[sterlingice]

Yeah, I think I probably used the wrong phrase (hyperinflation) - not 100% or 1000% inflation but like 10-30% seems so foreign when most of us have spent our entire adult lives with it at like 2%. Millennials and Gen Z will have spent so long with low wages, barely saving enough to get a house, only to see any saving eaten away by insane (by today's standards) interest rates. It was one thing when wages were like they were in the 60s or 70s adjusted for inflation and the whole "one household income could buy a house, cheap college, reasonable health care, etc". It's another with the overinflated prices of those things today.

I guess I'm doing what I can to help stay ahead of inflation. I keep throwing my money into my 401k and I just get to accept that there's no really secure way to save money (like, say, dropping money in a savings account) - I just have to accept that every few years, these assholes are going to crash the market (someone's going to make a boatload of cash doing it and it's not me) and I'm going to lose a bunch of my worth with it and hope it keeps bouncing back. I can have a nicely diversified portfolio (stocks, bonds, real estate) and it doesn't really matter that much.

Even with that, it's pretty clear that slow moving retirement money is being skimmed all the time so I'm not nearly getting the returns I should. Every month when my new shares are bought, quants pay for he order flow and front run institutional trades so my cost is more than it should have been. Of course my broker passes that money they make from selling the order flow onto me so it costs less for broker's fees, right? Hah! Most of the funds I have access to have a 0.5% or higher fee on them and they perform... not much different than index funds. Sure, there are outliers sometimes, but, by and large - I have to pay them 0.5% or more for them to just go "hur, dur - let's more money in FAANG" and basically ride the market. So, frankly, I've just shifted a lot of my money into index funds. Sure, I'm now going up and down exclusively with the market but at least I'm not paying the "privilege" of 0.5-1% to do so. And this doesn't even get into the myriad of fuckery around individual stocks where companies are targeted to be shorted out of business, hostile takeovers that leave them weak and eventually out of business, pump and dumps where fast moving money takes the worth out of the stock so the companies can't pay dividends, debt shenanigans, fraud, and everything else that comes with business.

But, in the end, it's just not a confidence inspiring situation at all. I know the markets are rigged against individual investors but it's a bit of a hostage situation as the system is set up for people to put their money there to be able to retire reasonably. Otherwise, you have to risk it all on something like crypto, start your own business and/or invest in real estate and all the extra time that entails, or just put in a bank and make no interest so you lose it to inflation.

SI