<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>dwc</author><text>Agreed, with one exception: when you as an individual have fairly deep knowledge about something and spot a market opportunity based on that knowledge, you &lt;i&gt;might&lt;/i&gt; be able to correctly judge whether you can take advantage of it.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve done this several times and made good money. Two times I approximately doubled my money over the course of several months. Yeah, not day trading but buying and waiting for the market to figure out what I already knew. The thing about that is, it only happens when it happens. Most of the time my money is sitting in index funds quietly getting solid but undramatic returns, and I don&amp;#x27;t have to pay much attention at all.</text><parent_chain><item><author>brianpgordon</author><text>You will never, ever beat the market by making smart trades.&lt;p&gt;Get real- you&amp;#x27;re a beginner reading investopedia. Active funds employ hundreds or thousands of people who work more than full-time to support an operation of systematically studying investment opportunities and exploiting inside information to beat the market, and even &lt;i&gt;they&lt;/i&gt; don&amp;#x27;t beat the market.&lt;p&gt;Put your money in a diversified portfolio of index funds and leave it alone. Making targeted trades costs money and will do no better than index funds anyway.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Ask HN: How did you learn about stocks and the market?</title><text>I find it really hard&amp;#x2F;confusing to understand stocks and the market from the investing perspective. I&amp;#x27;m a beginner in this domain. So, I keen to learn about it so that I can understand the technical details too. I did a search and found out that everybody is recommending &amp;quot;The Intelligent Investor&amp;quot; by Benjamin Graham. I&amp;#x27;m kind of person who likes to watch videos, so I also found couple of courses (paid) on Udemy but those aren&amp;#x27;t good and just wastage of money. I also found that Investopedia is an excellent resource. It contains a lot of good tutorials [0], guides [1] and videos [2].&lt;p&gt;You might have already learnt what I&amp;#x27;m trying to. What&amp;#x27;s your story? It would be really nice if you can also share the resources that proved really useful to you.&lt;p&gt;[0] http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.investopedia.com&amp;#x2F;university&amp;#x2F;stocks&amp;#x2F;
[1] http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.investopedia.com&amp;#x2F;university&amp;#x2F;
[2] http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.investopedia.com&amp;#x2F;video&amp;#x2F;</text></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>baccredited</author><text>&amp;gt;You will never, ever beat the market by making smart trades.&lt;p&gt;Agree. Just buy ticker VOO and get on with your life. Even Warren Buffet has said to buy 90% VOO and 10% bonds. And you will never be as good at this as Warren Buffett.&lt;p&gt;That said, I take 10% of my net worth and put it in a &amp;#x27;casino fund&amp;#x27; where I can buy whatever I want. Startups, peer to peer nonsense, individual stocks, and so on.</text><parent_chain><item><author>brianpgordon</author><text>You will never, ever beat the market by making smart trades.&lt;p&gt;Get real- you&amp;#x27;re a beginner reading investopedia. Active funds employ hundreds or thousands of people who work more than full-time to support an operation of systematically studying investment opportunities and exploiting inside information to beat the market, and even &lt;i&gt;they&lt;/i&gt; don&amp;#x27;t beat the market.&lt;p&gt;Put your money in a diversified portfolio of index funds and leave it alone. Making targeted trades costs money and will do no better than index funds anyway.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Ask HN: How did you learn about stocks and the market?</title><text>I find it really hard&amp;#x2F;confusing to understand stocks and the market from the investing perspective. I&amp;#x27;m a beginner in this domain. So, I keen to learn about it so that I can understand the technical details too. I did a search and found out that everybody is recommending &amp;quot;The Intelligent Investor&amp;quot; by Benjamin Graham. I&amp;#x27;m kind of person who likes to watch videos, so I also found couple of courses (paid) on Udemy but those aren&amp;#x27;t good and just wastage of money. I also found that Investopedia is an excellent resource. It contains a lot of good tutorials [0], guides [1] and videos [2].&lt;p&gt;You might have already learnt what I&amp;#x27;m trying to. What&amp;#x27;s your story? It would be really nice if you can also share the resources that proved really useful to you.&lt;p&gt;[0] http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.investopedia.com&amp;#x2F;university&amp;#x2F;stocks&amp;#x2F;
[1] http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.investopedia.com&amp;#x2F;university&amp;#x2F;
[2] http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.investopedia.com&amp;#x2F;video&amp;#x2F;</text></story>