Some millennials blame their boomer parents for making them the Slackoisie, because of feeding, housing and clothing them during their formative years. Oh yeah, and ruining the environment, economy and mental stability of their generation. We’re sorry about that, by the way, but now that you’re almost grown ups, you might do better putting your efforts into fixing things rather than whining about them.
Anyway, as millennials are finally coming to the realization that they will need to do something with the money they saved while living in their parents’ basement, eating their parents food, complaining about how they are micro-aggressed and harassed by all things hurtful to their delicate psyche, they are embarking on a journey into the fabulous world of investing.
And, like most other things in their life, it’s too much work. It’s hard. It requires thought. Somebody needs to do it for them.
Well, aren’t you the lucky ones, as your need is about to be filled.
Remember how Goldman did all that research on Millennials and concluded that they suck and are terrible?
Turns out the annoying beliefs and habits of the next generation are actually already being used against them by some canny young entrepreneurs.
Note that the canny entrepreneurs are “young.” That’s right, young, just like you. Except they aren’t whining about the misery of their coddled lives, and have instead decided to take advantage of the huge opportunity of a generation of slackers. See? You don’t have to be a slackoisie even if you’re a millennial. Somebody got the memo. Just not you.
Business Insider gives up the problem:
A new generation of millennial investors is coming of age with money to save. But one problem for Wall Street is that many of these millennials still have scarring memories of the financial crisis that make them wary of investing.
“They don’t trust the stock market,” Goldman Sachs determined in a survey, which highlighted that a mere 18% of millennials thought the stock market was “the best way to save for the future.”
Of course, the alternatives range from buying first gen iWatches in the hope of making a killing on the secondary eBay market, or getting that mind-blowing half point interest on a savings account. Well, now that I see it in writing, it’s not nearly as enticing as it played out in my head.
Poor dears. Is there anything that can be done to change their “minds?”
Vest, a Y Combinator-backed startup, wants to change that by offering an easy way for investors to both see and lower risk on a particular stock.
To do this, Vest uses a type of financial product called an option, a contract that protects you from a certain amount of risk.Oh yeah, those notoriously risk averse options trades.
A “Y combinator start up”? How techy cool is that? Vest! Yeah, that’s the ticket. Just wrap up their pitch in a pretty, easy-to-use ribbon and see who’s clueless enough to bite.
Well, apparently by deeply understanding their target audience.
Millennials cannot stand losing, hate doing anything that they can’t pretend to have invented, and would really prefer not to be hassled with busywork.
Vest has them sooo covered…
“Basically you buy a contract that says if a stock goes below a certain level, the contract will make up for the losses — not you,” Vest cofounder Karan Sood told Business Insider. He describes it as taking out insurance on a particular stock.
Saying “Sit back while we do all the math”… CheckMATE!
Math is hard. Thinking is hard. Why do hard when you can do cool. It’s so much groovier. And, it’s gluten free!
Before you all start whining and explaining to me why it’s not your fault, why your parents (and me) are to blame for making your life too easy, giving you a false sense of entitlement and self-esteem, telling you how you are a winner, even if you’re the 32nd winner out of 33 in the race, I’m going to explain why this isn’t a post about how worthless you are, but an invitation not to be scammed simply because of your blind adoration of anything that takes responsibility for your own actions off your hairless, manicured, Axe-scented backs.
Aside: Sometimes, I feel like Garrett Morris doing news for the hard of hearing. If I don’t spell it out in small words, they just don’t get it.
Sales pitches are crafted by people who want your money. Everything in life requires thought, including distinguishing sale pitches for ideas that are worthwhile and ideas that suck. Sometimes, the ideas are scams to take advantage of the foolish and lazy. Sometimes, the ideas are just other dopes who don’t realize their ideas are doomed to fail.
No one, but no one, forces you to be the patsy of either a scam or a really crappy idea. You have the ability to perform due diligence, to learn what is real and what’s nonsensical, what will work and what won’t. You can pick and choose things that are in your best interest and things that are easy and promise unicorns and rainbows.
You don’t have to be a member of the Slackoisie. No one will force you. No one will insist that you close your eyes tight, stick your fingers in your ears, scream “lalalala” at the top of your lungs, and base decisions about your future upon your feelz rather than your thoughts.
But it requires work. It requires thought. It will force you to tolerate ambiguity, to make risk assessments, to understand how things work, to eschew things that are premised solely on shiny apps. You will make mistakes along the way, but you will admit the error, suck up the loss, and swear to yourself that you won’t make the same mistake again.
Your call. But stop bitching about the misery of life. Now that you’re becoming big boys and girls, accumulating some savings, getting read to put aside your prolonged adolescence to assume your place at the grown-up table, take responsibility for your choices. And make wise ones.
Not everything coming out of Y combinators is good. In fact, most are garbage, no matter how rosy the sales pitch. It’s up to you to figure out what you want your future to be. Stop handing it over to others. Stop blaming others for your choices. Be one of the few of your generation who will succeed because you’re willing to do the heavy lifting that the Slackoisie are not.
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Finally, a subject about which i know a great deal.
Let’s see: What this really is–that is, buying a stock and buying a put option for protection, is mathematically equivalent to simply buying a call option. The options market is an arbitrage market. That’s the only reason there is always someone willing to take the other side of your options trade.
From a pure investment point of view, one would be better off financially by just buying the call option. That’s because a retail investor has to put up the money for the stock as well as the put option. An options market maker does not. Their hedged positions are subject to much , much lower margin, and the prices of the options they sell reflects this.
The cost of the “protection” is a function of 6 factors, but I won’t go into that much detail.
As I read Vest’s site, they are charging a management fee of 1/2%. Sweet for them.
But, then , Vest would be no different from the tens of thousands of brokers who sell call options on their clients’ stock to produce income. The arbitrage equivalent of owning a stock and selling a call is to simply sell a naked put instead. Yes, really.
See, you didn’t have to pay an hourly fee for free advice.
I knew that. But I remember learning when they sent me a calendar with a pic of a naked put for each month. It wasn’t so great.
Scott,
I couldn’t agree more with you. I used to trade options for a living — and what this guy Sood is selling is quite possibly the simplest thing possible that one can do with options. There is nothing sophisticated whatsoever — spending an hour on Wikipedia to learn the background plus half an hour setting up an account with an online discount brokerage will allow you to do everything. And for much cheaper. But since unless it’s on a smartphone app, people can’t be bothered, apparently.
I hate my generation.
PDB
How many people are using that app and how old are they on average? That business insider article reads like cross between advertising and an attempt to get other investors then just Y Combinator. Tech journalism is practically PR for venture funds like Y Combinator all too often, so it would not be all that surprising.
Overwhelming majority of startups fails, including Y Combinator startups. Vest is likely not to exist three years away from now. Articles like this are part of standard lifecycle – when they are trying to transition from investors funded to customers funded.
Before you get all ashamed of all under 30, check whether this article is proof of all millennials being all kinds of lazy or rather tech business journalism being crap as usual. For the record, Y Combinator is not run by millennials although Vest likely is.
Despite your defense coming off as lame whining, you’re quite right that overwhelming majority of start-ups will fail and won’t be around in a few years. That, like most of the Slackoisie deflection responses, however, doesn’t confront the fact that some millennials think they can bank on their own generation’s laziness. After all, even if their attempt to capitalize on their own fails, what would they know about their own generation’s motivations?
Startups and more importantly their investors typically do not look to become self-sustained business. They look for “exit” most often being bought by larger company or get another round of fundings until infinity. The article is likely not an attempt to engage lazy rich millennial investing parents money. More likely, it is an attempt to engage older investors by repeating popular opinions about millennials and thus making this one look as potential success.
As for potential customers, financial scams based on simplification were not born with millennials. They are as old as financial markets themselves. Whether this particular startup fail or success says nothing about anything much less whole generation’s motivations. Sillicon Valley startups live in their own bubble and are hardly representation of anything out of Sillicon Valley anyway. Just like drug dealer living in San Francisco says nothing about whole generation (although he does not have contacts in business insider to give himself a bit more publicity).
Thank you for explaining the world of startups, because nobody knows more about it than someone who calls himself SE and comments on the internet. But I kinda know a little but about this too, and you are partially right, partially wrong, and partially it could be what you say or a hundred other things.
That said, you are still whining, and too myopic to see it. Focus on the issue and stop embarrassing yourself by trying to argue the illogic of the milliennials. You would do yourself (and others) a benefit by grasping the solution to the problems rather than conclusively proving what everyone else thinks about the milliennials by being the poster boy.
Is there a class in college dedicated to teaching Millennials to make the excuses for the laziness and entitlement that permeates their generation? Is it the same course that teaches that real men have no balls and are deeply sensitive to feelz?
Get a grip kid. Be the millennial who succeeds instead of one of the lazy entitled whiners.
Not one specific class, no. More like entire programs and departments.
Maybe I’m just extra cynical, but if I could come up with a way to make money off of the laziness and/or inability of Millennials to take responsibility I am pretty certain I would become fairly wealthy. It isn’t like the Millennials are becoming less worthless…
Yeah, go ahead and pile on my generation. We’re the most credentialed, least productive people in the history of the world. Whatever. Two hundred trillion dollars of unfunded government liabilities is a lot, and by the time we got our first letters from the Social Security administration, they were already talking about going bankrupt before we turned 65.
You know what it feels like? It’s like somebody stole our future and told us we could only get it back if we followed their script for our lives. And that script was a pipe dream. You can’t have an entire economy built on tax evasion and regulatory compliance. You can’t train your kids to think that real work is for losers and a corner office is the minimum requirement for human dignity, and then act all surprised when a third of them can’t find a job they’re willing to take.
So now we’re all idiots because somebody comes up with a goofy ploy to reassure investors. To the old people laughing at us, how’s that thing with that Nigerian prince working out for you?
I, for one, enjoy hearing that pitch every time. Leaves me in tears. If only you could package that in a youtube video and get people to pay to hear it. You would be RICH!!!
Yeah, I do that one pretty well. Alas, I’m neither particularly good looking nor more tech savvy than any of my peers.
You have other virtues. And I bet you can dance up a storm.
Actually, the only reason I comment here is that this is literally the only place in the entire internet where I haven’t been permanently banned, yet.
Hope springs eternal.
You didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on YOU!
Oh, sorry. Wrong speech.
Spoken like someone who has literally voted for a”smart growth” ban on construction of new multi-family housing in his city limits to selfishly protect his own property value, and then either whined about his kid’s inability to pay the rent or paid the rent for the kid with specific strings attached.
Uh oh. I smell a flame war brewing. Carry on.
Naw, he’s got nothing, and besides, I probably hit too close to the mark. Somewhere Mort is spluttering in wordless rage at his computer. Perhaps he’ll reply quickly and fail to see that I can just repeat my same comment, substituting a fresh example of the selfishness and stupidity of Xers, Boomers and their parents, forever, and by the time I run out, they’ll have enacted new ones.
Depending on whose reckoning you go by, I’m the oldest millennial, and I look on them as any good big brother would. I tell them they’re full of crap all the time, but I’ll punch back twice as hard if I see anyone else come at them with less than perfectly clean hands.
Not even remotely close. I suspect even Scott knows me well enough to know I’d never vote for greater restrictions on anything.
No, the answer is quite simple; I just think you’re kinda dumb.
Jeez, the two of you even suck at flaming. But you’re both good guys, so I hereby declare a truce. There will henceforth be peace in the valley, free drinks at happy hour and a new Star Wars movie to be named later.
And if there is any doubt as to my Solomonic wisdom, this should put it to rest. Next case.
Your treasure was law school and wine.
How fortunate that it ain’t mine.
In otio dulci
I’ll rest. And as you’ll see,
Iehova† loves slackers just fine.
†Proverbs 13:4
You crack me up with your millennial generation rants esteemed one.
You do know that Janet Yellen is bound to figure out that her only hope, before getting on with the party, is to convince Ben, Alan and Paul to do a risqué spread in Vanity Fair with her before the millennials start to figure out what the verious function keys located on them retirement calculator apps are for right?
The four of them sipping cups of herbata góralska while loungung in the garden in their bathrobes after brunch is going to be so tranquil as to be hypnotic.
Stop worrying so much esteemed one tranquil and hypnotic are good. It will all work itself out, one way or the other.
The millennials will figure it out. The hard lessons are a comming. The only question that remains to be answered is whether a soft and tranquil landing is more desirable than a hard but hypnotic one?
Either way it should be a pretty interesting party. Don’t forget to bring your tooth brush and tractor. Shouldn’t be to long now before necessity forces the millennials to figure out that the tactics in the street need to evolve and it would be a damn shame if you couldn’t keep up and missed out on all the fun.