I'm broadly an index-fund investor, but both of the times I've believed particularly strongly that I should buy a particular stock at a particular moment (Nvidia after the Deepseek moment, SK Hynix yesterday), it seems to have worked out well for me. I've invested a bit in other individual stocks and I'm sure I've beaten the market overall with those as well but during my time investing it has largely been a bull market so I don't put much stock (heh) in that.
From market close 08/28/26 to market close 09/01/28 I will track the performance of the S&P 500 vs the performance of my non-index investments, expressed in annual average return. This market resolves NO if the former offers a better return over that time, YES if the latter does.
The title refers to individual stock trading, but if I decide at some point to trade options or invest in other assets, their performance would be included as well. I will include cash-on-hand that is not part of my checking account or emergency fund as part of my non-index investments for calculating return purposes. I would not try to trade full-time or anywhere near it.
I do plan to be significantly safer with my actual money than my mana. Feel free to ask me questions in the comments, which I may or may not answer. Feel free to give me advice as well.
I will not trade on this market.
1,000I believe this market does not have the mechanism to converge to true probability of success. NO side is not as incentivised to bet, since some of them will believe the market will NA, thus the balance point will be above the true probability.
@Henry38hw This is a great point. I'm not sure how best to address it. I could
1) Eliminate the N/A provision. In this case I would just track whatever non-index fund investments I have, probably there would be notably less of them in a high-NO-likelihood-world. But I don't have to make it none. This is probably the easiest actually. It feels a little weird because my actions will likely change some based on the probability of this market near the end of August so it's a bit endogenous? But it does eliminate the main problem. And it wouldn't really be that difficult to track so I'm leaning towards doing this.
2) I offer a higher bounty to NO holders if I N/A. This seems possibly like a a pain mana-wise and runs into issues where I just incentivize people to bet it low enough so they get free mana.
3) I resolve NO if the market is low enough and I then invest solely in index funds. This seems like 2's over-incentivizing people to bet NO issue but way worse.
4) Eliminate the N/A provision and commit to a specific amount of money I will put into a separate bucket, tracking just it vs the S&P500. I don't really want to do a two-year commitment like that, if I'm generally good at investing I would like to have more money not in index funds sooner.
Other considerations: It's generally nicer if markets don't N/A.
If other people have suggestions or criticism, I'd be happy to hear it, otherwise I think I will just remove the N/A provision. I'll probably give this a day and lock in my choice then.