This Is Not Financial Advice

Day 9 of Inkhaven: 30 Days of Posts

I've made some incredible financial mistakes in my life. The most painful one was buying 3 bitcoin in 2017, making an insane profit, and then destroying it all as the price collapsed in 2018. It was tragic going from a sense of real power, being relatively financially well off at such a young age, and having it all disappear to a fraction of what I had when I started. How I wish I'd spent more time becoming financially literate rather than believing I had some great gift.

I learned a lot from that experience, and from the next few years of studying the stock market, reading books on investing and getting actual experience in the market.

I truly love how the stock market works. I think it's one of the most remarkable inventions humanity has created, and it represents a tool for anyone to potentially gain their financial freedom. However, it is a weird and dangerous tool that presents numerous opportunities for shooting yourself in the foot as well.

Full disclosure about my performance over time:

• Portfolio has returned: 28.5% annualised since Jan 2024 vs S&P 500's +16.1%
• Best trade was Palantir, which I bought at ~$50, sold at ~$137.
  • This accounted for 64% of all gains.
  • Without that one pick, my returns are similar to the S&P 500
• My Tax Free Savings Account (TFSA) is just a passive S&P 500 ETF and it has been wonderful and reliable.
• 2 years is not enough to know if I'm actually skilled or just got lucky

A note on the Palantir stock. I always felt kind of bad owning Palantir but I bought it when it was mostly just a very cool company doing extremely well. I held it for a time even after I learned about its involvement in military operations in the middle east that I disagreed with, but I held onto it. I finally sold when I found out about its involvement in ICE raids on immigrants in the US because I didn't want to be a part of what was happening.

My most recent pivot has been towards investing in the compute infrastructure layer for AI, taking some inspiration from Leopold Aschenbrenner. Arguably this is quite a cynical position to hold while working on AI safety and being very worried about AI, but I believe that the compute infrastructure seems like a reasonably neutral thing to invest in.

Ultimately, the thing that I think is the most defensible is that I'm highly uncertain about what the downstream impact of this compute will be. On the one hand it might contribute to building the very harmful thing, but it might also be used for relatively beneficial purposes. In the case of Palantir, the harm was extremely clear and visible and it was straightforward to determine that this is harmful, but in the case of compute it is significantly harder to say.

Arguably the effort spent on all this is inconsequential compared to just putting in effort to learn valuable skills or earn more money. This is probably true, but at the same time, the investments have the wonderful quality of becoming more valuable without doing anything, which suits my lazy preferences.