/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.4595347]

My question up front: is it plausible to teach oneself finance and economics, read the news, etc., and just make money playing the stock market?

I'm studying Madame Bovary in college right now, and my prof plays this little number:

Here's what our culture teaches us: get a job, get married, have 2.5 children, a raised ranch, a golden retriever, and a goldfish, work for 40 years, die. That's a pretty shitty story, and one of the major reasons Flaubert wrote MB was to get us to question this "master narrative." Later, the modernists develop this idea through perspectivism (ex A Little Cloud--Chandler sees living in Paris as the answer to his troubles, Gallaher is back in Dublin, wishing for Chandler's life), and the Beats actually give it a whirl. If you wanted, you could hollow out a tree and live in the woods. You could join a rainforest tribe or a Shaolin Temple, but no one does, because they're afraid, afraid to leave.

Been thinking about this stuff a lot lately, but the same ideas have been circling around and around in my head and I haven't been able to reach much of a satisfactory conclusion. Hell, I could research how to survive in the wilderness and be done with this society of slavery--Eating Cheap by Benson features "the ridge runner," a man who lived off the land without money for 13 years. Imagine not having to work for the rest of your life. Of course, looking at it this way is very romantic: in reality, such a life will have lots of extreme discomfort and danger, much more so than the master narrative offers. It seems freedom is the price of comfortability.

And I know rejecting the master narrative doesn't have to be that extreme. Talked with another tenured prof of mine who's been teaching 20 years and he said if he could have redesigned his life he would have worked 5-10 years on Wall Street to become financially independent, and then take it from there. I like this idea very much, but I have some serious problems with it. I totally wasted the last 10 years of my life playing videogames. That's one eighth of my life, gone. I don't want that to happen again. 5 years is a long time. That's 250 weeks of getting up at 6am, traffic, 8-12 hours of heart-crippling stress, some tv, bed. Every day. I haven't really looked into whether it's even possible to become financially independent in such a short time, and the thought of the above doubled or tripled tastes rather sour. Not to mention throwing my youth away for the desk.

Like everyone, I'm a romantic too. For example, I have a single snapshot in my mind of a tribe dancing and singing around a fire, I yearn for that. Kind of a philosophical idolatry: mistaking the signs for what they signify. I don't think homelessness or Wall Street is for me. Really, here's my question: is it plausible to teach myself finance and economics, read the news, etc., and just make money playing the stock market?

How flawed is my thinking?

[Anonymous No.4595361]

Making a sufficient amount of money on the stock market (day trading) is far more difficult than you would imagine. You also need a lot of money to being with. Playing it on a small scale is not particularly difficult, but don't expect to get rich.

If you really want to make a lot of money, the only option I can think of is getting into finance. That means that you'll need very good people skills and enough ambition to push your way in, and then up the ladder. Are you up for it? It'll be extremely stressful - the cliche of rich bankers doing nothing but watching their bank balances go up is more propaganda than reality.

[Anonymous No.4595388]

>>4595361
I couldn't care less about being rich. If I can get food on my table, a tiny house, and not have to work 40 hours a week for the rest of my life then I'm good.

Do you know of any books or sources I can start looking into?

[Anonymous No.4595403]

>>4595388
About day trading? I'll be frank: I don't know. What I do know is that if you want to set up that kind of nest egg, you'd best get a job and do the day-trading on the side to start with. Most stock trading services charge per transaction.

[Anonymous No.4595411]

>>4595361
This.

Read the Prince by Machiavelli

Then read American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Then read the prince again and ask yourself how they are very similar to each other.

Then apply your findings in the field.

[Anonymous No.4595424]

Hotel room, Shanghai: 100RMB per night.
A flat: much lower.
Hostel bed: 40~50RMB per night.
A good Chinese restaurant meal: 30~50RMB
A tolerable Chinese restaurant meal: 15RMB
Homecooking: Pennies.
Beer: 10RMB for c. 600ml, much higher in bars, painfully high. Tolerable prices in low-end restaurants for some reason.
Metro: circa 3RMB each way.
Ferry across the river: about the same.

1 hour one-on-one English conversation practice in a cafe: 150-200RMB, maybe higher if you pick the right target.
Most of these people are under the impression that white people are inherently glamourous; Chinese mainlanders are basically rubes, uncultured but snobbish. You will likely find yourself invited out by your nervous, awkward, friendly yet cold-blooded student to show everyone how much face he has. These people have all the social grace and charisma of a dead goldfish. Urgh.
Definitely a higher hourly wage if you're employed by a school and not working freelance. Degree? Don't worry about it, it's a circus here. But chances are you'll be dealing with toddlers who can barely speak chinese. A really repulsive, prudish, busybody culture - this is a place to make money and nothing else. HK and Taiwan are more humane. On the plus side, if you can call it a plus, you'll likely be nothing more than eyecandy for the parents, and do little actual work.

I'll be heading back into the mainland to bleed these fuckers dry in about two weeks.

[Anonymous No.4595428]

>>4595347
>Here's what our culture teaches us: get a job, get married, have 2.5 children, a raised ranch, a golden retriever, and a goldfish, work for 40 years, die.
That really tipped my fedora.

[Anonymous No.4595429]

>>4595424
do you get laid often?

[Anonymous No.4595459]

>>4595429
Truth? No.
Excuses? Plenty. I was there for a month, moving from place to place frequently, and only in Shanghai about a week. Hard to ease myself in.
But the atmosphere bodes very well for white people. The local boys are very much boys; I'd wager that ABCs clean up here if they get the language down, simply because they have such a relaxed, breezy and confident attitude in comparison, and ABCs are not exactly renowned for these attributes.
In any case, white people get stares. Stares. This is how Ryan Gosling must feel, I think to myself, walking in public. Yes, man, it bodes very well.

[Anonymous No.4595469]

what does this have to do with /lit/.

"grand narrative" belongs into cultural history. are you a culture or why are you applying it to your personal life? stop turning philosophical concepts into shallow little self-help guides.

[Anonymous No.4595488]

Working 40 years sounds pretty bad but I'd like to get married and have 2.5 kids, a raised ranch, golden retriever, and a goldfish. None of that sounds bad in the slightest.

[Anonymous No.4595496]

Babbys first nonconformism? Read the Electric Koolaid Acid Test.

[Anonymous No.4595501]

omg 10/10 i'm rustled as fuck pls provide us with some further keks by going to /biz/ and reposting this thread there
srsly though 10/10 the more i read this the harder i get rused

[Anonymous No.4595508]

>>4595424
10/10 too this thread is the best i hope /biz/ invades all boards of 4chan regularly from now on

[Anonymous No.4595927]

>>4595424
this is great. thanks.

[Anonymous No.4595955]

No, you can't beat the market by 'reading news' (completely useless, every other market participant reads news too) or studying economy (if anything they will teach you that you can't reliably beat the market without insider info)

[Anonymous No.4596196]

>>4595955
my prof said he has a friend, a news junkie, who was able to forsee the emerging market of fracking, invested, made it big. clearly not that simple, but that's a story.

[Anonymous No.4596671]

Feign a mental disability and become a welfare mooch/ NEET then OP.

As long as you dont plan on having children and to a lesser extent a wife your goal is very achiveable

[Anonymous No.4596976]

>>4596671
great plan