I was under the impression that you managed risk with a diversified portfolio. There is nothing stopping you from investing in any of the above. You want access to start-ups you have to find them yourself. You are not going to get anywhere with out taking what you consider excess risk. The people who "Make it" take a lot of risk. Easy way to make it is dollar cost average into TQQQ for the next 20 years
I made a post on this subject today. I am not concerned about peoples' access to money, I'm concerned about their access to reason, appreciation for the truth, ability to be decent human beings who respect each other and especially their elders and betters. Architects of their own misfortune is otherwise apt, it isn't just the system it is who and what they are, what they revere and promote. It's a large subject and text is a poor medium and my writing isn't equal to it. There are worse things than not being able to afford a house. I'd start with not being able to know what is true, and being forced to exist in a social class where delusion is imposed.
If you're in the peasant class in a Western country you have access to a better standard of living than the vast majority of humans who have ever lived. An embarrassing percentage of people alive today don't have access to clean water, medical care, and live on less than $10/day. Never in human history have the elite allowed the common man a place at the table, that will never change. A mixture of technology and requiring an educated population of knowledge workers permitted a temporary rise in the standard of living. This may have peaked, but would you choose any other time and place to be born? Why should the middle class person - average output by definition - deserve more than their current standard of living, which is excellent by any historical measure? Those among them who are able to deserve it seem to have a decent chance to succeed to some degree, on average. Yes the oligarchs brook no competition, but that's not a level which anyone rational would aspire to anyway.
1. life isn’t fair 2. Not everyone gets to be rich 3. If you are smart, hard working, and savvy anyone should have a chance to become rich. one and two are reality. America is closest to #3 than ever before (unless you are black). you could have worked at Blackstone. You just needed to get into an Ivy League school and do really well academically. You could have started a search fund. You just needed to do well in whatever college you went to to go to a good MBA and then be risk taking enough to start one and then savvy enough to buy and run the business. You could make money in the markets if you are smart enough to find that edge. You could start your own business if you were risk taking and savvy enough to do it. if you didn’t do these things that’s not a reflection of society being fair.
we all want to invest in OpenAI. It’s the best company OpenAI gets to choose who invests in them. Who are they going to choose to sell their equity to? (Answer: whoever will help them scale, so Microsoft gets the lionshare, and their initial seed investors get the balance). You could have applied to OpenAI in 2017. It was a non profit that didn’t even have a concept. You’d have been a billionaire or a deca billionaire. Why didn’t you?
I am currently entirely in cash (tbills), that's a lot of risk in itself given that there is hardly any other investable asset out there other than equities for all the money chasing yield which might as well elevate market up further, but I essentially liquidated my entire equity portfolio and everything else in December last year. I stated I am willing to take the commensurate risk but I don't see how I gain access to pre IPO firms.
Well, there is a middle ground between being peasant (however great you describe that to be in our western civilizations, and to some degree I agree that we never had it better before than now) and on the other hand aspiring to break through the invisible wall. My conviction is that someone who resorts to saying it's impossible nor rational to aspire to more and better opportunities in my book has already given up trying. I make an effort in my daily life to help those around me strive and gain better access and opportunities to things and services they work hard to attain, sometimes at a cost to myself (whether time or other resources). I just feel there is a level above where there is not only hardly anyone who is willing to let others around them strive but boots kicking everyone off the ladder below them.
Somehow we keep on miscommunicating. 1. I don't look for easy wins. 2. I am extremely well off without wanting to go into further detail, but I can live off interest for the rest of my life and live very comfortably. A need for more money to live a comfortable life is not my issue. 3. I want to believe that I have done very well, academically and career wise, I am reasonably smart and worked and work hard. Also not the issue. 4. What is my issue is that I reached a level and place where the daily grind is behind me and where I can speak out freely without having to fear any negative repercussions. It irks me to see a middle class, especially young adults who see no real hope or future. Especially here in New Zealand, entire cohorts of educated uni graduates leave the country for good because they see no hope in ever getting onto the property ladder. Property in this country is treated like a casino, a speculative toy object, the entire economy is based on the property market. And there are elites who do everything in their power to keep a tight control over who gets to play and who does not. I reached a point and level of comfort where I can concentrate my energy on the bigger pictures in life. And the loss of hope and giving up on their country by many young adults really rubs me the wrong way. I am talking g about pretty educated, good kids, willing to work hard, am not talking about freeloaders or socially anxious individuals. I can see why there is such push to the left in many of our societies. When you see the blatant abuse, the nepotism, the revolving doors, the corruption, that is nowadays so in all our faces, then that's something that I find important to talk about and finding solutions to course correct. I am under no illusion that society was and will always be a class society. This time aorund I think the elites and powerful have squeezed the middle class to such extent that it makes a lot noticably uncomfortable and that it raises anger and resentment. That's usually the first stage in a line of events at which end there is a powder keg that will explode. I just can't help feeling that we are not heading in a good direction in many of our western societies