How to take advantage of social networking for investing advantage

Read the Reddit (a link aggregation/dissemination site that is mainly dominated by teenager/sub-30 year old people) comments on “I have about $12,000 to invest, what should I do? I’m 26 and never invested before!“.

There are some decent responses (for example, people asking for more information on the person’s balance sheet), while there are a lot of comments that sound quite sophisticated but are quite incorrect.

While responses like these are not typical of the pricing you typically see in the marketplace, if you were locked in a room with teenager/sub-30 year old people and were forced to trade with them, you could use this information in a way that would give you a disproportionate advantage.

That said, in most cases people that have never invested before, if they do invest in risk-bearing instruments, will lose money. Even indexers, adjusting for management expenses, will not be able to outperform the rest of the market because so much money is tracking the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100 and the TSX 60 in Canada.

Outperforming the market requires you to know what you are doing, and to know it better than the people you are playing against in the marketplace. Most of the time the market gets it close, and knowing when the market is errant is crucial.