I’d like to introduce you to someone who is going to self-destruct. No, I’m not talking about myself. I’m doing all right, all things considered. I’m referring to someone who just put up a post on /WSB:
As the saying goes, let’s unpack this. Here we have a man who:
- Is married;
- Has two young children;
- Is the sole breadwinner, earning about $145,000 annually;
- In spite of this, he lives “paycheck to paycheck”;
- He has a net worth of a remarkably tiny $20k;
On top of this he has stated, without any explanation, that he “had a chance of becoming a millionaire” not just once, but twice. The circumstances or credulity of this is wholly unknown to us.
For me, far and away the biggest tip-off is the childish misspelling of “losing.” If you examine the posts of all the people who fancy themselves traders but are in fact feckless nimrods, the percentage of those who spell the word as “loosing” is, in fact, 100.
Getting back our hero, however: this man sounds quite frustrated with his past missed opportunities, and he just can’t stomach not “making it” anymore. Thus, he has taken the obviously reckless step of taking a $15,000 “balance transfer” (AKA high-interest credit card debt) with the goal of somehow transforming that $15,000 into $1,000,000 by the end of 2023.
I’ll be kind and assume he means before-tax dollars, since actually achieving $1,000,000 in profits would subject this fellow to at least a 40% forfeiture in his profits thanks to taxes, assuming he lives in a zero tax state. If he’s unfortunate to live in California, over half his profits would be confiscated. But, again, I digress.
So let’s take a breath here and all agree on something. It requires an interest rate of about 6,700% to become a million dollars, and to do it in half a year’s time requires an annualized gain of almost 14,000%.
There aren’t many things in life a group of strangers can agree upon, but I’d like to stick my neck out and declare that we can collectively agree that the odds of this illiterate clown taking out a credit card loan and, I suppose by way of exceptionally high-risk options trading, achieving an APR of 14,000% are approximately are-you-fucking-kidding-me.
This is the age we live in. It’s the age of greed and the age of hubris. The age of charlatans and the age of FOMO. People are absolutely convinced that the government has, at long last, devised a way to keep stocks and the economy propped sky-high without interruption until the end of time.
This cannot last. It never does.
I’m simply out of patience with how long it’s taking. But the post you read at the top……..this isn’t healthy.
