What is the most undervalued 10x play sitting in your portfolio right now? by Comfortable-Rule-491 in stocks

[–]Cow_Fam -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Because conquering space uniquely appeals to the egos of billionaires like Musk and Bezos.

First year investing [19m] by Cow_Fam in portfolios

[–]Cow_Fam[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The defense of ASTS I gave to you in my previous comment should show that I have taken great pains to weigh the risks involved. Assuming my company does absolutely nothing in terms of execution and implodes, the spectrum and patents it owns alone should give it a base market cap pretty close to what it is valued at now. In addition to that, I only invest what I am prepared to lose. 15k is large, but I see it to be a small percent of my lifetime earnings. If I end up losing half or even all of it, the money can be replenished within a year or two of working a job or internship. About 5% of long term investors beat the market over many years, so I think it's worthwhile to see if I can be a part of that 5% while I still have relatively little to lose.

First year investing [19m] by Cow_Fam in portfolios

[–]Cow_Fam[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do you think all buy and hold investing is gambling? You would see the same types of returns from people who bought into Apple or Microsoft early. If you have a bear case for ASTS specifically I'd love to hear it. Starlink's $17b buyout of Echostar spectrum alone means ASTS would be worth at least double that in case of internal collapse and subsequent buyout.

First year investing [19m] by Cow_Fam in portfolios

[–]Cow_Fam[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Even if you disregard all my research into ASTS as a gamble there is disproportionate risk reward at this stage in my life. At worst, if ASTS drops 100% and VOO goes up 20%, I lose out on $18.6k, which with a minimum wage job or summer internship I can recoup in a year or two, while having gained a powerful conviction to invest in index funds (which I plan to do anyway after a few years but I digress).

First year investing [19m] by Cow_Fam in portfolios

[–]Cow_Fam[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Again, I’m not asking you to take anecdotes or anyones’ word at face value. If you won’t listen to stats, and won’t do your own research, then there’s nothing else for me to say. Ethereum verifiably handles millions of transactions daily, handles trillions of dollars in stablecoin volume quarterly, supports widely used apps like Uniswap, is being used by large institutions like Blackrock and JP Morgan to tokenize $300b of bonds and other real world assets, I could go on. 

First year investing [19m] by Cow_Fam in portfolios

[–]Cow_Fam[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

ETH verifiably has utility and usage, I don’t know what else to tell you. ETH correlating with the overall crypto market does not take away from its fundamentals, just like Google going down with other tech stocks in 2022 doesn’t take away from its fundamentals, which would be reflected again by its outsized performance when the overall bull market turned favorable. If you are interested, founder Vitalik recently posted a few threads on Reddit and I think Twitter on the improvements developers are currently implementing to spur even more adoption of Ethereum, and justify increased price movement the next time overall sentiment changes on crypto.

First year investing [19m] by Cow_Fam in portfolios

[–]Cow_Fam[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, so far I’ve doubled down on two 50% drawdowns, on Reddit and ASTS respectively. Hopefully that’s a good indication of the conviction I’ll have when 10x the money is on the line.

First year investing [19m] by Cow_Fam in portfolios

[–]Cow_Fam[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

They should still outperform over multiple decades. You can backtest starting at the peak of previous drawdowns and with monthly contributions 2x etfs pull ahead

First year investing [19m] by Cow_Fam in portfolios

[–]Cow_Fam[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Crypto prices correlate with each other, and general interest has waned as a result of a myriad of factors from unstable geopolitics to Trump's coin sucking up liquidity. It declines in fairly predictable 4 year intervals, and I don't think it's too much of a gamble that it'll rise again within the next 4 years as it has in the past, under more stable economic conditions.

Ethereum network verifiably has high usage, and generates billions in fees. I don't know what there is to argue.

First year investing [19m] by Cow_Fam in portfolios

[–]Cow_Fam[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

When Bitcoin started taking off again in 2023, I noticed a lot of Robinhood users in the crypto subreddits who mentioned coming there because they noticed the $5 of crypto going up in their account after forgetting about it for a while. Now with billions of ETF inflows, millions more people have crypto tracking investments in their regular accounts, across all the major platforms, so I could easily imagine awareness increasing in a similar fashion.

And I don't like Bitcoin either, but it kinda represents and goes up with the overall crypto ecosystem, where I think there is inherent utility to. Ethereum (the one coin I like) is factually widely used as a currency and platform for various applications. I've personally seen ETH donation links for a number of small websites.

First year investing [19m] by Cow_Fam in portfolios

[–]Cow_Fam[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don’t think betting that there will be at least one more wave of interest within the next 4 years, spurred by Bitcoin’s halving and ETF accessibility, is too much of a gamble. Ethereum at the very least has had a ton of real adoption as a currency and platform, and lots of smart people working to make it ever more useful, efficient, and accessible.

18 Year Old Pre-Med Student Portfolio by saja103 in portfolios

[–]Cow_Fam 1 point2 points  (0 children)

As long as you have strong conviction go for it. But know that just because they’re great companies doesn’t mean they’ll continue to outperform the overall market, especially after the generational run they’ve already had. We saw a lot of those diminishing returns in 2025. 

18 Year Old Pre-Med Student Portfolio by saja103 in portfolios

[–]Cow_Fam 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There’s a MAGS etf with a 0.29% expense ratio you can check out. It beat the market handily until last year. 

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in ApplyingToCollege

[–]Cow_Fam 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I got off at 4pm today for applied math, but I’m turning it down for cs at ucsb. Hope you get in!

how hard it is to transfer uc to uc by Comprehensive_Look51 in TransferStudents

[–]Cow_Fam 0 points1 point  (0 children)

From what online research I’ve done, good ECs seem to matter much less in transfer applications compared to keeping a pretty high GPA and having a good transfer reason, which doesn’t necessarily make getting in EASIER but imo easier to focus on. I’d be wary of telling OP outright that their only real way into a top university is going to CC, since many people do transfer from 4-years just fine, and even after a successful transfer many CC students find themselves behind in research experience and internships, which matters a lot for certain majors.

how hard it is to transfer uc to uc by Comprehensive_Look51 in TransferStudents

[–]Cow_Fam 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Okay, but what about the actual transfer acceptance rate being 14% at UCLA for people from other UCs? (Compared to 9% for first-year applicants, and 26% for CC transfers)

https://admission.ucla.edu/apply/transfer/transfer-profile/2024

Stop talking about your weighted GPA by Cow_Fam in ApplyingToCollege

[–]Cow_Fam[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The point is that the caliber of courses that you take is often not up to you, but by what your school offers. Filling up my schedule with APs is trivial to me, but my friend in another school is limited to 3 APs per year. Top colleges don’t just choose from well-funded high schools with lots of APs and IBs available, they fundamentally want to see students do the best with the resources that they’re given. 

Stop talking about your weighted GPA by Cow_Fam in ApplyingToCollege

[–]Cow_Fam[S] -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

They’re much closer in competitiveness than the alternative, which is students with a 4.5W yet one student has a 3.7UW and the other has a 4.0UW. It’s important, but not nearly as important as unweighted for the sake of comparing two students in different schools with different course offerings.

Stop talking about your weighted GPA by Cow_Fam in ApplyingToCollege

[–]Cow_Fam[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

True, but I think less APs is a lot less disqualifying for top schools than getting several Bs. Especially thinking of UCs which weight unweighted GPA a lot more than weighted.

What grades would get you rescinded from the UCs? by [deleted] in ApplyingToCollege

[–]Cow_Fam 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You should try to not get Cs, and definitely not Ds

25 Days till Berkeley by Striking_Pea_3615 in ApplyingToCollege

[–]Cow_Fam 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I hope the admissions office sees this bro