Coming soon.
Return homeI ran a fire staff manufacturing business in Albion Online. I had dedicated suppliers for wooden planks and a contracted delivery crew I paid insurance to. Support for this included part-time helpers I trained, makeshift escrow systems I set up, and a few spreadsheets I would later turn into scripts I gave out to guildmates.
What the fuck does this have to do with index funds?
I would argue that this is the more valuable story from a money making perspective, and to back this I will try to disprove some fundamental beliefs you may have about your finances.
1. I think index funds are wrong for 99% of people. Yes, they will consistently net you 10% YoY with little to no effort. Also yes, you will never become 'rich' investing solely in index funds (unless you're already rich).
I'm not going to split hairs about how much money = rich, nor anything about how being rich at 50 is meaningless. The point is that an index fund is the absolute baseline in terms of efficiency in deploying money. It is the floor, in that anyone can do it and there is no alpha there.
So how then should you be deploying money? Well, in Albion you can be a lumberjack that cuts down trees and sell the wood. You can also simply be the refiner, buying wood from the lumberjacks and selling the refined planks to be made into chairs and tables. I personally had a fire staff making business. I was tapping out practically all the supplies for wood and steel in my city. I was also finding it hard to find enough demand for all my fire staves. It was easy enough to start crafting different fire staves and other such weapons that I could make with the same materials, but it's also worth noting the extra effort in 'specializing' and the bonuses you can reap there. The key here is that once you've tapped out all the easily scalable avenues for revenue, you now have more capital than you can easily deploy. So you may think about other vehicles. This is the only time that you should be thinking about things like index funds or etc, when you don't think you have some other vehicle that could (with low risk) make as much money. I hate the idea of just blindly thinking that you're investing by putting something in the SP500, this is the mindless way to deploy money. In the same vein as my fire staff business, you can practically give out 100$ to 100 kids to each make a lemonade stand, and reasonably profit far more. If they take $20 for a weekend and the lemons are a few dollars or etc, they'd only need to send 10 lemonades in two days to make back the money. Of course this isn't very scalable, but there are simply so many ways to make more than 10% a year. I promise if you don't have millions to deploy there are better avenues, ones you could easily think up in a weekend.
Unrelated I am starting a fund to start lemonade stands across the US, DM to seed.