Apart from the reasons in the article, I'm going to go ahead and say that, if you're on Hacker News, you should be learning how to if you don't know already. If it gets you rooting around the balance sheets of publicly-traded companies, that has got to be a good thing for understanding how a company like Apple or Yahoo runs. You should at least get a sense of why someone would pick a stock. It's a great way to turn analytical interest into business knowledge.<p>And beating the averages picking stocks is not that different than doing so with a startup. Startup founders, in aggregate, never outperform their opportunity cost. Is that going to discourage you? I really hope not.<p>Besides, when you learn about this kind of stuff, sometimes you happen upon gems like this:
<a href="http://paste.lisp.org/display/14576" rel="nofollow">http://paste.lisp.org/display/14576</a>
What's the source of "investors as an aggregate never beat the market"? I used to believe this, but as I've learned about options and futures, I don't buy it anymore. (If we weren't beating the market, what would be paying my salary at an investment bank?)<p>Even the simplest options strategies can give you a fair return on your money in a very short time, certainly better than a 5% APY savings account or a 10% annual return on your index funds. (And, you can use options as security on your stock positions, and you can use them to make money on your safe stock positions.)<p>Anyway, not buying it. You can beat the market.
One of my biggest regrets was giving into fear when the market tipped down in 08 / 09 and not scooping up equities that would likely return to paying out dividends (I wrote my senior thesis on this investment concept, after all).<p>I heard it a hundred times on the trading floor but it now very much rings true: "Buy into Fear and Sell into Greed"