Any recommendations to get exposure to the gambling/gaming industry? I'm thinking along the lines of online sports betting and e-sports, or companies that will dive into VR to give fans "front row" seats at live sporting events.

https://readthejoe.com/2021-state-of-the-igaming-industry/

I've seen some posted in threads a few weeks ago but can't find them. Should I be looking into casinos? Am I better off getting an ETF that covers a broad group or are there a couple stocks that stand out?
Edit: to be clear I mean actual gambling... Like sports bets, daily fantasy, casinos etc...
Not gambling as in risky stocks like airlines and cruises.

Ignore the current crisis, just pretend things are stable for this question.
My current strategy is basically to pick up oversold stocks with cash on a weekly/monthly basis, and hopefully when they take a temporary big gain, sell that and put that money in various ETFs.
The idea is that long-term I'm counting on building wealth via ETF, but short term I'm trying to maximize the small amounts of money I'm using to buy ETF.
Thoughts?

Not sure how to best out this question. I use m1 to automatically take money from my checking and invest. "set and forget". I have about 80% of my pie going to various ETFs. Just regular safe plays / portfolio stocks. With the other 20%, I have 2 stocks that are outpacing or I think will outpace the market. They are really the only single stocks I plan on messing with.
My question is, will m1 automatically apply less of the deposit to those stocks? They are over weight. I want the allocation to be percentage of my deposit, NOT percentage of holdings. So I have no interest in rebalancing.
Am I missing something here or is this a dumb thought? I get rebalancing is for diversification. Just don't want it applying to those 2 stocks. Can I set up a separate pie/deposit? How should I go about this?

There would be a bull(win)/ bear(loss) etf per team. If you team wins the bear etfs money would all be shifted over and vise versa. Would this be possible or legal? I figure it's kinda like earnings....

This isn't new, but the extremes have moved significantly. Never before have I seen so many people lose so much out of sheer ignorance.
First and foremost I want to establish a fact: Short squeezes are not permanent.
I made a post a week ago telling everyone that short squeezes were not permanent. GME opened at over $300 that day. By Friday it would close at $63. The mechanics of a short squeeze make this an inevitability. They are, by definition, a short term event fueled by a sudden spike in demand, an unsustainable spike in demand driven by short covering. That demand is necessarily going to end. So, when you see a stock skyrocket from the 20s to over 300 in the matter of a week taking a long position is a less constructive use of your money than just burning cash for heat.
What this isn't: an "I told you so".
I don't really care about that. The red on the ledger is enough for people to eventually learn they were wrong. Sure, they'll grovel about conspiracies for a bit, Janet Yellen called Vlad and told him to fuck the retail investors. Hedge funds had a "short ladder attack" (for why that's not a rea, see here or here. They'll claim that the DTC intentionally stopped out retail order flow, despite retail orders being net sells for most of this endeavor. Whatever, so you're going to see a lot of blame on anything but the fact that it's obviously not smart to go long at the top of a goddamn short squeeze. This is the financial equivalent of doing 150MPH on a dirt road then blaming the tires, the loose gravel, the 2mph headwind, or interstellar radio waves altering your tire pressure when you crash. No, you shouldn't have been doing 150MPH on a dirt road.
What this is: reflecting on the mob
The shameful part of this is that in your foaming at the mouth rabid need to believe in this story you downvoted and ridiculed anyone who brought up risks, you attacked news agencies who called it irresponsible, you barraged threads and subreddits with hype posts. For the first time in this sub's entire history we actually had to restrict posting
I spoke with a reporter for a major publication working on this story, and he relayed that he recently interviewed a homeless man who bought three shares at $315 hoping to get himself out of poverty. do you know how much $945 can do for a homeless person?? There's this post, where a disabled man on government support hopes to build a house with GME gains, again buying in near the top. These are two examples, but there are hundreds if not thousands more.
20 year old middle class kids blowing their beer money for the month on GME doesn't bother me. who cares. But these are people who cannot afford to a few hundred dollars. These are setbacks that could have equated to months worth of food, new wardrobes, necessary medical attention, etc.
We can never prevent those in poor financial situations from making poor decisions, but we can and absolutely should hold ourselves to the standard that we will at least not foster an environment that encourages poor decisions. Many of you will lay blame elsewhere, but if you downvoted a post discussing risks of GME, accused someone of being a shill, encouraged someone to buy without first understanding their situation, etc. then you are culpable here.
You can, but should you?
Much has been said about Reddit's ability to affect the outside world, and now just like with the Boston bombing everyone dove in head first without bothering to examine the risks, the drawbacks, the losses, and the ramifications for those who can't afford them.
So, what did Reddit accomplish here?
Ultimately, nothing aside from transferring a lot of retail wealth to institutional funds, again. Sure, we can jerk off all day to Melvin's down month. Perhaps they were hedged and they'll have a monster January, perhaps they were not. But all of the other funds that took the long end of this early on, with managers that understood the aspects of short squeezes - they bailed out in the 200-300 range selling some to short and some to unwitting retail investors engaged in a fervent and ultimately useless battle against some imaginary foe.
This wasn't social justice, it wasn't some populist uprising, and I don't care how much AOC, Ted Cruz, Mark Cuban, or the Pope wants to dogpile in on this. There was nothing that happened here aside from a bunch of retail traders who didn't know what they were doing encouraging a whole lot of other retail investors who couldn't afford it to give away money they didn't have to institutions.
Next time y'all want to effect change just have a charity drive for UNICEF, or send money to a PAC focused on fighting inequality. Write your senator, picket congress (peacefully, no mob bullshit), organize a sit in, whatever. But let's not encourage broke people to give their hard earned thousands to hedge funds.
And most importantly, the next time this happens, because it will happen again, for the love of shitt try to understand what the fuck is going on before jumping on the hype train. And stop downvoting and ridiculing people that do understand what is happening with an opinion you don't like.
.
Thank you for listening to my Ted^X Talk^{I look forward to hearing about how much this hurt everyone's feelings in the comments.}

I gotta say, I see some good shit out there. I see new members trying to diversify their positions and learn about other stocks and other ways to make money. This is the path my fellow retards. I'm a nobody here, but I have good returns and some good insight. When I came to WSB, multiple people helped me figure out what the fuck I was doing, because I knew jack shit. I care more about my money than yours, but no retard should be left in the dark alone. So let me pass on a couple things. I can't prove shit to you, so read this or don't.
I mainly trade options (Calls and Puts), so that is what I will discuss
Generally the most insane gains will come from being in a specific stock and not an ETF or Index. While riskier, this is where you can hit the homeruns. So decide if you want to go for conservative gains or if you want those huge swings. While what I said is true, I am usually against putting everything into a single bet. Anything can go wrong at any time and no play is 100% guaranteed. The goal of this game is to stay alive. You will lose money on a play at some point, because it is inevitable. So never let yourself get wiped out, because you can always build yourself back up. This goes along with one of my other recommendations: always have SOME cash ready to go. You never know when there might be an incredible opportunity and you do not want to get caught with your ass hanging out.
Paper hands and diamond hands are just words. You ultimately decide when you want to sell or hold and how much profit you want to take. One of my favorite strategies is to say, buy an even number of options on a play, sell half at a modest level of gains (like enough to break even or gain a little bit) and then let the rest ride longer. Look guys, on many plays, you either paper hands at some point or diamond hands long enough to see your positions go red. Some people will bail at 40% gains and others might not take anything less than 500%. Just know that chasing endless profits ups the risk factor, so YOU decide when it's time. Having a target share price for the stock is also a good strategy.
Here's a couple psychological principles in investing. Studies have found that people tend to hold onto losing positions too long and sell winning positions too early. They let their losers lose and cut off their winners short. Apparently most people hate losing more than they like winning. Think about this before you sell. Stocks can often get hot and run multiple days in a row. Sometimes a stock will have one red day and then keep up going. This is why it's important to know WHY you got into a position. Trust your DD and stick to the plan. I had ideas for plays where they went red right away and I bailed... only to see them moon. "Diamond Hands" means that you don't dump your position instantly if it goes down. The hardest thing is knowing if you should cut losses or diamond hands. I'm a retard and we're in a bull market.. so often times the stock will eventually go up. Your call though.
The market makers and big boys want you to lose. They want your money. I'm not going to dive into the realm of possible illegal activities that they may use, but just point out some simpler tactics they will use. Big money often sees retail as "weak hands" aka Buy High and Sell Low. They know FOMO is strong when a stock is going up big and that fear takes over when a stock divebombs. We're in a bull market, which means stonks only go up. However, we still have negative days. Stocks sell off sometimes and things can look bad. Generally, the dip is not time to sell, but instead, time to buy. Case and point, we had a pretty big drilling 2 weeks ago. Do you know what the big money did? They bought the fuckin dip and snatched up everything for cheap. We've been mooning ever since.
Sometimes shit makes no sense. A company can have blowout earnings, exceed expectations, and the stock will tank. I was holding one stock a little while ago that reported a fantastic earnings and proceeded to drill to the core of the Earth that day. It was total bullshit and I knew it, I trusted my DD. So instead of panic selling, I added to my position. Sure enough, the stock began swinging upwards and hit an all-time high just 2 weeks later. This is why simply gambling can bite you in the ass. It's easy to get scared and sell when you doubt yourself because you picked a random thing to buy.
Option Expiration Dates matter. Buying a 1 week option is the cheapest and gives the biggest percentage of profits if it goes your way. However, it can often be a noob trap. One bad day or one piece of bad news can kill your entire position. Stocks trade sideways sometimes. Sometimes they don't do what you think they should do. And sometimes the whole fucking market shits itself for seemingly no reason. So give yourself TIME to work with. Time costs money and hurts profit margins. But it is better to consistently make 50% profit than to hit one play for 300% followed by 10 losers. Look, playing weekly stupidly OTM calls is fun as hell and is a huge rush when it hits. I do at least one or more every week. The key is not loading your entire portfolio into this shit. Remember, no tendies = no more fun.
Along the same lines, Strike Price matters. An OTM (Out of the Money) option means that the Strike Price is a bit of a ways from where the stock's price currently is. OTM options give huge profit margins the further you go out. I personally enjoy using them.. some people don't. But my advice is to balance risk with profit potential. If your call relies on a stock gaining 50% in 2 weeks.. then well, it's probably not gonna happen. ITM (In The Money) options means that your stock is already within the strike price. ITM is a more conservative play and sacrifices massive gains for lower risk.
https://www.optionsprofitcalculator.com/calculatolong-call.html - Use this to get an estimate of potential profits and how much of a move you need
Leaps are fuckin dope. A Leap is a call, but for a much longer period of time. I'm using the term loosely because we're degenerates and some people might consider anything more than 1 month a leap. Given that the market trends up over time, you might even make some money on a mediocre stock this way. A lot of people buy ITM leaps, but again, I'm a degenerate and go OTM a lot.
Implied Volatility (IV) - Extremely fucking important. IV is basically an estimation of how much a stock is predicted to move in either direction. High IV = Expensive Options. It's fucking weird to think, but you can make similar profits from a 2% move on a low IV stock as you can from a 5% move on a more volatile stock. Low IV is fantastic when buying an option on a stock that you think is about to moon. High IV is riskier, so you damn well better think the stock can make some big moves. Buying an option on a stock right before Earnings Report (ER) will be more expensive due to IV. Trying to play ER is usually for suckers, unless you have some really good DD about why a company might deliver a huge surprise. One of the textbook big boy moves is to pump a stock going into ER. The company will deliver great news and then dump hard. You may see people bitching about this very soon. Basically, big money knew ahead of time it would be good, so the stock got pumped and then they took profits.
Buy the rumor and sell the news. Events, press releases, and important dates that everyone knows about are another trap. You will get shit on. Ask someone about TESLA Battery Day. Positive rumors will send a stock soaring though.
Finally, get busy learning. Read about Options on Investopedia and any other things you do not understand. The big boys rely on us to not know what the fuck we're doing to take our money. Learn about the general market. Stocks are grouped into "Sectors" or categories. Start figuring out what they are and pay attention to where the money is going. I didn't even mention half of the shit that goes on in options, so that's on you. The first thing you need to do is to learn what the "Greeks" are. That will teach you how options function.
https://www.investopedia.com/trading/using-the-greeks-to-understand-options/
If anyone wants to talk or discuss, send me a message. I'm a degenerate with no life.
Oh and, if you follow someone's DD and lose money that's on you. I've come up with some genius shit, but I've also lost on some retarded calls. Nobody can pick you a guaranteed winner and hindsight is 20/20.
May the gains be with you

Edit: Thank you for all the comment guys. I legitimately read through every single one of them and comment back if I have anything to say. Pt 2 is in the comments because when I originally tried to post with it in, the post was getting deleted by the bot.
1st Mistake
I was up about 40% for the year of 2019, it was awesome, it was the first full year of working as an engineer and I have put in a bit of money into my investments. It felt REALLY good to see the growth it has done. Theeeeeen came the covid drop. I sold halfway down the drop, my entire brokerage portfolio and Roth IRA for about a 50% gains loss of my ENTIRE time investing. I did this because I believed that it will drop even more, which it did for a some days, but then it went back up, and back up, and back up, and kept going back up. I kept telling myself that it was a dead cat bounce and the market will drop even further than before and it never did. I tried to time the market and got rekt. I didnt even get back into investing late last year so I lost out on a good bit of money if I had just kept everything in.
Lesson: Timing the market is hard. It is SO much easier to just keep everything in and put MORE money into your positions on red days.
What I am doing now to not repeat the same mistake: I got back into the game late last year and I will not touch my investments ever again. I have also set aside a 4-ish month emergency fund that I will never touch. I believe part of the reason why I sold during the covid drop was also because I didnt have an emergency fund set aside and I got emotional with my investments. Now even my portfolio drops 50% in 1 day I still have 4 months of living expenses if I lost my job so I would still be carrying out my day to day living normally
2) Getting too greedy with GME or any other hyped up stock I bought GME because I wanted to "get rich quick". I put in $5k last Wednesday thinking I wouldn't take anything less than a $10k gain for some reason. Well I was up a good $3k Thursday, Friday, and Monday, but didn't sell because I was too greedy. I closed my position being down $3.5k. Had I held longer it would have probably be more like $4k or so now.
Lesson: Hyped up stock is dangerous, if you really want to gamble, use only the amount of money you are willing to lose or just bet on a sports game, it will be easier. Greed is also a dangerous game. It is euphoric to see a couple of thousand dollars of gains in a couple of days no doubt, but seeing tons people on WSB making 5 to 6 digit gains blinded me on how much a few of thousand is. I thought it was too little and got too greedy and held the stock too long. I am hating myself right now for not selling in the green when I had the chance. Definitely learned that $5k was too much for me. If I want to play another meme stock it will be a lot less than that.
What I am doing now to not repeat the same mistake: Unfollowing WSB and removing it from my Reddit home screen. I have put a big majority portion of my excess cash in my checking account into an S&P ETF for now and doing research on other stocks that I should be investing in. Having excess cash in my checking account allowed me the opportunity to spend it on dumb shit and gamble it away. I need forced scarcity to stay humble and stay focused about what I spend my money on. Maybe I will expand the 4 month emergency fund to 6 month and keep $1000 or $2000 at most in my checking account for day to day spending.
CONCLUSION During both the Covid drop and GME hype for a week, I literally stared at my phone screen from when I woke up to 8pm when after hours closed. I wanted to see every movement of the market/stock and it consumed me. I definitely could have used the time to do my work more efficiently or literally do anything else. This is what happens when you trade with emotion, it can and it will consume you. The positive takeaway for both is that I am relatively young in my investing life. I am glad I made these few thousand dollar mistakes now rather than 10s or 100s of thousand dollar mistakes later on in my career if my portfolio had more money. If you read this entire thing then I thank you for your time and I hope you have learned from my mistake and wont do the same stupid things I did. If you had a similar story and would like to share, I would gladly hear about it.

I graduated college 3 years ago and bought my first rental property recently. Ever since, I’ve felt some sort of disconnect or judged from my friends as they view landlords as “leeches” who are just making housing unaffordable. I grew up in a low income area and a lot of my friends are high school friends, so I do get where they’re coming from. I worked really hard as well as a couple of side hustles to come up with this down payment and also had to buy hours away because it was the only thing I could afford but I saw potential there. It really makes me sad because I had a vision of expanding my real estate portfolio and feel like it’ll be a big part of my life going forward. Do I just not share this info with them? Anyone else felt this way or have any advice?
I plan to FIRE in 10 years at the age of 35 - I’ve been really invested in stocks and options right now and I feel like I don’t really have that in common with them as well. I did try to explain to them about the more basic stuff like ETFs, mutual funds, etc but they see it as gambling... and rather keep everything in cash. I know it’s not my place to tell them where to put their money but I just thought that we’d be able to have more in common once they see the effect of their money growing. I’ve been friends with some of them for 10 years so I know they’re really caring and supportive.
Edit: ahh thanks for all the responses. I’m overwhelmed lol also, I don’t discuss the exact money part with my friends. They just know that I have a house and that I’m renting it out (I had told them this initially not knowing their reaction). I think the most recent situation was that my house had a massive leak and I was pretty stressed, missed a couple of hangouts and I felt like I couldn’t tell them the real reason I couldn’t make it without feeling weird about it - I had to make up some other excuse. Also, I’m a girl for those who keep calling me “dude” in PMs lol

Take your profits and get the fuck out of these high volatility stocks. It’s fine to ride the train up, but please for the love of god, set a stop limit or a trailing stop. I’ve been apart of this community for over a year but just started investing. I’m going to give the new people some advice.

1. Research the company and see if their valuation matches the current share price.
   
2. Pay close attention to all the comments on whatever you’re investing in. It’s not hard to tell the real people from bots. Most bots will tell you to hold the fucking bag, while they run off with your money.
   
3. If it’s too good to be true, it usually is. I’m not telling anyone how to spend there money, but please only invest in these high volatility stocks with the future of the share possibly tanking.
   
4. Don’t let high volatility stocks take up a majority of your portfolio. I’ve seen advice where people say one stock shouldn’t take up more than 10-20% of your portfolio.
   
5. This one is a big one. If you see people hyping the fuck out of a certain stock, there is a good chance there will certainly be a sell off once people start seeing huge profits. It don’t hurt to take profit and buy in at a lower price. Definitely use risk management to make sure every trade is worth it.
   
6. Don’t day trade, you will lose more money than you make in the long run. If you plan on investing short term, have a strategy. Invest in options that have good deltas and IV. These are certainly risky but if you like gambling on shitty shilled stocks, this one is for you.
   
7. If you want to go long, invest in ETFs. Sure these will see lower gains, but over time the gains will be decent. If you want to go long on equities, make sure you love the damn stock. So many people see red and sell, this is fine if you’re using risk management and need to exit but horrible if you’re trying to make money without a lot of capital.
   
8. Learn, Learn, and Learn. Learn from every mistake you make and better yourself for the next trade. I was a bag holder with GME, I lost about $600. Know which indicators lead to the stock moving in a certain directions. You think it will breakout, what will the catalyst be? Always strive to learn more than the previous day.
   

TLDR: Trust your instincts, not random people on Reddit, who a majority are bots and shills. You can definitely learn from people on here, but you’re picking a needle from a haystack. You’re here to make money for your future, other people are wanting to fill their pockets, so expect misinformation. Take everything with a grain of salt.

23 y/o with $30k to invest. I have moderate-to-high risk tolerance - but definitely not outright high. I don't need to withdraw any money for several years: at least 8. I have thick skin, so please, tear this apart and tell me where I'm wrong - I love all feedback. From reading through many other posts here, I think many will question my lack of ARK & a QQQ. Anyway, thank you for your time! Please lmk if you have any questions.
IPO: 5% (I believe the IPO frenzy will only increase. Investors' attention spans are increasingly short, and they all want to get in on the 'next big thing').
MSOS: 5% (this stock will inevitably go a lot higher (sorry, bad joke)).
MOON: 10% (high risk, high reward)
XLV: 10% (fairly stable growth ETF since 2011)
BETZ: 10% (I'm extremely bullish on sports betting. IMHO investors are greatly underestimated just how addicting sports betting is (I've fallen victim myself). I believe it will have a handle on the public within 5 years. I had to convince myself to only allocate 10%).
VT: 60% (the stable backbone of this portfolio)

45 days clean. I had never invested before and but invested 60 in gamestock shares Friday, never to make any money just to make wallstreet suffer. I didn't view it as gambling, got no impulses from it since and never intended to withdraw it. But a friend I told about it and knows about my addiction said I shouldn't be investing because its dangerous. So I thought about it all weekend and put a sell order for tomorrow and then to withdraw..... And 5 minutes later I went back and clicked "cancel sell order". I was immediately shocked. Because like most of you I have done that many times from bookies or casinos cancelled a withdrawal. A serious shock, and I immediately put a sell order again and am closing it tomorrow. I just realised that it can be a massive trigger and even if its not to make money investing is absolutely gambling. Talking to someone in messages here about it really hit home so thought I'd share it. That cancelling of it really hit home hard and brought back some bad memories, so grateful I've learnt from previous mistakes and won't repeat them 😊 hopefully it helps even one person

If yes, from your country or america or eu?

Just posting in solidarity with my fellow clowns (too poor for official loss porn over at WSB)!
Usually I’m super conservative with my money, but decided to YOLO for once after buying into the hype. Bought on Monday at market open, straight downhill since and no end in sight. Probably just going to hold long term and see where it goes - not really worth selling at this point***
Context: I’m a student living at home, and still have *60k in cash, 10k in ETFs and 10k+ guaranteed income this year. This is money I can throw down the drain without changing my lifestyle or future plans at all. So, just to reinforce the oft-said advice: don’t gamble money you can’t afford to lose!
THE UPSIDES - Reconsidering my life choices! If I just yoloed away more than half a year’s worth of income at my part time job, do I really need to make myself miserable just to feel adequate? - Got me to open a US account - I never would’ve bothered otherwise - Motivated me to transfer more money into stocks for (responsible) investing instead of just letting it rot away in a HISA (or really a LISA at this point, because HISAs don’t exist currently apart from westpac, which I’ve already maxed out, and BOQ, where the 10k max isn’t worth the hassle). This is something I’d been procrastinating on for months. - Proving to myself that I am level-headed enough to handle fluctuations/the loss in general - Lesson learnt that FOMO is bad, and internet trends are fleeting - Learned a bit about options and all that funky stock market shit - My friends’ reactions were pretty funny (“you spent NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS on fucking gme and you’re here agonising over paying 95c more for postage?????”)
THE DOWNSIDES - feels bad man, stonks do not go brrr - staring at the numbers for my daily self esteem boost is now off the table for a while :( - I’m being bombarded by etoro ads on all platforms
Edit: forgot I had 15k sitting in SW, updated accordingly
***Edit 2: to everyone talking about sunk cost fallacy - personally, I know I’d feel worse if I sold now, took the 1.5k, then watched it go up later, as opposed to holding and seeing it literally go to zero. I never viewed this as an investment. It was a “fuck it” gamble from the start, so I’m going along with whatever makes me happier rather than the supposedly correct thing to do.

Because my last post got deleted, here's a more "friendly" version.
The memes on here use to be hilarious, uncensored, offensive and some of the worst advice you could possibly imagine. The thing is people understood the humor. Most understood market fundamentals and traded options. If you trade options you're a big brain mf, congrats and fuck you.
But new people reposting these shitpost memes everywhere, on every social media channel, comment thread, where ever, you're kinda fucking it up imo.
There was a massive difference between sharing personal investment/yolo stories to a group of 10-900K people and trying to hype up specific stocks to 8.9 MILLION or more random folks.
Ever since GME, WSB has become famous. So famous that an ETF is being developed that will track trending stocks on social media like WSB. People with money are going to take advantage of this easily influenced massive group of retail traders for their own gain if they haven't already.
​
So what is the message here?
You should know the difference between investing and gambling, between GME and any other stock. Memes for GME do NOT apply to EVERY OTHER STOCK when it falls or when you're holding. The memes were fun but they really ONLY APPLIED to the GME situation.
If you want to invest please please please spend some time getting a basic understanding of volatility, risk management, trend patterns. Read the analysis behind companies before you invest. This is probably the ONLY time where "Do your own research" ACTUALLY BENEFITS YOU.
And always remembers that if you're gambling to rapidly make gains, you can just as suddenly lose your money.
Enjoy the memes, just don't bet on them.
​
This is not financial advice, I'm not even a real person

With all of the GME/AMC craze over at WSB, I got kind of sucked into it. They're a crazy and funny bunch, but after spending some time there, my investment compass started spinning and I started to seriously question my sanity. It's like going to a wild party, coming home and then waking up with a huge headache in the morning, not knowing what the hell happened last night. I needed to remind myself about various investment theses and I am looking to rebalance. I thought I would share these thoughts in case it might help someone else as much as it helped me to put all my thoughts down on.
20% - Canadian REITs. These got hit hard in March 2020 and their share price have not recovered much even though many of the larger REITs have good balance sheets, cash flows and rent collection. They are still massively undervalued, given that everyone is going out and buying houses and over bidding by 100k+, driving up the price of real estate in many major cities. The Canadian government wants to boost immigration, which is bullish for real estate. It's a nice time to jump in and hold for the long term. I don't use ETFs here since I have spent a lot of time analyzing many Canadian REITs. My favourites are HR.UN, IIP.UN, KMP.UN, SRU.UN, SOT.UN.
20% - ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK). Cathie Wood's investment thesis is all about investing in disruptive innovation. Through her team's open research, they actively try to find companies of the future (before they become big) to invest in. I came to the game way too late (around December 2020). I admit I was skeptical about ARK. But after listening to Cathie's interviews and videos, I started to gain a lot of respect for her investment intellect and knowledge in the space. I also feel confident ARK is also watching & assessing the macroeconomics side of things and how it affects the companies in their portfolio's and allocating appropriately, as best as they can, which is worth paying the higher price for this ETF. For now, I would only stick money into ARKK and none of the other more specialized ones. I think ARK could do well in the next few years, but I am uncertain they will keep doing well in the very long term (decades).
30% - US Total Market (e.g. VUN, XUU). Jack Bogle's thesis about being in everything and being diversified in your investments. The US total market ETFs hold over 3000 companies of all sizes and diversified in many sectors and types of businesses. If you look at the charts, the share price of this index has been rising since the US federal reserve started their QE program. They are obviously still doing it after the crash in March 2020, creating a huge amount of new money, and that is part of the reason why the US stock market has been going up fast. The US dollar is the reserve currency. The US economy is large and everyone is linked to it. Basically, it's diverse, "too big to fail", and has the backing of the fed & reserve currency. The fed will keep jumping in to prop it up (e.g. Great Recession, COVID pandemic) since retirees and pension funds can't be compromised too much by this index taking decades to recover. With their embrace of MMT (whether right or wrong), I don't see this dovish stance changing anytime soon. Why wouldn't you want to invest in this rather safe basket of equities?
10% - High risk & semi-gambling. I think it's good to allocate a small portion to more high risk type of investments that don't have much correlation with the main index. These could be precious metals, miners, crytocurrency, YOLO/momentum stocks (shrooms, cannabis, DOC.V, NUMI, AMC, GME, etc.) at no more than 2%, emerging market stocks/etfs.
20% - Cash. You always want to have some dry powder lying around in case of a massive black swan crash, or dips. The distributions from REITs can help replenish this reserve every month. I think it would also help stabilize the portfolio a bit more.
Currently, I have no allocation to bonds. I am also not close to retirement (still have 25 to 30 years) Interest rates are low everywhere so I don't think bonds are worth it for now.
I am also a bit skeptical about investing in the Canadian market because there is a lot of oil & gas and financials. I get that oil isn't going away soon (heck they might even do extremely well once the pandemic is over and people want to travel), but wonder if institutional investors will start to move away from such stocks sooner than we think (market being forward looking). I get that the big Canadian banks are too big to fail, but I think many of them are behind the times (resting on their laurels & not treating customers right since I don't know anyone who actually loves their big bank)... Interest rates are also very low so they're not making much from lending.

Also on my blog with better formatting, cute footnotes and inlined images.
Note that not much here is new material, mostly rehashing existing points.

Disclaimer

This article started out as research for my betting against Bitcoin on the stock market. This isn't financial advice. As a matter of fact, I encourage all readers you to not buy or short crypto, through any market or derivative. Use your money for productive uses.
Here's a TL;DR:

1. The current parabolic price increase in Bitcoin is a bubble that has started popping.
   
2. A stablecoin called Tether is either one of the largest frauds or money laundering operation in history, and is providing most of the liquidity in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
   
3. A BTC bubble pop, incoming regulation on stablecoins or the current NYAG investigation into tether will expose tether's insolvency to the crypto market. This is bigger than it sounds.
   
4. (Speculative, but one can hope) Current prices to mine BTC could end up higher than BTC market price, exposing BTC to a 51% attack.
   

A Recap: Bitcoin is useless and should go away

Bitcoin serves no purpose. Let's just rehash that by quickly debunking the major claimed uses over time as seen here

• Proof of concept: No argument here, but now that the market cap of cryptocurrencies is closing in on a $700B, this seems moot.
  
• Cheap Payment Network: Nonsense, since BTC transactions are currently >$10 and this worsens the more people use it.
  
• Anonymous Darknet Currency: I'd have said "no argument here", but apparently it's surprisingly easy to trace BTC nowadays. However, crypto ecosystem as a whole seems to do a decent job at laundering money as we'll see later.
  
• Reserve Currency for Crypto: Since a reserve currency should be useful as a means of exchange, and I wrote several thousand words on how BTC is not that, my position is pretty clear. Also, the fact that a cryptocurrency indexed to the US dollar has trounced BTC as the main means of exchange in the crypto ecosystem speaks for itself.
  
• Programmable Shared Database: You know what's programmable, shared and a database? The database we use at work. Just learn to implement access control lists on your SQL server.
  
• Uncorrelated Financial Asset: Given BTC crashed just like the rest of the market when COVID showed up, this doesn't hold up
  

The stupidest version of the "uncorrelated asset" argument I hear is "Bitcoin is a great hedge for inflation!"
You know what's a good "hedge for inflation"? Literally anything. The definition of inflation is "the price of money". If the price of money goes down (inflation) then everything else has a positive return by comparison.
People who say "bitcoin is a good hedge for inflation" shouldn't be trusted to manage their own money, let alone give financial advice to anyone.

• Censorship Resistant e-Gold: This is a roundabout way of saying "BTC is a store of value"! Which, again, can only be said by people who've never read the definition of "store of value" in a textbook.

I already went into detail into this, but BTC is a terrible store of value because it's volatile. Assets that can lose 20% of value overnight don't "store value". BTC is a "vehicle for speculation".
The only way price is sustained for BTC is that you can find some other idiot to sell it to. Just as a reminder, 50% of Gold is used for things that aren't speculation, like Jewelry, so you'll never have to worry finding a seller there.
Here are some real uses for bitcoin:

• Gambling is fun. You buy BTC, the price might go up! Or down! This is exciting.
  
• Hackers, money launderers and other criminals certainly find cryptocurrencies useful.
  

Reminder: BTC is an ecological scourge
The current cost to mine a BTC is around $8000 in electricity. This electricity mostly comes from subsidized coal in China.
And given the current amount of BTC generated each day, we're using about equivalent to the electricity from all of Belgium, largely in coal, to keep this going.
I don't mind wasting time on intellectual curiosities, but destroying our planet for glorified gambling is not something I'm happy about. I want cryptocurrencies to go away entirely on this basis, philosophically.

Current BTC prices are a bubble

Before we go into tether, reminder that at the time of writing, the plot of BTC price against the S&P500 looks like this
BTC price has increased by ~800% since March. Still, no one uses it for anything useful since the last bubble in 2017, or the other one before that in 2013. This is another bubble however you put it.
BTC is not "new technology"
10 years the internet became popular, Google and Amazon already existed. We're 8 years after the popular emergence of deep learning and it has already revolutionized machine translation, computer vision and natural language processing in general.
You could argue that deep learning and the internet existed before their emergence, but so did cryptocurrencies. Look up b-money and hashcash for instance.
Bitcoin has existed since 2008 and emerged in popularity around the same time as deep learning did, yet we're still to find actual uses for it except speculation and criminal uses. It's a solution waiting for a problem.
Institutional investors are also idiots
The narrative this time is that "institutional investors" are buying into BTC. This doesn't mean it's not a bubble.
Many of the institutions were buying through Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. Rather, many of them were chasing the premium over net asset value that hovered around 20%. Basically, lock money in GBTC for 6 months, cash out and collect the premium as profit. Of course, this little Ponzi couldn't last forever and the premium seems to be evaporating now.
Similarly, totally-not-a-bitcoin-ETF-wearing-a-software-company-skinsuit Microstrategy (MSTR) trades at a massive premium over fundamentals.
There will always be traders chasing bonuses from numbers going up, regardless what is making the number going up. The same "institutional investors" were buying obviously terrible CDOs in the run-up to 2008.

Tether is lunacy

Tether is a cryptocurrency whose exchange rate is supposed to be pegged to the US Dollar. Initially this was done by having 1-to-1 US Dollar reserves for each tether issued. Then they got scammed by their money launderer, losing some $800M, which made them insolvent.
Anyway, now tether maintains their reserves are whatever they want them to be and they haven't gotten audited since 2017.
You know, normal stuff.
There's a problem to backing your USD-pegged security with something that isn't US Dollars. Namely, if the price of the thing you're backing your US Dollars against goes down, you're now insolvent. If you were backing $10B in tether with $10B of bitcoin, then the bitcoin drops by half, you're insolvent by $5B.
And then this spotlessly clean company they somehow added $20B to their balance sheet in the second half of 2020
Reminder: one side of that balance sheet is currently floating around the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Cryptocurrency traders own it as an asset and sell it to others. The other half of the balance sheet is whatever tether wants.
There are only two possibilities that explain tether's growth:

• Massive unbacked issuances, because they're afraid their scam has run its course.
  
• Money laundering. Lots of it.
  

It could also be a happy mix of both.
One particularly interesting date is 30/8/2020, where tether added $3B to its balance sheet overnight. This is interesting because it predates the subsequent movement in bitcoin price and large movements in other cryptocurrencies.
The story from tether and tether's bank's CEO is that this money largely comes from foreign nationals through an OTC desk which implies the transaction goes as following:

1. A foreign national sends money in a foreign currency to an OTC desk. This is exactly as clean as you'd think -- often raw cash transactions in the millions.
   
2. That OTC desk converts the money to USD and sends it to tether's correspondent US bank. The OTC desk gives tether to the foreign national.
   
3. Wait tether has a correspondent US bank?
   

Oh, I forgot to mention, no bank wants tether as a customer because they obviously break KYC/AML compliance. So tether first bought invested in a bank called Noble which then lost its relationship with Wells-Fargo when they realized tether were lying to them about AML. Poor tether lost its legal access to USD.
Tether has been banking in the Bahamas with a bank called Deltec since. First they had a money launderer called Crypto Capital Corp to send funds to customers, who stole the $800M from them and subsequently went to jail.
But worry not! Tether found a way to get banked in USD afterwards. Curious coincidence, an executive at Deltec was randomly blogging about buying small US community banks in 2018. You know, that thing money launderers do.
So tether's story is that in 2020, they took in roughly twenty billion USD of shady foreign money into the small community US bank their deltec bankers bought. These transactions are necessarily breaking KYC/AML. The foreign parties to those transactions wouldn't take such a rickety route to convert billions into cryptocurrencies if they weren't laughed out of the room in serious banks.
But of course, Deltec will say it did KYC on tether. Really solid KYC, clearly, since they're the last bank on earth taking tether's business. Tether says they do KYC on their customers (the large OTC desks). And I'm sure the OTC desks would be shocked, shocked if the cash money they get in Russia and China turns out to be dirty. So everyone can pass the buck of responsibility down the road and claim "We do KYC on our customers".
Sure you do, tether. If you did such great KYC, you wouldn't have such problems finding banking relationships. I mean when even HSBC is not doing business with you you're apparently more obviously moving criminal money than fucking drug cartels.
And, according to tether's people, this money is what's backing tether's reserves. Money that will get frozen the instant a prosecutor even looks at it.
Reminder: the above is the charitable, positive case for tether.
The less charitable case is that they took crayons and added zeros to their balance sheet, and that there's a couple billions waiting to burn a hole in the crypto ecosystem.
Anyway, the $25B garbage fire that is tether will make a great book/netflix series at some point and their hilariously stupid CTO going on podcasts while flinching on questions about how BTC ended up on their balance sheet will be a fun part of it.
But I'm not here to write a book, I'm here to make money by shorting all of this. For my purposes, even in the positive case tether is a ticking time bomb waiting to burn a hole in the crypto ecosystem, because...

KYC and AML are coming for cryptocurrencies

If you listen to "crypto news", all incoming crypto regulation is just great, because that means crypto is becoming legit. However, companies investing in crypto are very angry about them.
This is because crypto transactions break the FinCEN travel rule, where KYC information should "travel" along transactions, to prevent money laundering obfuscation schemes.
Of course, according to the crypto industry this is "stifling innovation". A more reasonable take is that by being leaving the crypto industry outside normal financial regulations, we're enabling a "race to the bottom". As we saw with shadow banks in the 2000-2007 era this leads to "creative banking". I don't want my bankers to be creative, I want them to be solvent.

Tether's effect on the crypto ecosystem

When tether implodes, it's taking most of the crypto industry along for a fun ride. Tether can implode in one of a few ways:

1. A BTC price crash triggers it. If
   
2. Regulators decide they've had enough of AML avoidance and regulate them.
   
3. The NYAG investigation, which is waiting for an update in a few weeks, finds something and shuts them out.
   

Let's assume tether falls to $0 for simplicity. The analysis is the same directionally if tether significantly "breaks the buck".
This doesn't happen instantly, but it happens quickly. The peg breaks, and most people holding tether will try to sell it for other crypto (BTC, ETH, etc.). This puts downward pressure on the price of tether, incentivizing even more people to "pass the buck". Automated inter-exchange arbitrage bots might try to exploit emerging gaps in bid-ask spreads, only to end up with worthless tether instead, as their operators rush to pull the plug.
Then, we have a small village of cryptocurrency enthusiasts being out some $24B. With the trading bots turned off and the trading lubricant (a dollar pegged asset) gone, the bid-ask spreads blow up. You get a predictable flight to safety -- that is, to real money. This puts downward pressure on BTC.
While all of this is happening, there are all sorts of fun second-order effects happen. A lot of DeFi derivative products are priced in cryptocurrencies, so having normally stable prices shuffle around (eg. USDC price moving above $1 in a flight to safety) triggers a tsunami of margin calls. Some exchanges might insolvent (they're the ones redeeming tether for USD after all).

If BTC price drops below $8000, fun things happen

Currently, the price to mine a BTC is roughly $8000. Most of the mining comes from huge mining farms using subsidized coal in China, and mining costs more the more hardware there is to mine it.
Since the price of BTC hasn't substantially dropped below cost to mine we're in for a fun experiment if the price drops below this threshold. Most of these farms should turn off so that the price to mine comes back to breakeven in a case of prisoner's dilemma.
But if too much hardware turns off, this leaves mining hardware idle and the door becomes wide open to a 51% attack. It's not clear at what price below breakeven cost to mine a 51% attack becomes a serious threat, but once this threshold is crossed, we're in the "irreparable harm to BTC" risk zone.
And for a person like me, who just wants to see crypto disappear forever this is very exciting.
Maybe those mining farms could be replaced with nice forests soaking up all the carbon they emitted for posterity. One can hope.

How do I bet against all of this?

Microstrategy (MSTR) is, at this point, a bitcoin ETF wearing the skinsuit of a dying software company.
Michael Saylor, MSTR's CEO, is quite the character. I wrote a lot about his lack understanding of what a currency is, but it's on another level to look at the early stages of a bubble pop and decide this is a good time to buy $10M more of the stuff, as seen here
However, this bubble is tame by Michael's standards. Look at the historical stock of his company
What's happening on the left is that Saylor pumped the numbers with accounting fraud then the SEC took issue with the fake numbers. The stock dropped 90% practically overnight. Their accountants, PWC, paid $51M in fines. Saylor and friends paid fines, partly with company stock.
You could also short GBTC, but when Mr. Saylor provides you with an options market instead, why not use it? Shorting on crypto exchanges that might become insolvent in the very event you want to happen with this bet is a bad idea, on the other hand.

Mike can't cash out

The bitcoin market is illiquid and leveraged when it comes to real money coming in and leaving the ecosystem. Buys in the $10M-$100M seemingly move the price of BTC by upwards of $1000 in the last weeks. This means hundreds of millions of real money means tens of billions in movement in BTC market capitalization.
Now imagine what cashing $1.1B of BTC into real money would mean for the price. And this is purely in market terms, before the PR damage from bitcoin's demigod abandoning ship would have second-order effects.
Saylor has painted himself into a corner. Even if he wanted to cash out, he can't.

MSTR fundamentals: Why it should be valued below $10

In early 2020, MSTR was a slowly dying business. The EBITDA has been rapidly evaporating in the last 5 years
At that point, MSTR a stock price of $115 meaning a market cap of $1.1B. This included some $560M of cash they were sitting on. I presume the remaining $550M was an implicit sales premium for the inevitable private equity firm investors expected was going to relieve them of this stock and make the business profitable again.
Of course, they didn't sell.
Instead, they took the $560m they were sitting on and bought $400m of BTC at prices $11k and $13k in late summer 2020. Then, in early December, they took on $600m of debt to buy BTC with at $23k. They also bought $10m more in January at a price of $30.5k.
At this point, we can mostly value MSTR like a trust.

• Price the underlying software business as being worth $600M, as the market did before the bitcoin nonsense. If BTC went to $0, this is what we'd value it at, and the MSTR stock should be around $65.
  
• But wait! MSTR took on $650M in debt in December. Their actual value with a BTC priced at $0 should be much, much lower than $65 depending on how you value the debt. You could make an argument it should be in the single digits.
  
• They hold 70,784 BTC. At current prices ($32,000) this is worth roughly $2.2B. With the current market cap of MSTR ($577 stock price), this means MSTR is currently priced at an eye watering $3B premium over fundamental value.
  

GBTC's 20% premium-to-NAV is a joke compared to the MSTR premium.