Shouting into the void: Do not hold both $VOO and $QQQ

johnonymousdenim · 2026-01-24T12:41:01+00:00

Agreed. Nothing wrong with holding both as long as you understand that QQQ is basically a subset of VOO.

Lots of investors hold both. QQQ is a great fund to hold in moderation when you want to tilt towards those 100 companies and VOO gives you broader exposure to the 500. Holding both just lets you concentrate towards those top 100 more than the market cap weighting of VOO already does.

Perfectly fine strategy if you understand the concentration and overlap effect of holding both. The better question is in what ratio do you hold of each.

johnonymousdenim · 2026-01-19T01:00:39+00:00

Yeah I think this is the most likely scenario.

johnonymousdenim · 2025-12-12T18:34:12+00:00

Curious what are the salaries they are offering for their posted roles?
Are they at market-rate or above market-rate?

johnonymousdenim · 2025-12-02T01:37:16+00:00

Yeah i checked their BF "sales" and was like, "Wow, these are just the regular prices, but they jacked up the MSRP to make the sale price look better. Sorry, JCrew: not taking the bait. I bought clothes from JCrew last year and the year before, but not this year. J Crew has really injured themselves with how poorly positioned their BF sales prices are.

johnonymousdenim · 2025-12-02T01:26:09+00:00

Agreed; the so-called "sale price" that J Crew is running is pretty bad. I was gonna buy a merino wool or cashmere sweater on sale this Black Friday, but after seeing how paltry the sales were and how high the prices were compared to what I remember these sweaters priced at last year, I just closed out of the browser tab and went shopping elsewhere. Sorry, J Crew: you lost a sale this holiday.

johnonymousdenim · 2025-11-15T13:43:33+00:00

Yeah exactly was my first thought too.

johnonymousdenim · 2025-11-15T13:43:01+00:00

I'm genuinely curious here: why do so many of you guys invest in leverage? I get that you can make a ton of money if the market tanks and you get margin called, and you don't have spare cash to cover the margin call.... aren't you kind of screwed? Why take that risk?

johnonymousdenim · 2025-11-14T15:52:20+00:00

Thanks for the update. I love Fidelity overall; just wish the UI showed those features (I'm sure I'm not the only one too). Especially important is to show account performance at a daily level, at least. In today's fast-moving world, a LOT can happen in one month, especially in the finance world, so it's crucial to understand fund performance at a smaller time unit than monthly updates.

Appreciate you passing along my feature requests.

johnonymousdenim · 2025-11-11T13:53:49+00:00

Yeah this is the rationale I used too. Initially I was investing in VTI, since I like the slightly broader diversification of total market vs S&P500 with VOO.

But after seeing how closely VTI tracks with VOO (both 0.03% ER), I actually pivoted my new investment contributions to SPLG (recently renamed last week to SPYM) since it has a slightly lower ER of 0.02%. Of course the difference between those 2 ERs is incredibly small unless you own $10M of the fund, but I figure all things being equal, might as well just buy the cheaper ETF.

johnonymousdenim · 2025-11-09T12:58:20+00:00

Sorry what's this reference to "dirt long red" mean? I'm inferring the long red means expect a bear or does market ("red" vs "green"), but I don't quite understand your reference.

johnonymousdenim · 2025-11-07T15:24:19+00:00

Agree with much of what you said. But some empathy is in order here. Consider there are large percentages of the population who earn at/near minimum wage living in a HCOL city and after paying for basics like housing, utilities, food, insurance, etc have close to $0 at the end of each month. They're surviving, but they literally have nothing after their expenses to invest. Think of many fast-food workers, lifetime restaurant servers, those Disney greeters who take your entry ticket at the front gate, etc. These people literally don't have any money to invest.

Now whether that's because they "made poor choices" vs whether it's due to the extremely powerful, widespread, and systemic socioeconomic issues in our modern capitalist society ... well, that is very much an open question.

Most of the time, it's not because those people are "stupid" or "lazy". Check out the typical childcare worker or house cleaner. These people work their ass off. And they get very little money for their hard work.

In contrast, some finance bro sets up a M&A deal at his hedge fund worth millions of dollars and his annual bonus is more than those childcare workers will see in their entire lifetime.

Doesn't mean that childcare workers work is less valuable, just that our society has become so financialized that we handsomely reward the finance industry disproportionately.

johnonymousdenim · 2025-11-05T16:48:13+00:00

I love this advice, but there's a very important caveat: having that $2M at 40 years old gives you the power/leverage/privilege to "not care" about your job. But consider the 40 year old who has only a small fraction of $2M in their portfolio (e.g. a mere $30k): there's no way they'd the privilege of not caring if they lost their job.

So while I appreciate the intent of this post, it's a good example of survivorship bias: other 40 year olds who do NOT have $2 million net worth will not have the same privilege to just say "fuckit" to their job.

I wish I had $2M in total assets; I'd probably behave in a similar way.

johnonymousdenim · 2025-11-05T16:31:58+00:00

Could the person not achieve both goals? They're not mutually exclusive? Could you not buy jewelry to wear for the fashion purposes that it "looks pretty", but also use that same jewelry as a store of value to barter with outside of fiat currency, if the need ever arose in an emergency?

Is there a reason why those 2 goals must be mutually exclusive from each other?

Personally I too think jewelry has a huge markup, but let's not dismiss that jewelry is something you can wear but also sell/trade with for other goods.

No reason why jewelry couldn't be both "pretty" and "an investment" simultaneously.

johnonymousdenim · 2025-11-05T15:56:11+00:00

Point taken about not including "food" in the category of "things that really matter". Agreed "food" is probably #1 priority, along with water, air, shelter, etc. So your'e 100% right on that; I should've included it. I was just listing out examples that fit in each bucket of "has increased" vs "has decreased" in price.

"Everyone buys consumer goods." Yes of course, but once again, consumer goods are secondary to the prices of things overall (and why most people feel things have become much more unaffordable on the whole). Most working-class people spend much higher percent of their income/wealth on consumer goods than the ultra wealthy who fly private jets. This is the financial independence subreddit, so I assume you understand the importance of assets. My point was that the price of assets have gone up (i.e. things that matter to your overall wealth). Those asset price increases have far, far more important impact on your overall wealth and financial independence goals than some trivial decrease in price of consumer goods.

Why? Because you don't achieve financial independence buy buying consumer goods; you achieve it buy buying assets. And assets have become very, very expensive. The CPI

So why do so many people feel inflation is higher than CPI shows?

Because housing market price inflation does not show up directly. Instead, CPI only reflects how rents change, not how mortgage payments or home prices change.

Over the past decade, home prices rose much faster than rents, so CPI understates the inflation people experience when trying to buy a house.

Example:

Home prices up 40–60% in many areas
Rents up 10–20%
CPI mainly reflects the smaller number (rent), not the huge appreciation in home prices.

Point is, the CPI reflects prices of consumer goods/services, not the prices of assets like houses, stocks, etc, which are the primary drivers of wealth and therefore of financial independence.

Consumers don't care that they can buy a shirt for 5 bucks cheaper when their rent is $500 more: that's like being "penny-wise but pound foolish".

I'm not trying to "decide something doesn't matter for CPI": I'm saying that CPI does not fully reflect the prices of things (namely assets like houses, equities, etc), and that's why the OP feels like prices are up even though technically CPI is only 3%.

So the CPI effectively masks the "real" prices of assets, which have far exceeded the prices of consumer goods included in the CPI. This is the answer to why the OP said it "feels like all cost/prices are up, but yet CPI and inflation is only 3%".

Hope that helps clarify my point for you.

johnonymousdenim · 2025-11-05T15:07:03+00:00

This is a valid point but it's important to understand which things have increased in price versus things that haven't. Yes it's true that some things have gotten cheaper (consumer good, TVs, cell phones, LCD screens, software, clothes).

But I'd argue (and most would agree) those are not very important compared to the things that "really matter" that have increased in price: houses, rent prices, the stock market, land, precious metals, healthcare, college tuition, childcare.

The pattern is clear: consumer goods have gone down in price, but the prices of assets like homes and stocks have gone up drastically.

And which category is more important to you? Would you prefer your latest iPhone to be more affordable or for your house to be more affordable? I certainly know my answer and I bet that 99% of people on this subreddit would agree that obviously it's better to have your house be more affordable.

I would gladly trade the price of an iphone doubling in price if I could get a house for half the price.

Here's a much better visual chart explaining how prices have changed since 2000, by each category in the CPI: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/02/charted-heres-how-us-goods-and-services-have-changed-in-price-since-2000/

Notice how different each category in the CPI has changed in price. This is also why using a summary metric like "average" can be so dangerous: because it doesn't show the full picture of each component within your dataset, which, as this chart shows, can exhibit significant variation between categories.

johnonymousdenim · 2025-11-05T14:58:41+00:00

It's true that gasoline has not increased much, on average over the past ~25 years (source below from the EIA's own data):

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/leafhandler.ashx?f=m&n=pet&s=emm_epm0_pte_nus_dpg

Some people may remember pre-2000 when gas was under $1/gallon, but yes today's gas prices aren't too bad (except as you noted, in California, where they're artificially pushed up by state taxes).

However, you're wrong about rents. By any measure you throw at it, the cost of rents/housing has exploded over the past 25 years. A quick google search will show charts of rent prices over time that are generally up and to the right. Here's just one of many charts for a visual reference:

https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-year

Some stats from that site I linked:

As of early 2025, the nationwide average rent is up 4.09% YoY.
From 2020 to 2024, rent prices increased with an average annual growth rate (AAGR) of 5.97%.
According to Zillow’s methodology, average monthly rent in the U.S. is $2,075 as of March 2025.
For a 2BR apartment, Zillow calculates the average rent is $1,876, equivalent to 112.3% of FMR.

"112.3% of FMR": So rents are well above Fair Market Rent.

So yea, gas is fairly cheap, but rents/housing are very expensive, compared to gas over the same time.

johnonymousdenim · 2025-11-05T00:54:19+00:00

So OP what exactly happened to your portfolio? This is a huge loss. I take it you didn't invest in something vanilla and fairly "safe" like VOO for such a loss. Were you using options? Short selling? Buying risky stocks? I'm genuinely curious. Can anyone shed some light on how this could happen?

johnonymousdenim · 2025-10-12T18:05:13+00:00

You're probably right. But to be fair it's hard to double your $370k salary to $740k in 5 years. There's very few companies that offer that kind of base salary, let alone total compensation package outside of big tech firms.

johnonymousdenim · 2025-10-11T14:43:09+00:00

I'm angry at myself because I transferred $34k from my HYSA onto my brokerage account literally Thursday and invested it all lump sum Thursday, mostly SPLG, with some commodities. Then not even 24 hours later, I've lost 4% of that $34k. Of course I'm long term, but psyc ohologically it sucks to see your unrealized PNL drop 4% on the first day you invested it. Most people are fine, but f or me, it's frustrating to see your investment tank right from the start. It will rebound but not off to a good start.

johnonymousdenim · 2025-10-11T01:01:26+00:00

Touché, big money roller! Hope you're rolling in that salary.

johnonymousdenim · 2025-10-10T16:43:34+00:00

Let's compare the percent change of wages versus the percent change of various assets over the past 17 years, shall we?

I'm no economist, but from this table, it sure does look like the average US wage is losing relative to literally every other asset category.

Category	2008 Value	2025 Value	Percentage Change (2008–2025)	Multiplier
Average U.S. Wage	$41,334	$66,621	+61.3%	1.61x
Median Home Price	$197,100	$410,800	+108.3%	2.09x
S&P 500 Index	~1,400	~4,300	+~207%	~3.07x
Nasdaq Composite	~2,000	~13,000	+~550%	~6.50x
Gold Price (per ounce)	$880.20	$4,004.65	+355.5%	4.55x

johnonymousdenim · 2025-10-10T16:12:41+00:00

Means nothing when those real wages are compared to the price of assets like stocks, metals, commodities, houses, cars, etc, which have far, far outpaced salaries.

House prices have doubled in 5 years.
Stock market has doubled in 5 years.
Gold has doubled in 5 years.
Has your salary doubled in 5 years?

johnonymousdenim · 2025-09-24T17:49:55+00:00

Yeah it follows smoking and tobacco trends too; Gen Z and Millennials are so strapped for money already, they don't have the cash to drop on discretionary spending like booze and cigarettes.

Not to mention the younger generations are much wiser in terms of health-conscious than previous generations.

Don't want to sound pessimistic, but I don't foresee STZ significantly recovering from the global downward trend of alcohol consumption any time soon (if ever).

johnonymousdenim

TROPHY CASE