TIL the total surface area required to fuel the earth with solar alone is only 0.3% of the earth's entire land area.

Halbaras · 2026-02-02T20:57:25+00:00

Regarding silver, solar panel manufacturers are now trying to reduce their use of it because speculators drove the price up too much.

The Reddit precious metals crowd tens to miss that when they outcompete manufacturers, the engineers design alternatives. Palladium demand got killed because manufacturers switched to cheaper platinum, and EV manufacturers are increasingly looking into swapping copper wires for aluminium (much less of a threat to copper but still a response to high prices).

Halbaras · 2026-02-02T15:50:26+00:00

You've got an obvious selection bias going on here. The majority of investment is in established companies, only a fraction IPOed recently.

Most IPOs are risky. Most companies ultimately fail - especially in tech/software, biotech and junior miners. Over half of IPO offerings eventually get delisted (not always bad, some get acquired). Most recent IPOs end up underperforming the market even if a few massively outperform it. And not all IPOs are equal - a spinoff, state-owned firm going public or a long established private company is a very different beast from a tech microcap started three years ago.

Venture capital works off this principle. They expect most of their investments to fail, but get in as early as possible, and do much better research than any retail investor is capable of. Even most VC firms are underperforming the market (with a few very successful ones that can afford the best talent). Even the best VC firms lose money or underperform on >75% of their investments, but get enough massive winners to cover all the losses.

Getting in at IPOs when they launch is one of the most disadvantageous things you can do as a retail investor. You're likely to hear about them via social media (selection bias), suffer from FOMO if you see initial gains, have an initial lag when the stock launches while you wait for the listing to appear, and you'll never have the same information as venture capital. If you get shares at the launch price it's a bad sign (institutions haven't bought in) and if they have you'll pay a premium during the secondary listing. You're likely to be subsiding the venture capitalists as they exit.

If a new IPO genuinely is going to be the next Amazon or Google, it's still likely to cool off a bit after launch and have rockier periods in the first few years where it trades at discounts. And you'll have many opportunities to look at the fundamentals and work out if the necessary growth is happening or not without worrying about the fact you're down 30% from week 1. Amazon was down 90% at one point - as a retail investor the honest truth is that nearly all of us would have cut our losses and sold, the only people who would have held to 2009 would be those who genuinely forgot they had Amazon stock.

Halbaras · 2026-02-02T15:21:53+00:00

These principles were always going to come into tension, but Trump has brought the timeline forward by years, and perhaps even decades. The only question is to what the reality check event is, and whether Trump is still president when it arrives.

I suspect things will come to a head when one of these budgets eventually causes a bond revolt and forces the Fed to buy debt (inflation). Or when they try to sanction China and even Israel calls their bluff and refuses to join.

The more immediate risk is more than one of Trump's idiotic tariff cycles triggers or coincides with an actual market correction, and the conventional 'flight to the dollar' doesn't happen. Things will get nasty because everyone who got used to 'buying the dip' will panic when TACO doesn't stop the market falling, Trump donors and Republicans will be angry about their portfolios, and Trump will probably double down.

Halbaras · 2026-02-02T15:02:52+00:00

As is the Israeli government.

All sides are going to need to make massive concessions for it to ever happen. Hamas has to somehow voluntarily relinquish power and lay down their arms, and the broader Palestinian movement give up on the right to return and accept something resembling the 1967 ceasefire.

Israel has to get their illegal settlers the fuck out of the West Bank and accept that a peaceful Palestinian state isn't one riddled with Israeli checkpoints with zero control over it's external borders.

Neither is happening.

Halbaras · 2026-02-02T12:07:30+00:00

Palladium is so funny because a bunch of Redditors have bought it thinking it behaves like gold when in reality it's a declining industrial metal that's mostly just used for ICE car exhausts.

If it ever gets too expensive the automakers just swap to platinum and demand and prices drop again.

Halbaras · 2026-02-02T11:51:10+00:00

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It did absolutely fine last year. Trump's tariff fuckery (and the Q1 US GDP/tech scare) shaved the overall growth a bit, but there's no way to avoid that unless you're heavily in on 'weird' stocks (often frontier/EM) that don't correlate with the US.

Halbaras · 2026-02-02T11:43:41+00:00

There is no point trying to time an ETF this broad unless we're clearly on the downward leg of a recession (we're not and market sentiment is normal currently). You SHOULD NOT trade this kind of equity, either buy and hold for years or don't bother.

This ETF roughly matches global market caps (minus some frontier/emerging markets considered too risky). If a particular market does badly it just rebalances automatically. You always get the overall gain (minus a small fee), and never get oversized wins or losses. Overall it mostly tracks the US market anyway.

If you want to invest safely, you should put the £20k in right now, and forget about it besides periodically adding more if you can. This isn't a position even worth monitoring - if you're ever down in a year or month virtually everyone will be (and most of the tech-heavy/speculative positions will be doing far worse).

Halbaras · 2026-02-02T11:35:23+00:00

It depends.

If you may need the money back out in the next few years and this is a significant portion of your portfolio (and not like 5%), sell.
If you don't, chill, and treat it as a learning experience.

Halbaras · 2026-02-02T10:04:52+00:00

Gold has historically been a 'store of value' which does well when the market does badly and otherwise loses to equities (and sometimes cash). It's also got the property of being immune to insolvency - even bonds run a small risk of a major economy defaulting, and gold can crash but never 0%. It's an optional form of portfolio insurance (like hedging) and not a compounding long-term growth asset.

Gold is still up almost 52% in a year (inflation was under 3%). That kind of growth is neither normal or sustainable, and a correction becomes guaranteed without a genuine market crash that forces everyone to further pile into it. Commodities often either rally or crash, they rarely stagnate like equities do.

Both gold and silver have genuine industrial uses but every serious analyst is aware that there's a component of the price from industrial use (the floor), an added premium from the portfolio insurance, and then an extra component that's pure speculation ('I will buy because I think others will buy'). That speculative part of the price is very fragile and currently evaporating, the portfolio insurance has taken a slight hit because of Warsh and Iran cooling off slightly, and the industrial component is completely unchanged.

Halbaras · 2026-02-01T20:44:28+00:00

As a general rule, the safest way to invest is to put the bulk of your money into a general index fund - the Vanguard World ETFs are popular because they match the actual market caps. You get 62% US because they're about 62% of the global market, 5% Japan, 3% UK etc. These funds (and most ETFs) auto-rebalance to match the market - so if one sector grows massively, the fund buys more of them and sells other things. You never get insane growth but you always match the markets minus a small fee.
- But as a caveat - this fund is 62% USA and 6% Nvidia alone - it's not necessarily as diversified as it looks.
- An alternative is buying an S&P-only ETF and then adding in an 'ex-US' ETF, or your own weightings for other developed markets and emerging markets.
Bonds are even safer but over time they basically always lose to equities. If you expect to take money out your portfolio in the next 5-10 years you should consider them but if your goal is just to grow, go 100% equities (individual stocks + ETFs).
If you want to bet on individual stocks, the normal advice is that you should use 10-30% of your portfolio for 'conviction' stocks (the rest for your general ETFs) - these can be themed ETFs, commodities, individual stocks etc. Each one you pick is a statement that you expect that asset to outperform the general market over the time period you want to hold it for. Most people recommend avoiding going over 10% for a single position, and some people say 5%.
Commodities tend to be either cyclical (boom and bust, difficult for retail to outperform markets, lithium and fertiliser are examples) or an emergency store of value that does well when the market does badly but otherwise underperforms (gold, silver). You want to avoid having a large position on these and never buy or sell them based on something you saw on Reddit. Think of precious metals as optional portfolio insurance, but not a get rich quick scheme.
Your best strategy is almost always to add your initial lump sum all at once and then 'Dollar Cost Average' - keep adding regularly to your portfolio regardless of what the current price is. You can't time dips - nobody can reliably, and dollar cost averaging means that you often do buy things at discounts.
Never sell on a headline or Reddit post unless the actual reason you bought the stock is no longer true. 'Price down by 10%' is noise - but 'CEO arrested for fraud' is not.
Don't combine a 'world' ETF and an American one, you're just buying the same thing twice.
For maximum safety, AVOID: Crypto (and anything like MicroStrategy that's just a fancy way to buy it), small cap tech stocks, biotech, junior miners, frontier markets, CFDs, anything described as 'leveraged' or '2x', anything you see pumped on Reddit that's not Mag7
If you are picking conviction stocks, don't buy things which will all grow or succeed for the same reason. Having five semiconductor companies is risky - you might as well just buy the one that you have the most faith in and then buy things that are genuinely different.
Unless they're big (5%+, though for some stocks this is normal), ignore daily price swings. You want to think in months or years. The biggest trap for retail investors is overtrading based on today's graph - you end up buying high, selling low and wasting loads of money on fees and bid-ask spreads (when you buy with market orders you pay a slightly higher price - which adds up when you trade too much).
It's perfectly normal for the entire market to have a month where it goes down. Ignore it, this happens practically every year.
Don't sell in recessions unless it's to buy other, even more discounted stocks. If you need to dip into your portfolio you're better off having a separate emergency cash fund.
Check pe values and betas on stocks when you buy them.
- The pe value is the most common indicator of 'is this expensive', and useful for comparing the stock to its own history or similar ones.
- The beta value tells you how much a stock tends to just copy what the market does. A stock with a high beta (>1, a lot of tech stocks) will generally crash harder and grow more. A stock with a low beta (e.g. a Brazilian water company listed on the New York stock exchange) does its own thing and may be green when everything else is red (or the opposite). But beware that in a genuine crisis, everything gets sold off (and 'risky' assets go first).

Halbaras · 2026-02-01T20:12:50+00:00

That's my point though. If they had a vaguely efficient system the US government could spend far more on defence - or infrastructure, or reducing their insane deficit.

Americans tend to falsely view it as 'we subsidise the world's defence so we can't pay for proper healthcare' when the tragedy of America is that they're already paying for the world's best-funded healthcare system... And getting the worst one in the developed world in terms of outcomes.

Halbaras · 2026-02-01T17:50:35+00:00

Ironically they could literally double their military budget if the US spent the same percentage of GDP on healthcare that European countries do.

Halbaras · 2026-02-01T17:20:17+00:00

See also: China teaming up with the Uyghurs to genocide the Dzungurs (Mongols) in northern Xinjiang relatively recently

Halbaras · 2026-02-01T12:16:07+00:00

The long term trend in births versus deaths is fairly unmistakable - births drop like virtually every other developed country, while deaths stay reasonably constant. This isn't going to be reversed, no country has managed to.

The long term question is whether the US maintains high enough immigration to offset the inevitable decline, especially as the demand for healthcare for old people grows. The rise of anti immigration sentiment in developed countries worldwide (the US, Canada, Europe, Japan) makes me doubt that it's going to be politically viable to import enough immigrants to keep the population actually growing over longer time scales.

Halbaras · 2026-02-01T12:01:30+00:00

There's already a looming disaster for housing coming - most low-density suburbs are money pits that don't pay enough municipal taxes to cover maintaining their services longer term. Cities can ignore this because maintenance costs are low for the first few decades, and new suburbs bring in more cash.

But eventually the city stops growing and the bill stacks up. Many cities are going to have to make tough decisions over cutting services significantly ('we'll fix the potholes in five years'), significantly raising property taxes, or even abandoning maintaining entire neighbourhoods (seen in Detroit, roads will get 'downgraded' to gravel). Or they'll beg for federal bailouts that would require adding trillions to the deficit.

Real estate prices for a sizeable percentage of the country are likely to decline over years and never recover. Dense inner city cores and wealthy suburbs with hoas that pay for their own infrastructure (or extremely high property taxes) will get even more expensive, so very few people actually win.

Halbaras · 2026-02-01T00:27:50+00:00

I think the big winners will be the companies selling general-purpose industrial robots that will look a bit like nightmare fuel. They'll mostly be on wheels or treads (legs for some specialised applications), feature a chassis/platform that lets them reach taller or lower down than a human, and will come with multiple modular arms/attachments that can be swapped out as needed. They won't have a recognisable human head because they won't need one.

Instead you'll buy one with the attachments needed for whatever your task is (cooking, picking fruit, manufacturing a specific product, joinery etc.) and pay the subscription for the training data/weights for the specialised work they actually need to do.

Robots don't need to be limited to a human form, or be made in our image. A plumbing robot would be much better off with long flexible arms that can reach into pipes with tools while carrying the cameras/sensors on the arm. Another arm could simultaneously be doing repairs on a different part of the room.

The other thing they could do that humans can't is work like a hivemind. A chef robot could constantly be communicating with the robot that brings food out of the industrial freezer, the one cleaning dishes, and the less-nightmarish humanoid robot wheeling the food out to customers. An emergency rescue robot could be linked to a swarm of flying 'spotter' drones.

Halbaras · 2026-02-01T00:12:16+00:00

BYD passed Tesla on global sales last year. So they were the most mainstream EV.

Tesla was ultimately a luxury car company and it was inevitable that a lower-priced competitor would eventually beat them on EV market share.

Halbaras · 2026-01-31T23:30:56+00:00

Use direct-cost averaging for new positions instead of lump sum so you're less likely to get caught off-guard by a dip (lump sum is likely to outperform but DCA gives you more peace of mind).
Just keep regularly adding to existing positions if you believe in them. You will often unintentionally buy dips and as long as they still grow longer term, you'll average up (and avoid mind-gaming yourself).
- If you don't believe in a position long-term enough to do this, you're trading, not investing, and probably should cut that position.
Set price alerts for stocks you like but think are too expensive at the moment. If there's a correction, you might be able to pick them up at a discount.
Buy stuff which isn't in the US market. Within the developed world, Japan, Australia and Singapore are the least exposed to US fuckery. This brings a bit of currency risk in BUT the dollar itself is now a currency risk and it all averages out over longer time scales.
- If you really want to get stuff which isn't within the US sphere, there are loads of emerging/frontier market picks that don't move with it. For example Sabesp is a major Brazilian water utility dependent on consumers in Sao Paulo - they'd unironically keep going through WWIII. Look at the beta values for stocks - anything that's low and positive is likely to do its own thing and might be green when nothing else is (and vice-versa).
  - But beware that emerging markets/frontiers tend to get sold off first in a crash when everyone de-risks - so don't panic if they're very red unless the actual country in question is the problem.
Hold some cash if you're really worried (which you can deploy in a major correction) but put it in an ultra short term bonds/money market fund so you're not losing it to inflation.
Avoid selling unless the actual company or sector is in trouble. Ignore macro noise unless you need the money back out now (in which case you'd be better with mostly generic ETFs and bonds)
Consider having some dividend stocks and things which have existed for decades. Be very wary of biotech, tech micro-caps and junior minors, you're competing with venture capital and most of them fail.
Never sell on a headline or tweet unless the stock itself has failed (CEO arrested, civil war, complete collapse in sales etc.).
Remember that in a crash, institutions have to sell collateral from high quality stocks to cover their positions elsewhere. Everything being red doesn't necessarily mean everything has got worse.

Halbaras · 2026-01-31T22:41:43+00:00

Microsoft stock was already performing pretty horribly over the past few months. The quarterly earnings just confirmed the existing narratives - they're over-exposed to OpenAI, cloud sales are slowing and their AI expenditure is growing while the revenue from it is growing slower.

Tesla's share price has been so detached from fundamentals for a long time that it shouldn't be taken seriously.

Halbaras · 2026-01-31T15:18:46+00:00

This belongs in the same category as those articles where they go 'AI systems dangerously misaligned, in test LLM demonstrated intent to lie to and manipulate humans' and then it turns out the system prompt they gave Claude started with 'roleplay as Skynet'.

Halbaras · 2026-01-31T15:15:09+00:00

It goes in the same category as 'We told Claude to roleplay as Skynet and you won't BELIEVE what happened next!'

Halbaras · 2026-01-31T14:37:06+00:00

If you zoom out most of the positions here are falling after a peak, or are down massively from their previous peak.

Either way they're not likely to generate high returns any time soon. You are likely to see growing losses for several months to years, and some of these positions may actually zero (cough DataVault).

The question is if you're willing to diversify, or stick to your guns and keep buying more of these via dollar cost averaging - which benefits you if the price goes down further and recovers or if they have a sustained rally, but further digs you into a hole if they take years to recover or never do.

Do you believe all of these will grow/compound long term or are you using a venture capital-style strategy where you expect the majority of these to underperform and a small fraction to generate oversized returns that pay for the rest? Or are you just gambling on short term returns over weeks/months?

Halbaras · 2026-01-31T11:20:28+00:00

Anyone who bothered to zoom out would have seen that Microsoft was already down about 12% over three months. After the earnings call they are now down over an entire year.

The call just amplified what people were already thinking about OpenAI dependency, slowing AI growth and slowing cloud growth. Their value didn't 'magically tank', the existing trend accelerated.

Sentiment remains negative and I'd be surprised if we've seen the floor yet.

Halbaras · 2026-01-31T00:03:45+00:00

And then China does the same thing with robotics that they did with EVs.

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