How to Lose Money

&gt;The nice thing about options is that there isn’t just one way to lose money. No, you can lose money in many different ways – far more than I can write on this page.<p>This is the most important lesson of options. It&#x27;s never just a coin flip. You have an unimaginably huge number of factors riding against your success. It&#x27;s not even remotely close to a 50&#x2F;50 win&#x2F;lose scenario. There are a million ways to lose, and just a few narrow ways to win. You literally have better odds going to the roulette table and placing a bet on red.

This is good advice. I wrote a bunch of novels, got a degree - a Ph.D. in philosophy to make sure I&#x27;ll never make any money and people who have money wouldn&#x27;t want to give it to me -, and did some Internet advertising. Not very surprisingly, I&#x27;m fairly poor. However, I&#x27;ve still managed to save a little bit of money so maybe I should start trading now.

Building an online course[1] has been one of the easiest ways to make money in my personal experience. Other things I&#x27;ve tried building: SaaS, Trades business, Freelancing business.<p>I&#x27;ve made over $8k since I launched last month and it&#x27;s been a great stepping stone into other ideas. The main problem I see going forward is getting consistent traffic. Building the course was the &quot;easy&quot; part and now I&#x27;m focusing hard on SEO to keep consistent traffic going to my page. Long term I think I can make $100-$300 a day with it.<p>I floundered trying to build SaaS and other types of business for years before making some money online. Selling a one time purchase can be a game changer for those looking to go independent. Look at the stairstep approach[2] for reasons why this works so well.<p>Overall, if you invest a few days and put something out there, I think an online course can be a great way to build some income.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vim.so" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vim.so</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;robwalling.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;26&#x2F;the-stairstep-approach-to-bootstrapping&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;robwalling.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;26&#x2F;the-stairstep-approach-to-...</a>

&gt; I have over 40,000 students taking my online courses and they have generated a few thousand in gross revenues.<p>I have 400, and I made a living out of it for the past couple of years.<p>Sure, I was earning more when I was a freelancer. So, I guess his point stands, I am losing money in that sense. And if money was the only metric, he would be spot on. But money is not the only reason.<p>It&#x27;s also true that most people just wing it, thinking they will make easy money online. And then, fail.<p>But well, guess what. Business is hard work. Any business. Creating educational material is not any different. A lot of work goes into positioning, copywriting, marketing, and sales. I would like to see his.<p>I know many people making excellent money with online courses. A couple of them are in the bi-weekly business mastermind I attend. Heck, if Apple didn&#x27;t introduce SwiftUI two years ago, forcing me to re-do my courses from scratch, I too would be doing great, instead of just OK. But well, that&#x27;s just &quot;cost of doing business&quot;.<p>So, saying &quot;you are going to lose money with online courses&quot; is the same as saying &quot;you are going to lose money if you start a business&quot;. I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a sentiment shared here on HN.

Options are effectively Zero Sum - meaning that whoever is on the other side of the contract is predicting the opposite of whatever you&#x27;re thinking.<p>Successful long-term options traders don&#x27;t trade options &#x27;directionally&#x27; (like buying 50K of GME calls), they manage a whole portfolio of options, and then take directional portfolio risk. This is sort of like diversifying, then running risk analysis, then figuring out where there is money to be made ie dummies who priced contracts incorrectly.<p>And, to run an option portfolio, professional options traders run risk management software like Blackrock Aladdin and Goldman Sachs SecDB. These cost a LOT of money (close to 6 digits a year)<p>Now, remember the zero sum part? No matter how smart you think you are, if you don&#x27;t have these tools, you don&#x27;t have the data or analysis that is available to the big boys. It&#x27;s like playing poker with someone where they know the exact odds every second as cards appear, but you only have the vaguest idea.. Sure, you could get lucky once in a while but in the long run, not knowing the odds is going to hurt you and you are likely to lose all your money.

Shorting call options also has a nice feature: there is no limit to how much you can lose.<p>But really, what this article misses is a tip about leverage!<p>Whatever your plan to lose money is, make sure you&#x27;re leveraged. So that you can lose X time the amount you would lose if you only put your own money on the line. Eventually, you&#x27;ll quickly lose much more than you had in the first place!

Damn, am I the only one who does adequate research before I dive into things? I mean, buying patents for a dog alarm before knowing your customer? Really?<p>Losing money on trading i understand because it&#x27;s a very seductive venture and it&#x27;s mostly just gambling that you can hedge slightly with some smart info. Otherwise, yeah, some of these things can only happen when you already have too much money to play with. Someone who understands what it&#x27;s like to have virtually no money will never casually toss it at random ventures, they probably don&#x27;t have the time to anyway.

This seems to be a very one-sided view. I personally know a guy who makes ~3000 USD month with a book about worldly wisdom. I know about it because he pitches his book on every occasion. And I guess that&#x27;s true for everything: Just writing a book is not enough, pitching and selling it actively afterwards is key.

School is such a guaranteed one now during Covid – you don&#x27;t even get social serendipity. You&#x27;re literally sitting there on Zoom burning through cash.<p>What common folk don&#x27;t realize is that college is just a luxury consumption good of the rich.

9) Time is money. So by reading lot of irrelevant posts on HN and commenting and not doing your own job &gt; wasting time &gt; leads to loss of money.

The &quot;fastest&quot; way of losing money - which the author says is trading options, is naive. Even with a margin account, your purchasing power is 4:1, at best! Now - if you have _enough_ money, you can write uncovered(aka &#x27;naked&#x27;) option contracts and open the possibility of unlimited losses at least, but that won&#x27;t afford you any more leverage.<p>IMHO...that &quot;fastest&quot; method to lose money(in the markets) is the commodity futures market. You get 200:1 leverage there, almost no rules, and it&#x27;s open 23 hours a day, 6 days a week. The securities market and derivatives within are small fish by comparison. If commodity futures don&#x27;t scratch your itch for losing(or gaining) money very quickly, you can also trade forex with similar leverage. Both of these market types make securities and options look like the kiddie track at the go-kart park.

A secondhand anecdote:<p>An acquaintance of mine used to be a professional options trader. A fairly successful one, too. He retired from the job in his early 30s.<p>After that, he tried doing a little options trading on his own behalf, for old times&#x27; sake. The look on his face as he recounted how that went down was a sight to see. I don&#x27;t know exactly how much money he lost, or how quickly, but my take-away was, roughly, &quot;Here is a person who, having first traded options with great success as a professional, and <i>then</i> traded them with great failure as an amateur, became more convinced than anyone that options trading is best left for the pros.&quot;<p>It would seem that there&#x27;s a reason why Bloomberg terminals, broker-dealer licenses, exchange membership, a spot in the exchange&#x27;s colo, and all that good stuff are such expensive commodities.

My experience with Options was pretty frustrating. I had a couple of big wins, but those mostly evaporated by a couple of bad trades. So while I haven&#x27;t lost money (yet), I&#x27;ve fared much better with simply investing (buy and hold).<p>Now with so much volatility in the market, I&#x27;m trying to take advantage of it by using a backtesting tool to become more consistent. So far it&#x27;s been worth the fees. The gains aren&#x27;t as outsized as I imagined when I started trading Options, but I definitely have more consistent wins.

#0 - Be pessimistic about the stock market.<p>This is by far the most meaningful way most people lose money over the course of their lifetime.

Or you can think for yourself and lose money too.<p>I thought I was very smart and did a DCF analysis of TSLA for myself. Looked into the assumptions, and convinced myself that even in the most bullish case, the revenues and profits generated by TSLA would not justify a valuation above 500B dollars.<p>I have now lost about the price of a TSLA Model S on paper, and still have not closed out my TSLA short. I should have just bought a TSLA instead of shorting TSLA.<p>The saddest part is, even if TSLA corrects I&#x27;ll only make a few tens of thousands of dollars ... and I have in jeopardy hundreds of thousands.<p>Stupidest move of my entire life.<p>If my crypto portfolio had not 4Xed this year I would be in real trouble with my wife. Sometimes I feel like its the same trend in the market blessing me and cursing me at the same time.

I wonder how many noticed that the article continues with 5 points for &quot;<i>How to make money</i>&quot; after the image with broken savings.<p>&quot;4. Stop quitting&quot; resonates the most with me, in hindsight. And I&#x27;m not sure if I would have persisted with my current work if I hadn&#x27;t got lucky with encouraging sales at the start.

&quot;Stop finishing Projects&quot;<p>I tried to convince people it was a good idea to have a general purpose bytecode VM as part of web browsers in 1994 - quite glad I was ignored by my employer as they would probably have patended the idea!

It’s a shame that education has become so transactional. I was lucky enough to have a scholarship, but if I’m fortunate enough to pay full-ride for my kids when they’re old enough, and they’re at a place where they seem ready to get the most out of it, I’d spend that money in a heartbeat. Not because I think we’d see a dollar value return on the investment, something coldly transactional. But because I was lucky enough to see firsthand the value of that <i>experience</i>.<p>And it was lucky, because the vast majority of people are under a ton of financial stress for something that hasn’t provided a clear return on investment.<p>So what I would caution is this: don’t write off college. But also don’t write off the enormous financial burden you may be taking on. If you’re young and have a shot at a scholarship, really consider it! A lot of the negativity around college is financially driven, but the experience of getting a truly rounded education is invaluable. As well as the friendships you make.

He forgot the best way to lose money on options - selling options! It&#x27;s a great and effective way to lose money - sell out of the money options and get paid a premium, and feel smart! Until the unexpected happens and you go bankrupt. So you get to feel smart AND lose money!

The only options trader who doesn’t lose money is the one who ̶n̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶r̶t̶s̶.̶ pays Janet Yellen&#x27;s speaking fees. - Andrew Tye (FTFY)

Aside from being a great look at the back hand of the make money online world, this was comic gold. Bravo. I laughed right out loud several times.

Gary Vaynerchuk has some great come backs to people in his events saying &quot;I&#x27;m going to start a business, buy property ETC&quot;<p>The internet is awash with the slime in this article but people want fast money.<p>Fast money in leaves fast as well.

1. Trade Options<p><i>Cries</i><p>That was a 10k lesson I wish I didn&#x27;t take.

This article is long and I missed the bottom half on my first read.<p>The top section is awful without the bottom section.<p>If you&#x27;re going to do anything to make money you should make sure you charge by the hour.<p>If instead you enjoy doing your side project and it may be monetizable you&#x27;ll be golden.<p>Because no project is guaranteed to make money, if you consider it fun then you should be able to just enjoy it.<p>Then when it starts requiring the things you may not love to scale you can decide if the money is worth the marketing, patenting, managing, etc that comes with turning a project to a business

&gt; I’ve written four short books and they have literally grossed hundreds of dollars.<p>I hear this argument pretty often.<p>A book is not a binary thing: there is a book, and there isn&#x27;t. It&#x27;s not about the &quot;book&quot;, it&#x27;s about the contents of the book.<p>So in other words the author has gathered some knowledge and he didn&#x27;t make much money off of it. Therefore, the knowledge you will gather will not allow you to earn any money. Does that make sense? I don&#x27;t think so.<p>I will probably be downvoted, but maybe more important thing is the subject of the book, than the actual book itself?<p>Disclaimer: I did not write a book. I did write a chapter to a book, and I got some money off of it. I&#x27;m not rich because of it, but I see the potential.

Building an online course has been one of the easiest ways to make money in my personal experience.<p>The problem is that most people focus on what they know and spend hours creating the content for the course.<p>However, most of your success is going to come from building an email list of at least 1k people. And most of the effort should be here BEFORE you start building the course.<p>I&#x27;ve done that many times and have been profitable since, even after outsourcing most of the work.

&quot;Build a following first&quot;<p>Easier said than done, why would people follow you if you don&#x27;t have anything interesting to share? You have to start somewhere

&gt; And as a side benefit it will help me make ends meet since I’ve lost so much money but still need to pay bills and such.<p>I feel your pain. Thursday was rough.

I used to lose money so consistently buying options I thought, “Hey, I should <i>sell</i> options”. Now I make money pretty consistently.

buy a plane, I just did that. you loose all your money really fast

You can lose money with options or stocks or literally any form investment.<p>The real problem is: not assessing risk tolerance correctly and not diversifying your investment portfolio.<p>e.g.: you YOLO one stock instead of investing on multiple stocks, multiple sectors, with ~5% on each stock.

affiliate links and tracking in here, just saying

Seems like in all these methods, you need to be in top 10% or top 1% to make money.

If he&#x27;s in, I&#x27;m in!

&gt; Do things because you have genuine interest in them... Don’t start out with a singular goal of making money.<p>I really hate advice like this. Have you ever seen a business before? Have you ever met a person? Pretty much no interests are monetizable and almost all companies are doing really boring work. I don’t believe anyone in the world is truly passionate about things like payroll software. If I followed my interests I would be homeless.<p>The whole “if you want to do X, you have to not be doing it for X” attitude is useless and doesn’t give any actionable advice.

It&#x27;s too soon.

&gt; Buy some $GME swag from me right now to lose money instantly.<p>Paper hands, smh.

A lot of these like &#x27;Write a Book&#x27; do not involve actually losing money. They are in fact earning money, just at a lower rate than the author demands.

Really bad post. Read anything from nassim taleb or take a course on probability.

Method 10: Write an absolute piece of shit article on revue.<p>I often wonder what motivates people to write certain posts. This piece is filled with opinion and subjective and obviously wrong information, followed by nonsensical motivational fluff. I have no idea what makes the author think that this is a good use of anyone&#x27;s time.