Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Your experiences?
Your bets?
Recommended gurus or paid groups which sell signals?

Pro perspective: Barbells are advanced strategies that require understanding two different groups of investors (the risky and the risk-averse) better than they each understand themselves. Your profit is in the difference between the two because you can put your weight with whoever is more right than wrong. In short, a barbell strategy gives you options to maneuver.

Noob perspective: It's a way to make bets on extreme risk w/o losing your shirt. Likely you'll be losing money to the people in the first paragraph. Monies lost would be either explicit and immediate or opportunity costs.

Overall perspective: A barbell is rather binary. You're actually dealing with an entire risk/alpha surface. Weights are loaded all over the bar, not just the ends. And the bar is not one-dimensional either.

Recommended reading is anything by Mark Spitznagel.

Marry the accountant. Have a fling with the rock star. Just don't become the forever girlfriend of the pharmaceutical rep.

I have played and continued to play individual asymmetric opportunities. Or in other words, I place some bets. Usually in the pharma, health sciences area. The issue I have encountered is that my "right" bets get acquired before the explosive gains. So I might make some money, but I don't bet big enough to have my needle moved on a 2-3X. And if I didn't buy at the right price point, I might still suffer a loss or come out whole. Most of these companies seem to cash out before the individual investors can reap the real rewards.

LEAP options. You can get the same long term return as an index fund by investing 25% of your portfolio in index call options. If you buy calls on a lot of individual stocks instead you will also increase the return and decrease the risk. There are many ways to improve the strategy.

Here is an article where they use a very simple strategy with index calls:
https://seekingalpha.com/article/424285 ... n-analysis

I like the outlook explained in the book the income factory. I also like the trading style of Walter Schloss/Peter Lynch. No such thing as too many holding, they both had hundreds.