Investment Ideas

Strategies that seem worth investigating as a way to beat passive S&P 500 buying.

• Copy an expert with a blog Applied Divinity Studies - on the other hand, it looks like that particular expert mostly loses to the S&P 500, and, to the extent he looks good, mostly looks good by a single investment: either long BTC if we evaluate in Feb-2022 or short NKLA if we evaluate in Sep-2022. The conclusion from that is even if you can find a genius blogger, knowing when to cease the position is still pretty critical.
• Use web scraping and ML to predict winners/losers based on social media (e.g. wallstreetbets and related subs)
• Choose simple strategies that have historically outperformed the S&P 500 (e.g. momentum investing, value investing, etc)
• Leverage low-risk stocks rather than own high-risk stocks
• Copy whatever strategy Harvard is doing to trade liquidity for returns:

  We should be getting an incremental return for that illiquidity—and we call that our illiquidity premium—of at least 300 basis points annually on average over what we are expecting in publicly traded stocks.

  — Jane Mendillo, CEO of Harvard Management
  (Barron's Feb. 8, 2014)

  In theory, I *think* this means (for long-term investors) buying assets with large bid-ask spreads. These assets have high liquidity risk, which should (in theory) be compensated with higher expected returns.

  On the other hand, maybe these endowments just got lucky Ennis.

• Hop on bandwagons?
• Hedge funds' 13F filings tell you what positions they were long on about 1.5 months ago. Many hedge funds don't change positions that frequently, so copying them seems plausibly good. Bonus! You can avoid their huge fees Whale Wisdom.
• Use lots of leverage because I'm young (calculator)
• Prefer housing over bonds based on the PE ratio and low mortgage interest rates
• Take advantage of months-long deviations from the theoretical real interest rate parity Interest rate parity
• Invest in countries with low savings rates Feldstein–Horioka puzzle
• Take advantage of inefficient prediction markets Yoder Smith
• Buy SPACs Special-purpose acquisition company that are trading for less than their redemption value. If, prior to a vote, they exceed their redemption value sell them; otherwise take the small amount of risk free interest. This is simple enough it could potentially be automated. Thanks to Dan Gold for this idea.
• Short bitcoin futures while buying bitcoin Siskind. Dan Gold suggests you can do something similar using cash-settled derivatives and earn ~10% per year in risk-free returns.