In this market, can a normal investor like me just keep buying? It depends on your time frame. That's everything. Like if if you need the money in the next 5 years, no. I would say absolutely not. You should not be buying right now. If you're this is a retirement account for 20 30 years in the future, I would say yes cuz the market will surprise you in many ways. A year ago I was bearish. I'm now bullish once again over the last year because AI was seemed so crazy. I got a little bearish for the first time ever and I reduced my stock exposure by you know 20%. I went from a 100% stocks in my retirement account to 8020 which to me that's like being bearish and at this point now I'm like why am why why did I do that? It's probably a bit of both, right? If you look at the history of any large technological change, there's always a ton of players that rush in. There's a lot of capital that goes in. There's always overinvestment. And I guarantee in this case there's going to be some overinvestment. At the same time, it is a paradigm shift for a lot of things. Anyone that's used, you know, Chat GBT, Claude, you know, Perplexi, you name it, you've seen things like, wow, this can save me time.

Price over sales. It it just there were too many things that just reminded me of 2021 and I think I got a little bit of deja vu. I overlaid the Nvidia price to sales with the Microsoft price to sales in 99 and like the the they matched. Price to sales I like that metric more than earnings because earnings can be manipulated with all sorts of accounting tricks. Sales is like that's what you have. Like you have the price of your company and you have your revenue. can't to fake sales is like straight up fraud and people very rarely do that. So for me, I was looking at these data series and I was like this is like seems crazier than the dot bubble and I think it there's just a lot of growth and that maybe justified it because a lot of that growth has happened. I mean look at what happened with Anthropic. I think I think I just read like they were 3 billion AR now they're 45 billion AR in a year. Like that is absurd growth.

The mantra of the book is... the continual purchase of a diverse set of income-producing assets. There's three pillars to that. Continual purchase. You're buying over time. Diversification is at the heart of this. And then of income producing assets... anything that can produce some sort of income. That includes equities, that includes fixed income, that includes real estate. That does not include things like gold, Bitcoin, etc. Does that mean you shouldn't own those? No. But I don't think they should be the vast majority of your portfolio. The conviction doesn't just come from like okay, we have one country with a you know a century of return. It comes from diversification. Since at least, you know, the 1800s, since the industrial revolution, we've been producing, humans as a whole have been producing more and more... and I don't think that trend is going to stop. And so that's where the conviction comes from.

The issue is... if you wait for a dip, a lot of times when that dip finally comes, it's going to be even higher. I remember back in 2017, there was an investor... he waited, waited, waited. Finally, COVID happens 2020. Even if he perfectly knew the bottom and bought on March 23rd, 2020, he still would have bought at a higher price than if he had bought back in early 2017. The worst dip in, you know, US market history was the Great Depression. The market was already down, I think, like 50%. From 1931 to the summer of 1932, the market went down 60%. This is after it already had two years of just getting destroyed. So you keep talking about buying the dip, but at some point you may face a dip where it just keeps dipping. That is truly destructive like nothing else.

Savings is for the poor and investments is for the wealthy. If you have a thousand bucks and you get a 10% return that's $100... but if you have a million dollar portfolio you get a 10% return that's $100,000. The stock research and beating the market only makes sense once you have a ton of money. Focus on your career. The data overwhelmingly supports a model where people are saving over time and putting it into the market. It's their careers. Taleb has this thing called the turkey problem... the confidence of the turkey goes up and then it just falls like that. That's what selling call options is like. You get more comments. Oh my god, I'm right. I'm a genius. And then one day you have this market event you couldn't have foreseen and then you lose everything. The only version of success I care about is whether you survive.

The reason I'm holding cash is because I'm trying to buy a house. My cash pile is going up because I have a legit reason... if we include those assets in my portfolio my allocation would be more like 35% bonds and 65% stocks. I personally recommend short-term bonds, anything with a duration of less than 5 years. Anyone that bought long-dated bonds got destroyed because as you know when rates go up prices go down. My guess is people are probably taking too much risk right now. Too much undiversified risk. You can own Nvidia and Microsoft and Apple and you're like, 'Oh, look. I'm diversified,' but you really are pretty concentrated in tech.