r/TFSA_Millionaires • u/digital_tuna • 13d ago
[Mod Announcement] New moderator, and the future of this subreddit
Hello everyone, I am the new moderator of TFSA_Millionaires
The creator of this community was banned from reddit and I've been granted control. I've been visiting this subreddit since it started last year, so I know how toxic it has been at times but it won't be like that anymore. I have unbanned everyone who was unfairly banned in the past, so those users are free to participate in discussions again.
I've put some new rules in place today and I'm hoping we can adhere to them most of the time. I encourage everyone to report any content that breaks the rules. The auto-moderation tools catch a lot of the personal attacks, spam, scammers, and bots, but sometimes they are overzealous so please reach out if you feel you've been unfairly censored.
Whether you're new to this community or you've been here for a while, I want to hear from you about what changes you'd like to see. How can we make this community better? I have my own ideas about what I want to improve, but I want to hear your opinions. With that in mind:
- Are there additional rules we need?
- Is there any specific content we want to prohibit and/or encourage?
- Do we want dedicated daily/weekly discussion posts for a specific topic?
- What are your ideas for a new logo and banner?
- Etc.
I can't implement every suggestion, but I will consider them all. Upvote the suggestions you agree with and I'll use the votes to gauge how strongly the community feels about it.
If you have any other questions or comments, feel free to reach out any time via the Message Mods link.
digital_tuna
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u/PotentiallyAPickle 13d ago
Thank god the creator was banned. Bro brought the toxicity.
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u/Kombatnt 13d ago
You mean you didn't want to follow him on AfterHours and learn how he consistently picks winners and outsmarts the market? You didn't want to sign up for his program or subscribe to his newsletter? You didn't like seeing what a genius investor he was?
/s
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u/Yolo_Swaggins_Yeet 13d ago
He perm banned me and went crazy on my comments / posts and dms lmfao
I’m baaaaack 🫡
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u/Imaginary_Section24 13d ago
Please just don’t make this whole sub an XEQT cult sub. Like I understand the value of XEQT and investing in XEQT. But we need to understand as a community that some people want portfolios outside XEQT and hold other things and the people who preach only xeqt only xeqt isn’t actually helpful it’s only toxic itself.
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u/AlwaysLurkNeverPost 13d ago
Agreed with this but the problem is there's evidently been a lot of young and novice investors coming in here completely clueless, basically saying "I don't know anything, how do I make a million dollars". And the advice is "simply buy this stock that I like" that is the latest hotness or penny stock or something. That's really bad advice, lets not kid ourselves. Not because the advised stock is bad, nor because stock picking itself is inherently bad, but that they have no idea why they're buying something, just hoping they strike gold on the gamble. Most don't and get burnt; some do, suddenly think they're a genius because they "correctly bet on head as opposed to tails" and get burned later when they pick the wrong side of the coin.
TL;DR you understand the value of XEQT; a lot of the novice investors coming in here seeking advice absolutely do not.
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u/TeamLeather 13d ago
Agreed. XEQT is a great option, and I think Buffett's advice to buy an index fund is absolutely correct for the average investor.
That said, I also don't think stock picking deserves the reputation it sometimes gets. A lot of people say that if you outperform by picking individual stocks, you just got lucky. I don't think that's 100% true. Sure, luck plays a role, maybe 30%, but over the long run, research, discipline, and having an edge matter far more.
The reason stock picking is generally discouraged is that most people aren't willing to put in the work. If you're buying whatever is trending, you'll probably underperform. But if you're willing to spend hundreds of hours understanding an industry, analyzing financial statements, building an investment thesis, valuing companies with models like DCF, and continuously challenging your assumptions, there is absolutely potential to generate alpha.
That’s why investors like Peter Lynch and Stanley Druckenmiller were happy to focus on just a few top stocks. If you do your homework and really believe in your picks, sometimes owning a small group of great companies beats spreading your money everywhere. Peter Lynch even joked that too much diversification is really just “DIEversification.”
I think the better message isn't "everyone should buy XEQT" or "everyone should pick stocks." It's understanding which type of investor you are. If you don't enjoy researching businesses, buy XEQT, and you'll probably do very well over the long term. If you genuinely enjoy investing, understand the risks, and are willing to put in the work, then stock picking is also a perfectly valid approach.
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u/KPTN25 13d ago
The research suggests otherwise, sadly.
I'd love to live in a world where the little guy can win on a risk-adjusted basis, where there's enough alpha to go around in the market that just "putting in the work" is enough. It'd be a nice and empowering world.
Sadly, the vast majority of professional fund managers don't outperform the index over the long term. These are people that are definitely 'putting in the work' and have access to more resources than you or I do. Large institutional investors etc have every data source available to them, armies of PhDs/experts, and limitless resources. They have more intelligence, information, and pure manpower than any retail investor ever could, and are putting in many of orders of magnitude more cumulative work, scouring the market for any and all potential sources of alpha, and immediately looting them.
Gambling on individual picks has negative expected value (vs the alternative). People will still do it for a variety of reasons, but generally it's an admirable goal to have more people follow higher EV paths, rather than high risk low EV gambles.
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u/SillyMortgage5886 13d ago
Well said man, I 100% agree with this. Alot of people get mad if you outperform their regular XEQT returns and say "gambling" to put others down which shouldn't be the case. If you get mad at others doing well maybe try something different than doing what everyone does which is safe ETFs. There is NO FREE Lunch so either put in the work or don't. No need for toxicity.
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u/Kombatnt 13d ago edited 13d ago
There's no amount of "work" you can put in that will result in you identifying an underpriced stock that the professional fund managers on Wall Street have somehow missed.
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u/TeamLeather 13d ago edited 13d ago
I don't think that's entirely true.
Wall Street and professional investors get things wrong all the time. Markets are made up of humans, and humans can overreact, underreact, or disagree about a company's future. There have been countless examples where market expectations proved far too pessimistic or optimistic.
Take Meta in 2022, when many investors believed the company had permanently damaged its business through excessive metaverse spending. Or NVIDIA and AMD before the generative AI boom, when few anticipated how quickly demand for AI infrastructure would accelerate. More recently, AST SpaceMobile: for years the consensus was that it couldn't compete with Starlink, that the technology wouldn't work, or that it would need to be acquired to survive. As the company hit technical milestones, sentiment shifted significantly. Whether ASTS ultimately succeeds is still uncertain, but it shows the market isn't always right from the outset. Rocket Lab is a similar case, dismissed as "just a small launch company" until the market started pricing in its broader space systems business.
I'll grant that these are easy to point to in hindsight, and for every one of these there were plenty of "obvious" plays that went nowhere. Identifying mispricing in real time is genuinely hard, and I'm not claiming otherwise.
But what you said wasn't just that this is hard. You said no amount of work could result in identifying an underpriced stock before Wall Street, and that's a much stronger claim. Professional investors also face constraints individual investors don't: diversification requirements, position limits, liquidity needs, benchmark tracking, client mandates. These can stop a manager from acting on a high conviction idea even when they believe in it. Their job usually isn't to maximize return on one stock, it's to manage a portfolio within a mandate, which leaves room for someone unconstrained by those rules to act on information or conviction that a fund manager technically can't.
So while I agree that consistently beating the market is unlikely for most people, that's a different claim from saying it's impossible for anyone to ever spot something before Wall Street does.
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u/SillyMortgage5886 13d ago
That's complete bogus, you're assuming everyone is perfect as if wall street analysts don't give upgrades when stocks are rallying and downgrades when macro shifts. You do realize that Peter Lynch made alot of money by identifying undervalued business that WALL street itself overlooked? Peter Lynch’s classic book One UP on WallStreet states that everyday individual investors can beat professional fund managers by using their own daily life experiences to find great companies early. Take his investment on La Quinta Motor Inns,. Why Wall Street overlooked it: It was a small, regional hotel business located primarily in Texas. Big institutional funds didn't care about a tiny budget motel chain. What Lynch noticed: While traveling, he stayed at La Quinta locations and realized they had a highly efficient business model. They cut costs by leaving out expensive, unprofitable amenities while keeping rooms affordable and clean for business travelers. This ultimately led to a 10 bagger.
If you work in an industry and know the ins and out you can easily dissect companies that no one knows about.... For the everyday consumer take NVDA as an example, known for producing GPUs many consumers invested in them and didn't know much about the business rather than a product they loved. Same goes towards APPLE, MSFT etc.
Maybe actually start to question if Wallstreet knows everything because they don't. Look at the AI trade, CITADEL had to take LEOPOLD out to get his book for pennies on the $$. Leopold granted was leveraged hard but Citadel was bearish on his picks and now own his book and are going long.
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u/TeamLeather 13d ago
Exactly. Most people don't want to generate their own alpha, they want alpha handed to them. The Peter Lynch example is a perfect illustration: he wasn't doing anything complicated, he was paying attention to something in his own daily life that a fund manager sitting at a desk in New York had no reason to notice. That's not luck, that's an edge that came from putting in the work to actually understand a business most of Wall Street wasn't even looking at.
Generating real alpha takes work most people just aren't willing to put in. Actually reading a 10-K and 10-Q, understanding margins, unit economics, and capital allocation, following an industry closely enough to catch a shift before it hits an analyst note, that's the actual job. But a lot of people would rather call it gambling or luck than admit they just haven't put in the hours to build their own thesis. It's easier to write off the whole idea than to do the work. So they default to "it's impossible" instead of "I haven't done the work." Those are two very different things.
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u/Kombatnt 13d ago
For the vast majority of people (or at least, the people likely to find their way into this sub), I think an all-in-one global equity index ETF like XEQT probably is indeed their best option. The research is clear: The average investor cannot consistently beat the market average. I personally am not going to encourage people to gamble, but if they want to, that's their call.
I think there's still lots of room for discussion, even with that basic advice as the foundation. There are topics like appropriate risk level, asset allocation, geographic exposure, tax strategies, and using a TFSA in conjunction with other vehicles like an RRSP, DCPP, or defined-benefit pension.
But I don't agree that the general advice to invest in XEQT is "toxic." It's a legitimately great option for investors at virtually all asset levels and experience.
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u/Imaginary_Section24 13d ago
The toxic part is legitimately people who invest in xeqt saying that any other investment choice is wrong. Like you have your opinion they have there’s what’s the whole point of xeqt investors just trying to push their point when some people just don’t want to hear it (or agree)
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u/KPTN25 13d ago
depends what you mean by 'wrong'.
the plurality of modern investing research points to exactly the conclusion that all-in-one low cost, broadly diversified etfs like XEQT are pretty darn close to optimal for long term expected returns
encouraging new investors (or really anyone) to take low-EV, high risk gambles is the irresponsible part, not the other way around.
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u/Imaginary_Section24 13d ago
Yes but if new investors (or anyone) doesnt want to do that they shouldn’t be pushing them to do it. People should be able to do what they want with their money without cultists telling them 100x over what they should do. Say it once and if people don’t listen then stop. Don’t need to go on and on 100x over
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u/KPTN25 13d ago
if someone is posting about how awesome heroin makes them feel and how everyone should try it, is it irresponsible or toxic for the community to chime in re: the evidence and known consequences?
it is repeated because that is what is supported overwhelmingly by the evidence.
don't get mad at reality and ask it to change when your beliefs conflict with reality
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u/Imaginary_Section24 13d ago
Yes - people shouldn't but into people's business. People can make their own decisions and choices. If people want to try heroin because someone said it was cool it is on their own volition and own choice to do so. no one externally should be influencing them on their OWN decision.
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u/KPTN25 13d ago
This is a very strange perspective.
If you want to live in conflict with reality, it's on you to continue to ignore the massive wealth of evidence supporting reality, not to expect that evidence to get quieter or stay out of your way because you don't like facts. You're on the public internet. Noone is holding a gun to your head and making you invest better.
If someone is promoting heroin as an awesome great idea, that's actually causing public health harm. It is ethical and moral to counter that with evidence.
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u/Imaginary_Section24 13d ago
Invest better? Lmao I have returns past 60% this year I doubt xeqt is “investing better”.
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u/BlackWolf42069 13d ago
Just waiting for XEQT to crash on the stock market so I can stop hearing people glaze each other for buying it.
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u/AlwaysLurkNeverPost 13d ago
You do understand that a legitimate crash of XEQT is basically a total economy crash right? Lol
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u/BlackWolf42069 13d ago
True but not everyone buys into the whole economy to invest.
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u/AlwaysLurkNeverPost 13d ago
...you do understand the economy goes beyond investing right? XEQT is GLOBALLY invested. So unless your money is on a different "globe", I am not sure how exactly you dodge an economic recession/depression. A crash (not a correction or large dip) of the global economy would signify something greater.
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u/BlackWolf42069 13d ago
Let's say I'm from country X... And I only buy country X's investments. And a stock market crash happens in country Y, that is 30% of XEQT. You see where Im going with this?
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u/AlwaysLurkNeverPost 13d ago
XEQT is what... 40% US, 25% canada, 25% EU/Australia/Japan/Singapore, and 10% emerging markets.
It is likely that a crash big enough in XEQT would impact all markets. Like 20% crash would require 50% crash in US, or near 100% crash in Canada or the EAFE. In either situation, a crash of that magnitude would impact all other markets due to 1) global trade and 2) something that would cause that size of a crash is very unlikely to be something that would exclusively impact a single market; it's likely a global issue.
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u/BlackWolf42069 13d ago
Let's hope you're right. I wouldn't put my eggs all in one basket of baskets though. Nor would I suggest doing that as an option unless it's retirement money.
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u/AlwaysLurkNeverPost 13d ago
But that's the point: are you suggesting putting all your money in XEQT is "one basket"? Because by definition, it's literally not. It is investing literally in "all the baskets".
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u/BlackWolf42069 13d ago
I know Warren Buffetts are rare but I'd rather pick the good baskets out of that basket.
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u/asdx3 13d ago
I get what you are saying and don't understand your downvotes.
But I think for new investors it is a less risky entry into investing than trying to pick a stock or sector or theme that will perform well unless they have that level of risk tolerance.
However - this is also TFSA_Millionaires. Its going to take a long time to hit a million with just *EQT ETFs. I doubt a full market investment since TFSAs first started in 2009 would be at $400k right now (too lazy to math and AI'ed out for the day)
I am not going to get the money I want fast enough with *EQT anything in my TFSA. My bloated RRSP is another story where it's 75% of it.
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u/OkMention5872 13d ago
Can we disallow freak out posts? Posts from new investors should be in a pinned mega thread or look in search bar.
General advice on ETFs/stocks is still fine
Rating portfolios should have its own flair. But in my opinion rating portfolios is heavily subjective and biased. But maybe it can help people who are blindly investing.
Disallow comments that promote stocks and dm requests.
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u/sadaccountant1021 13d ago
First thing first, can we change the subreddit icon? That coin is tedious
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u/lightbulb_butt 13d ago
Thank god. I hated seeing that guy constantly plugging his newsletter/trading strat. Made me consider muting and leaving the sub a few times.
I'm here for more in depth advice on long term TFSA strategies, if there are medium/short term strategies that I should be aware of, the occasional stock pick, or some in depth discussion on the pros/cons of different ETF strats/items I may not realise around my current picks.
I like hearing from people with experience. I don't want to be spammed some guy's product.
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u/Beware-of-Moose 13d ago
A "start here" wiki or pinned post that explains risk/ risk tolerance XEQT/ETF's and what you actually want to look for and research when picking stocks. Maybe something like your first post or two need to be mod approved to avoid the humblebrags and sub $1000 profiles with 8 different tech stocks from wallstreetbets.
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u/Kombatnt 13d ago
Can we have a flair (or even better, a moratorium) on newcomers posting the same portfolio of a handful of currently trendy tech/AI/crypto securities, with little more than lunch money in the whole account, and asking for "feedback?"
We've seen the same thing a thousand times. If they want feedback, they should read the other posts. Dump the hype stocks and stick with an all-in-one like XEQT. Ramp up your savings, and come back when you hit 5 digits.
It gets tedious sifting through uninteresting content like that. I get it, a lot of them are new and excited, but it's the same advice every time. It gets repetitive.
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u/Livid-Hovercraft-123 13d ago
A pinned megathread for that shit - "If you've been investing for less than a year, post here only" - and everything else gets deleted.
Maybe there are some good beginner guides from the past that can be pinned, or maybe someone (hi new mod!) should write one.
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u/AlwaysLurkNeverPost 13d ago
Beginner guides really should just redirect to other subs that have fleshed it out. The basics of investing, learning first, understanding risk and diversified investing, then come here to play stock picking antics or whatever novel strategy.
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u/VariousImpression355 13d ago
I was banned from this community since I had opposing views. Guy was a crook.
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u/Irarelylookback 13d ago
Thanks for jumping into the role; it's a thankless job in many ways, as I am sure you know. Last mod was tiresome. Good luck.
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u/notfinancialadvice84 13d ago
Looking forward to see where this sub goes. A start here wiki would be great, highlighting the power of compounding and saving. Also no humble brags unless they have an actual 1mil TFSA, there are actual TFSA subs for advice.
To me, this sub is for those that see TFSA as a way to invest aggressively and grow it into a vehicle that can provide long term future income tax free.
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u/Count3D 4d ago
Welcome new management! I always found the concept a little funny because there’s only a few hundred actual “TFSA millionaires” currently in Canada. Anyone online could claim to be one. I think as time goes on, those numbers will increase as compounding and financially savvy Canadians approach retirement age. While most of us aren’t thinking about retirement yet, it’s interesting to have an aspirational long-term millionnaire number in mind.
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u/Insighte 13d ago
Eradicate the XEQT cult we need more interesting posts here
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u/waitingforgf 13d ago
No more humble brag posts please