LOT
Lotus Technology Inc.
stock NASDAQ ADR

Around 16%. Little less. I hold a LOT of VXUS which is international. Rest is VTI.

Honestly ... it's a big impact & often overlooked / under rated.
If you think about it for a second, your emotions/sleep makes up A LOT of your trading judgement calls, right? So if your sleep is subpar, or you're stressed over something (either trading related or something in your personal life)... I can almost certainly bet your trades aren't going to be great

I started simple just noting: "tired", "stressed", "focused", "calm" before each trade. After a month I looked at the data and it was brutal.
Trades taken when tired or frustrated? Like 25% win rate. Trades taken when rested and focused? 48% win rate. Same setups, similar strategy, completely different results.
The sleep thing specifically, I noticed I'd have a solid green week, then blow it on a Friday after a rough night's sleep. Wasn't even aware I was doing it until I saw the pattern.
Doesn't have to be complicated. Even just rating your mental state 1-5 before you trade and tracking it alongside your P&L will show you a lot... don't have to overwhelm yourself at the start but when you get more comfortable, I'd highly suggest tracking this:
\- How many hours of sleep you had the night prior
\- Your overall mental focus before trading, high to low
\- Your Pre-trade mood (calm, focused, FOMO, impatient etc)
\- Emotions DURING the trade (anxious, calm, greedy, frustrated, focused)
\- Any potential mistakes you made during the actual trade itself (Didn't want for confirmation, ignored rules, revenge trade etc etc)
\- Did you follow your trading rules for XYZ specific strategy?
Sounds like a lot but honestly, it's really not that much extra effort...and it's definitely worth it
Start asking yourself the questions that often get overlooked, and you'll start improving in your trading drastically
Wishing you success <3

I think there's a LOT of idiots trading ODTE SPY who lose everything then warn others not to trade options because options are bad.

Well done on the trade! It definitely seemed like a nothing burger holiday week so I think its a really interesting question as well.
Hearing the pros talk about it (great little segment here on CFOF: https://www.youtube.com/live/HMq3MtgUZv0?si=7OfnFBXnJRwUplLe) and from my interpretation, there was A LOT going on but I'd say the biggest drivers were:
1.Basement level SPX vols
2. Size/width of his spread
- neither of which are mutually exclusive.
When SPX vols are arguably the lowest levels possible, you really dont get much premium from selling options. To make matters worse, the dealers were aware of his strategy and way under sold him for the 90k lots.
That meant he needed to shorten the width of his condor in order to get the premium necessary to make up for previous losses (it was like 1:3 ratio) which is why the martingale strategy is so relevant here.
So the width of his condor ended up being only 40 basis points!
Its tight but not necessarily insane with the expected move and vols this low BUT throw in 90k 0DTE contracts that dealers need to hedge and you essentially put a magnet into the market that creates enough momentum to blow out the upside.
Its counter-intuitive but Ive heard about a study (maybe it was tastytrade?) That found pricing to be more "accurate" when vols are higher. This felt like a good example of that.
It sounds like you traded it well and had the right idea. Hope you keep getting those consistent wins!

I developed my own, and I piggyback off my partner who has spent a LOT more time working on screens than I have. He manages our businesses profit sharing plan, 40% of which is actively managed using the screens he has made. The 40% is well into 7 figures, I trust his screens completely.

So, this may not be a popular or wise decision for many, but... if you have some semblance of security (parents in case of emergency), invest as much as you reasonably can without sacrificing necessary comforts. So don't go crazy with consumption, but you are young so you don't need to be hypervigilant with sparing all expenses. I'm older, but I'm able to get a little more serious with my investments right now because I don't have kids, my husband has a lot of cash saved (I was in school so mine is not 6-12 months of expenses), and my mom could always help. I have reasonable job security and if something bad happened, I would have options AND some savings. This is not so for SO many people, so I wouldn't advise my strategy for all. I still have several thousand saved, just not what I know is recommended for most people.
Based on some of your feedback, I think you're in the same boat. I've been investing in things like VOO, VTI, FXAIX and BRXAX, but also some individual stocks like Apple and CocaCola. Over time, absolutely everything has gone up. I'm not heavily invested yet ($35K), but if your strategy is long-term, which I hope it is, it's hard to mess up with something like VOO/VTI/FXAIX. Never invest so much that you "miss" the money. Since I have it automated, it's not ever a thought that it's actual money. I have automated fund transfers to my brokerage account and then I select what I want to buy, but I will be changing that and removing the decision-making process from that (choosing the purchase) and just evaluate every so often if I want to adjust.
If your employer offers 401k (and matching!), immediately get that. I've opted for Roth which taxes as it goes in, not on the growth and disbursements of funds once you take it out. If you have an HSA option, absolutely look into whether that's right for your medical needs. It's a triple tax advantage! There are so many resources on YouTube worth checking out. Take everything with a grain of salt, but so far it seems like the info there I have found makes sense with the context. BUT, and maybe this is just me, but don't solely contribute to 401k... I'm also investing into my brokerage account and HSA (which you can use those funds to invest/grow) so if I DO have an emergency, my purchases will be taxed as long-term gains which is less than the tax on ordinary income. Also, reinvest dividends.
Honestly, since I'm writing a novel, you're probably best to do anything at this point. For example, ALL my investments are down for today, but overall, they're up for the year/overall, but a LOT. Invest for long-term and don't worry about a perfect choice. Indexes generally perform. I'm not a financial advisor, but from my research... they're not high risk. You have the advantage of time. Find something, invest in 2 methods, the same amount for a couple of years, and then maybe that can help direct you. Everyone has different preferences. GOOD LUCK!

100% and asset size does not matter when in accumulation phase. Don’t care if it’s $10M. I fired my financial advisor that was taking 1% AUM for poor returns in funds that had excessive fees (that rarely beat index funds). When you compound 1% over 40 years, it’s literally 1/3 of your portfolio lost holding all factors constant (and this doesn’t include the high cost of the fund itself vs low cost index funds). Financial advisors are great WHEN needed and ONLY under an hourly or project fee basis. Most people don’t do that because they have to cut a check that feels real vs it happening behind the scenes as you slowly get robbed blindly. Bottom like if you follow this, you will lose a LOT.

Cheer up guys. 2026 will be a LOT worse.

a LOT of people think that 2026 will have some major crash in AI or the job market. I feel like sentiment heading into 2022 was very different compared to 2026. Maybe we do get a big drop but I'm willing to bet that there won't be a recession in 2026

Were all here for the same thing. BACK UP BIN LOT 2 lol

I got burned badly by lump sum....at the end of 2021 (like the last trading day) I was like 90% cash, 10% stocks. Decided I need to be in the market instead of waiting around, and put it like 70/30 into aggressive growth/bonds. We'll, come first days of 2022 it was negative like every day it seemed, and we know how that year turned out.. does everyone realize that a LOT of the SP500 has still not recovered to the 2021 highs?

THE BIGGEST SCANDAL THE USA HAS EVER SEEN! DONALD J TRUMP THE BIGGEST, MOST NOTORIOUS, PEDOPHILE IN AMERICAN HISTORY! SAD! WHAT A LOSER!! WORST AMERICAN CITIZEN EVER!!! A LOT WORSE THAN EPSTEIN!! A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE SAYING IT! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Lots of research. ASTS popped up on reddit for me and I dug A LOT.
I fish in some pretty remote areas in the US do having satellite coverage while using my regular mobile phone made me super interested in it.
So I bought, held and will continue to hold.

In my opinion solving full autonomy has huge implications that are worth a LOT for whoever scales up profitably first. If you can sleep in your car an wake up in a different country...think of how much people would pay for that.

If you can get beyond Wall Street hype and focus on the technical aspects of things, you would see that the OP is correct. NVIDIA has pushed AI, and Wall Street has listened, but when it comes to graphics, NVIDIA has actually cut way back on architectural improvements.
It all comes down to NVIDIA being afraid of competition, so always looking to run away to an area that doesn't have competition. When NVIDIA was doing the best in conventional rendering and AMD was struggling, NVIDIA was content to stick with graphics. Then, AMD released the first generation of RDNA, the Radeon 5700XT. That was enough of a threat where NVIDIA decided to push ray tracing. But, ray tracing performance in the RTX 2000 series was garbage, even the RTX 2080. So, NVIDIA came up with DLSS as a crutch to let people turn on ray tracing and still have playable frame rates. AMD started to show some competence with the RDNA 2 generation(Radeon 6800, 6800XT, and 6900XT), but while AMD was still well behind NVIDIA in ray tracing, it was obvious AMD was actually making progress on that front, so then what? Path tracing? Still far too slow for games, so...AI, yea, let's push AI!
Now, AMD is showing very solid performance with their MI355 and the talk about the MI400 series has been enough to scare NVIDIA, so NVIDIA is starting to thrash around a bit, maybe robotics as a direction, but NVIDIA is so fixated on AI because it is so profitable, they didn't really improve much in graphics performance with the RTX 5000 series. The 5090 is just a LOT bigger than the 4090, so that is where the performance improvement comes from. The 5080 and below aren't really better at graphics, just AI related stuff like DLSS performance.

This is why Im convinced the only service a financial planner can provide someone these days is simply to relate your story to their clients, which is extremely common as we all know, and prevent them from panic selling or market timing moves.
This is worth 1% to a LOT of people. Stock picking services are a joke, managed funds as well. It’s just that it’s counterintuitive to think the simplest investing strategy (low cost index etf) is the best. But its the truth nonetheless.

Honestly think we dip hard on Friday. New tax year, and there are a LOT of profits to be taken.

Congrats on your milestone! $25k at 21 is actually a huge deal - getting any meaningful lump of money invested at such a young age gives you an enormous leg up over your peers.
Just one bit of advice from an old fogey: we've been in the middle of a nearly unprecedented bull market for the last several years, and in those circumstances, a LOT of people will make money on all kinds of risky trades and think they are stock market geniuses. These are the people who will get absolutely wiped out by the next market downturn. Don't be one of them!

They do but it takes time. For silver to be resold it has to be melted down and re-certified, also logistics take time. But at $5-10 arbitrage per ounce believe me a LOT of people are looking into it.

Iran hit their secret base. Israel has military censors. And uh actually there's a LOT of footage of Iranian ballistic missiles hitting their targets.