this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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very basic math and a rudimentary understanding of the markets should prove undeniably to anyone that beating 10-20% in a year is easy as hell. just 1 10% gain a month (truly easy to do) would be roughly 250%...
1000% in couple months is just your training wheels coming off. cash/time poor i understand, that's where i started too...started trading during breaks/down time. those "active funds underperform the market" soundbites your familiar with only applies to large cap fund managers and shit mate, those funds aren't designed to beat the market...they're designed to minimize risk and fluctuations in value for shitloads of $, while still increasing relative to inflation
most brokers don't get paid to actively manage shit anyway, they're getting paid to essentially oversee a block of accounts/deal with clients/facilitate special orders etc. but i can guarantee you one that is being paid to actively manage wouldn't have a job very long if they couldn't beat a sp500 etf...
I am hugely skeptical of this - it'd be super easy to forge a +69420% screenshot or even to use a stock trading simulator to fake a more real looking portfolio, but I'll put that aside and assume good faith - how long have you been investing for?
technically, just a little over 2 years. the majority of these gains were over the last 6 months or so though, after I read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator and realized just how rigged everything is and always was was when it finally clicked for me and I felt comfortable enough trading to quit my job.
key rule differences between the US markets and others around the world allow for blatant price manipulation (rules that pretty much every country except the US fixed, after 2000/2008), the more you read up on the history and fundamental mechanisms of the markets the more clear it is that these rule differences exist specifically so the US markets can function more like a casino than a market, to be "exciting".
always figured the game was rigged, but didn't appreciate just how rigged before reading that book. paradoxically, the whole thing being rigged makes it easier to make as it's no longer a game of chance...it's a game of identifying whose going to fuck over who, and positioning yourself between them to profit off of either side winning
Which stocks are you most invested in at the moment?
right now? my biggest position is a late-stage biotech called SLS, very likely to get bought out by end of Q1 or Q2 of this year. just based on market mechanics alone it should gamma squeeze to the double digits from 4-5 soon, but the real $ will be on waiting for BO to send it to triple digits.
(shorts absolute pulverize the biotech space, because the overwhelming majority of drugs go nowhere and the industry burns cash like nothing else. so shorts just short the entire industry raking in boatloads of $ farming options premiums they know won't payout. but when one does work, and big pharma steps up to buy em out...shit can go from <100m marketcap to 10b+ overnight. because the doctors behind the drugs know how this whole finance game works too, and they're not selling out their lifes work unless it sets up their entire family/friends for life. it's like the heroin of finance industry)
besides that, at the moment mostly jusy some holding companies that are basically designed to reel in and trap/squeeze shorts, buy while trap being set...sell when it finally goes off and shorts start covering, repeat. then accumulating some beaten down dividend stocks that i think will recover longterm
if your thinking of trading on someone elses word/tips though...your gambling, and the first rule of gambling is don't risk anything you can't afford to lose.
also, let me end this with this...there's a saying by Buffet that goes "everybody is a genius in a bull-market", the reasoning behind that becomes clear after reading that book i mentioned, the Great Filter for this whole trading thing happens during crashes.
up until a crash happens...everyones basically just being lulled into a sense of complacency, the stock market really is just one massive predatory casino. first step to trading effectively is looking at every ticker like someone is trying to fuck you out of your $, then figuring out how and what you need to do to set yourself up on the winning side.