Go!
Go!
But honestly… I’m currently helping build a classroom in rural Tajikistan, where kids walk 5 km to school every day. Not exactly a revenue-generating asset — unless you count hope, literacy, and the occasional "thank you" as ROI.
So yeah, maybe not the most lucrative investment, but probably one of the most fulfilling
At the moment and for me personally it just makes sense to let others do the work. There are companies that at the moment and for some time now have been freeze drying massive amounts of food for my government so I just piggy-back off their work when they have enough reserves. Freeze Dry Wholesalers. Their food is very fresh and high quality. When they are out I get the lower echelon of freeze dried foods on Amazon.
35k is enough for a down payment on a small apartment. If you have a job, you can usually get a loan from most banks.
With good preparation and patience, you can cover all your costs by renting out your property and generate a monthly profit.
They still think it's ok because on paper their assets have appreciated but I think the market is just so iliquid right now they're not able to mark them accurately.
From a gut feeling viewpoint, something doing very well in the recent past makes me hesitant out of fear that it’s overvalued and will slow or even reverse in the near term.
You also need to minimize transaction costs, if you pay 10% every time you buy and sell you won’t make any money
I wouldn’t buy at this interest rate unless you got a screaming deal and could refinance later if rates go down but it’s a viable option.
https://www.cat.com/en_US/products/new/equipment/excavators/...
A lot of people complain that China has made manufacturing cheap but they forget that manufacturing tooling is itself manufactured. These days you can construct a small factory for less than it costs to commute to one.
I'd probably also upgrade the machine I use for ML.
But this is only if you want to start a machine shop.
But seriously, if there were some secret investment vehicle that wasn't so secret so as to actually be a secret, and that wasn't a scam half the time, people would know about it and talk about it as a real option. There's a reason that index funds in the stock market are the default advice for non-professional investors. If you're an active investor and have access to good deals, there are good deals out there, but not if you only have $35k. If you do have access to secret private equity deals, that would be investing into companies, but for the most part, ones that aren't start-ups.
Back to the question of how active you want to be with the money though. If you want to quit your day job and be actively doing something with the money, there's things you can buy and then maybe fix up, and then sell for a small profit. do that enough times and you've made a tiny bit of profit. At that price point, used cars that need work come to mind. How much you'd net isn't going to be all that large, and there's a large investment in tools and of time into it, but there's that. Getting a car and renting it out on Turo/Get around might be viable, or driving for Uber/Lyft but that's not a hands off money generator.
Any other solution is non-trivially more complex. Because you need to be able to slam your brakes and then punch the throttle.
Dedicated right-of-way means trains don’t operate in rush hour traffic and infrastructure costs dominate their economics. Dedicated right-of-way is also a good way to improve bus efficiency, but nobody wants to pay the political price for that infrastructure.
We must do something
This is something
Therefore we must do it
Sure, I have lots of dubious ideas…$35k will buy a nice synthesizer, but wealth is not needing to grow your money and being wealthy is the ability to wait for appropriate investments.
Given you're asking for something out of the box by definition you'll have to approach this from first principles and find some novel way to invest it which maximises risk-reward.
The most obvious place to start is to consider where you have unfair advantages. Small amounts of money are actually quite easy to invest with excess returns because you can exploit large misprices in small and inefficient markets.
A good example would be to look at your local Facebook marketplace, or better still garage / car boot sales. Find items which are pricey $5,000-$10,000, but you know could be sold for more... Knowledge of some kind of collectable could be useful here – vintage instruments, watches, jewellery, furniture, tools, etc.
If you're really ballsy you could actively seek out people with valuables who are ideally in desperate situations and offer them cash for their valuables. So for example, if you see a vintage car on someone's drive you could send them a letter with a low-ball cash offer. Most of the time they'll ignore it but do it 100 times and you'll likely get a hit. Buy for 20% under market price and sell for 5% more, and you're making around a 30% return per transaction. Do this a couple of times a year and you'll probably be able to replace your income. The issue is it's a lot of work and it doesn't scale well because you're exploiting very small local markets.
Be honest with people when selling, no slimy sales tactics, ask for referrals. Maybe every few cars find someone who is in desperate need and sell it at cost, ask for referrals. Buy some more tools, repeat. Maybe get a small shop with a lift. Maybe hire a certified tech for really tough problems, someone who values integrity and doing a job right, like a semi-retired person that knows a lot.
Grow that $35k into a viable, honest, local, AI-proof business.
Bonds are out. Commodities are out. Equity Securities, Index and ETFs are all out. All of these are overpriced, have unmanageable risk, and will lose people money; even the best traders out there will lose money on these.
The stock market is not an investment, its a casino where the PFOF house always wins. Price discovery failed when 25% of the exchange transactions started occurring in dark pools; its well over half now. Any investment in the stock market is burning money in effigy. Google Stop loss hunting, market manipulation (FRC/GME), PFOF, synthetic shares via options contracts, etc; to get an idea of how bad of an idea it is to do this.
Sectors that serve non-discretionary goods are usually more stable in down economies than other areas.
You’re not supposed to trade the index fund, you just buy and hold it confident in the knowledge that if it goes to zero you have a much bigger problem on your hands.
There are day traders, swing traders, options traders, and institutional traders; when it comes to the stock market. There are other ways as well.
> You're not supposed to trade the index fund, you just buy and hold it confident in the knowledge that if it goes to zero you have a much bigger problem on your hands.
If you are doing this, you are violating investment rules that date back to the 30s. Rule #1 is don't lose money, Rule #2 is Always Manage your Risk Rule #3 is Always invest with a sufficient margin for safety. Rule #4 is profit in volatility.
Today, Rule #1 can't be controlled, Rule #2 can't be managed, and Rule #3 has no margin for safety because of inherent changes to the structure of the exchange, the middlemen, the backstopped by the fed pricing, and the lack of price discovery all contribute to a sieve-like environment for those with more money than others.
If sufficient transactions happen in the dark (dark pools), there can be no price discovery, and this creates unmanageable volatility in the normal markets, and gives those people who trade in the dark the ability to manipulate and fix the market price indirectly.
Yield farming and stop loss hunting happen all the time. The T2 data subscriptions gives these traders access to know exactly how much they need to short to trigger these stop losses and just steal the difference. That's steal your money. Similar things happen in bonds using a YTM financial reporting loophole so interest rate risk isn't propagated into the market value of an ETF (just the underlying value).
The indexes are also required to rebalance and reinvest in companies who get listed, even when they have no intrinsic value. This is where your pensions and retirement are.
Most companies on the exchanges don't have intrinsic value because they are required to hold a debt burden greater than their assets to avoid hostile takeovers, which occur because banks print money through debt to fund it so long as the cashflow can meet certain circumstances over a 5 year term period.
AT&T and Tesla for example have very high debt to asset ratios, and this is true of most if not all equities. Tesla is a bit more convoluted in how they declare that debt because of EV/carbon credits and other regulatory shenanigans, you have to be able to analyze the securities appropriately.
For me that would be a tech or tech education business.
- other reserve assets like gold
- small businesses like a car wash or ice cream truck
- things you rent out: big tools, cars, parking lot
midzer•7mo ago