split into multiple companies, as they already have obvious verticals that could stand alone).
The concentration risk relates to diversification in investing. Index funds are generally thought of as a way to diversify a portfolio. Cap weighted index funds are generally preferred because they are cheaper for the provider to maintain. Compare VOO with RSV for example. VOO is cap weighted. RSV is equal weighted - which means investors in RSV bear the cost of periodically readjusting all holdings so they are once again equally weighted - something no necessary with VOO.
I am not the only investor who has taken steps to offset the overly high concentration in the SP500 that raises the riskiness of an investment portfolio. I've done so by splitting my VOO holdings in half, split 50/50 VOO/VTV that strategically diminishes the impact of the high top 10 stocks in the SP500.
I certainly think it's a good thing to diversify investing, while recognizing that there is value in putting a lot of your bets into heavyweights that are very likely to do very well in the long term.
One of my main points here is that dumping a lot of money into one company isn't always something that represents lack of diversity in your investment dollars.
A company like Microsoft has its hands in so many business verticals that its stock by itself is a highly diverse asset.
I also think it's important to realize that massive companies like these have inherent advantages over smaller ones. A company like Framework literally cannot make a better laptop than Apple even if an angel investor dropped billions of dollars into their laps. Even if they pulled it off, it wouldn't come with a free trial for Apple's content subscriptions and other revenue-maximizing features, and the wholesale price they get from the factory can't match Apple's margins on the device until they convince a large enough mass of people to buy them.
That's the kind of stuff that big companies can do, and that's why they are worth more putting more bets into than smaller ones.
Obviously, companies like Tesla and Nvidia are far bigger risks in the S&P 500, but they represent a small minority of those giants.
There is nothing wrong with your desire to 'dump[ing] a lot of money into one company'. That is easy to do without an index fund. And it is not the investing theory behind the creation of index funds and their investing purpose. When 8 companies dominate an index fund, that means the index is not performing the intended function for which it was created.
I wonder what a solution could look like. Perhaps keep the market cap weighting, but cap the weighting at a max $500b (or some sliding scale to prevent the top X stocks from composing more than Y% of the portfolio)
Pro tip: You could instead spend that money to spin up a forgejo instance for as little as $2 a month https://www.pikapods.com/apps#development (not affiliated, just a happy customer)
I did exactly that. Containerized it and Forgejo simply became a small instance part of the fleet. UI is much snappier then GitHub. And more importantly: zero outages.
Huh? Care to elaborate how Gitea is an inevitable cashgrab? Sure, it's not strictly copyleft, but it is licensed with the MIT License, and that is also the most popular license on GitHub.
You don't have to use their free service if you don't like its terms. "Extortion" is a bit of an exaggeration here.
Yes, I know, it's dicey when people get used to a nice, friendly platform, and the platform gains lots of users, and then at some point (or several points), the terms start getting worse, and people feel misled and betrayed.
I get that. But this is a corporation. Hell, this is Microsoft. It's hilarious how many people think they've actually changed since their antitrust judgment in the 90s. I guess a lot of folks here are too young to remember it, even.
Companies exist to make money. If they are giving you something for free, they are either a) getting something else out of it already, or b) giving it to you for free now and looking for ways to get their own value out of it later. I don't mean that in some sort of cynical, "fuck the world" sense; that's just reality, and that's fine, for the most part.
If you don't like this, don't use free services provided by corporations. Host your own. Yes, I know it can cost money. Yes, I know it's more work. But that's life. TANSTAAFL.
I've had a VPS running for a couple decades on a small provider. These days it costs me a little under $200/year. Much cheaper options exist. I run a web server, gitea instance, matrix homeserver, and a slew of other things on it. It requires very little maintenance because I just run Debian stable on it, keep up with security updates, but otherwise leave it alone. It backs up the important stuff to S3 using duplicity, but -- knock on wood -- I've never had a catastrophic failure that required a restore in the ~20 years its been running.
Ehhh sort of, I see what you're saying about it maybe not meeting the technical definition of extortion but I think you're missing the forest for the trees a little bit. The whole point is that when a company tries to force you to pay them through manipulative practices, you should not do that. That when companies manipulate you even if it makes economic sense to pay you shouldn't. That's fully compatible with not using the free service if you don't like the terms.
Obviously the root problem is the incentive structures created by a system that relies on scarcity to assign value to things being applied to things that effectively cost zero to duplicate. Obviously companies are not my friends, I self host everything, heck I even have a local copy of my VPS, it's on solar, I'M fine. I don't expect Github to do good things and make good choices, but that doesn't mean I can't be mad about it when they do things I don't like. Also I live in the real world and have to deal with society and there would be friction I create for myself when I try to exist in tech and refuse to use github, might be a worthwhile trade but it IS a trade.
An enterprise licence won't save you, Google, Microsoft, et al have happily been breaking copyright laws for years.
If the publishing industry can't win a case against the AI firms then you don't stand a chance when you finally find out they've been training on your private data the whole time.
They can tell you one thing and do the opposite and there's effectively nothing you can do about it. You'd be a fool to trust them.
Github's enterprise version "starts at" $21.99/seat, and requires you to "contact sales".
And I don't see any mention that that exempts you from being trained on. (Yes, the blog says you're still covered, but at that price I'd like to see a contract saying that)
Or, they don't train on it, but who's to say they're not harvesting analytics which may or may or not code samples, prompt data, etc. Which are then laundered through some sort of anonymization pipeline, to the point where they can argue that it no longer qualifies as your data, and can be freely trained upon.
Conspiratorial thinking? Sure. But if you've been around for a couple decades and seen the games these people play (and you aren't a complete sucker), then you'll at least be aware that there's at least slight possibility that these companies can get things from their customers that they (the customers) did not knowingly agree to.
Nothing conspirational about it. Getting data that their users or customers don't actually intend to give is the bread and butter of these companies. And they will do what they can to get it.
They're not all taking banned substances. Case in point, Hergie Bacyadan and Elis Lundholm competed in the last Summer and Winter Olympics respectively.
Both Hergie Bacyadan and Elis Lundholm has not undergone any hormone replacement therapy or surgery, and competes in the women's divisions. Their status as trans men has nothing to do with their eligibility to participate.
This would be like if two trans women, who has not undergone any hormone replacement therapy or surgery, would compete in men's divisions.
Well both of those examples could potentially electrocute you or start a fire and both can be done by a homeowner if he feels like it.
I don't disagree that it's a bit different in certain ways but I feel like that's drifting off topic. It shouldn't be up to manufactures to determine these things unilaterally but rather the legislature. Particularly any justification to the contrary rings hollow in this case because there's a very strong conflict of interest.
I don't consider photos I take on iPhone to be "AI generated" or even "AI augmented" even though iPhone uses neural networks and "AI" to do basic stuff like low light photography, blurring backgrounds, etc.
I agree that I wouldn't call these photos "AI generated", because the majority of what you're seeing is real.
But that's very different to saying that no generative AI was used at all in their production. "AI augmented" sounds pretty accurate to me.
Likewise, if someone posted a photo taken with their iPhone where they had used the built-in AI features to (for instance) remove people or objects, and then they claimed that no AI was involved, I would consider that misleading, even if the photo accurately depicts a real scene in other respects.
As a photographer and machine learning guy, I would call a lot of modern phone photos AI augmented. AI to stack photos or figure out what counts as the background is a little bit of a gray area, but an img-to-img CNN is about as close as you can get to full AI generation without a full GAN or diffusion model.
We use Apple Business Manager. Locking a domain is not a requirement if you're just doing basic MDM, I'm pretty sure. (I also had a negative experience with it, so we didn't use it and everyone just uses their personal apple IDs). Is it no longer possible to skip this step in setting up the account?
In any serious business, you don't want people to use their personal Apple IDs: that could lock their company provided devices for ever when they leave, you also don't want to buy them apps that you won't be able to re-use when they leave, ...
Eh what? It’s literally the only reason for prediction markets to exist. Otherwise they are simple gambling and pointless.
The only way you get more wisdom from “the crowd” is if it teases folks who hold non-public (or at least less public) information into the market to refine the odds towards what they should be.
Without insider information the entire concept is dead on arrival.
Yes randos are gonna gamble because they either don’t understand the game they are playing or are simple degenerate gamblers who want something else to gamble on. Others are going to think they know better or have limited insider information that isn’t worth as much as they think, or is not as accurate as they believe. And the delusional who simply think they know better for no logical reason but have convinced themselves otherwise.
It seems like two different definitions of 'point' are getting mixed. Yes, for many participants it feels like gambling. But structurally, prediction markets are closer to price discovery systems -like financial markets - where the side effect (or goal, depending on your view) is better forecasts, not just entertainment
> Otherwise they are simple gambling and pointless.
People find gambling fun. Owners of gambling services make a lot of money. The prediction markets both run ads that present themselves as gambling products.
Both of these things are points that can sustain large businesses.
That would go under someone who thinks they have more information than they think they do. Perhaps you are great at mathematics and think you can estimate much better than the average bidder. The person who filled the jar is going to have even better information than you do. Or perhaps not. Maybe they miscounted or their manager added a handful before they screwed the top of the jar on.
If the market that is taking the bet also filled the jar, then sure it’s just outright fraud at that point. But the market exists to get the real information into the open. Betting that an insider just isn’t going to play is a variable you consider when placing your bet imo.
A "market" is hypothesized to be "efficient" at price discovery.
An efficient "prediction market" would more quickly resolve to its expected outcome due to not only skin-in-the-game bets by experts, but also the influence of insiders.
Furthermore, bets are likely to shape outcomes. Betting someone will be assassinated (not allowed on Polymarket) would likely increase the probability of that outcome had there been no bet at all.
I’ve heard this assassination thing said, but I don’t see it. Someone still has to kill said person and somehow profit from the unlikelihood of this outcome. I’m not saying it’s impossible but I’m just saying that it’s never happened and maybe never will.
There is no assassination market to test it against.
If there was, I think you'd see quite a few public figures on the list.
And I think it _would_ cause folks to die. Which is why it's banned or regulated. (I'm actually not sure what the legal status is, just that Polymarket and US prediction markets disallow it.)
Polymarket is not fully in the US and its betting on oil prices is not a CTFC-allowed market. This is after all a bet on a commodity, which is already regulated and already a product available on ICE. Technically Polymarket doesn't need to care about the assassination market rule (which is a CFTC rule for prediction markets), but I presume they adhere to it out of respect for the reasoning behind the rule.
Openly corrupt markets that feature insiders with secret knowledge taking money from gambling addicts and rubes is actually good cause the crowd is now wiser.
Unironically yes. Someone bet a mid sized amount and now we all share in that potential insider knowledge. A small scale example is my spouse said that the election odds from her home country were not realistic because all the westerners were betting a candidate would win but weren’t accounting for corruption that she felt was guaranteed to happen. Turns out she was right.
Ah good. The NBA/NFL/MLB/etc should let players bet on whether they win or lose. Letting those with the influence on events being able to make money on them has never degraded a system before.
Someone must have just mistakenly put in regulations against insider trading before, for no good reason. Luckily this isn’t anything like the normal tech play of figuring out a loophole or flat out ignoring the law and hoping you get too big before the regulators catch up.
If athletes didn't face consequences for manipulating betting markets, I think you'd see people become less and less likely to bet on sports outcomes. People naturally don't like a rigged game, you don't have to tell them not to play it.
With these betting markets, do you think it's critical that they exist, but with bans on insider bets? Because I'm not sure anyone you are moralizing at is taking up the argument that it's critical that they exist.
Sports betting is specifically not a prediction market precisely because the players are banned by both law and extreme consequences from their leagues for participating.
You cannot have an open-ended prediction market with the same protections. It's just impossible from a practical standpoint, much less theoretical one.
I don't think these should be legal since it's just enabling more random gambling, fraud, etc. or even worse for no clear societal gain. But if they do exist, the only purpose for them is to lure out insider information into the open. Pretending they are just folks gambling on 'random' outcomes like a fair coin flip is naive at best.
Imagine it were 90% automated. Now imagine there's a 3 hour outage of the automated system.
You're left with a bunch of planes in the sky that can't stay there forever, and not enough humans on the ground to manually land them.
Now image the outage is also happening at all airports nearby, preventing planes from diverting.
How do you get the planes out of the sky? Not enough humans to do it manually.
Now imagine the system comes back online. Does it know how to handle a crisis scenario where you have dozens of planes overhead, each about to run out of fuel? Hopefully someone thought of that edge case.
Remember when all the Waymos were confused by a power outage? Now do that, but with airplanes that will fall thousands of feet and kill hundreds instead of park in the middle of the street.
I'm not saying we shouldn't automate things. We should. But, it's not easy. If it was, we would have done it already.
I think the point they're making is that the failure mode of a waymo and automated air traffic control could look the same from an angle, but would have very different consequences.
That's what everyone screaming 'funding' doesn't seem to understand here. If your failure mode for potentially hundreds of people dying is one controller over radio forgetting something, then it'll happen eventually. And has happened, there's plenty of videos on youtube of near miss radio recordings. When a plan is landing at over 100mph simple good luck can take care of things the majority of the time.
It just feels wrong that the primary form of control in 2026 is voice over radio.
> Now imagine there's a 3 hour outage of the automated system.
Planes divert to another airport, passengers grumble, end of story. Airport closures can and do happen all the time for all kinds of reasons, including weather or equipment malfunctions.
Speaking of runway crossings specifically, you could have an automated backup, and require authorization from both ATC and the automated system to enter a runway.
We build pacemakers, AEDs, flight control software, and other mission-critical life-and-death software. The idea that we'll just forever keep the system run by specially trained humans with known and foreseeable faults because poorly designed software could fail is head-in-sand unreasonable.
Look what happened when the power went out in SF and the Waymos just stopped in the street because they were confused and there weren’t enough humans to direct them. Now imagine that but with planes that will fall out of the sky when they run out of fuel since they can’t land. Automating this is pants on head retarded.
That sounds like a poorly thought-out implementation.
An example of a poorly thought-out implementation elsewhere does not exclude the possibility of coming up with a better one than humans coordinating with their mouths over radio.
Be greedy when others are fearful, or something like that?
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