Trying desperately to keep this thread - even over the weekend - somewhat on topic, rather than GREENWASHING something close to half of what's posted. Remember that just about all of my Mod Squad has retired so that leaves, for now, just your favorite Hulk to throw his weight around.....
About MARGIN -
Family story here. Both my parents spent their childhoods in the Roaring 20s and they, and their own parents, lived indeed what many think of as The Good Life.
For both these sides, the Great Crash of '29 was effectively fatal to all that lifestyle, and literally fatal to one of my grandfathers. The proximal culprit? Investment margin.
Fast forward to the 1960s and, as I have related before, my father was one of the few "names" on the Buy Side (ie, investors rather than brokers) that everyone on Wall St. knew, along with John Templeton, Edward Johnson II, Jon Lovelace and one or two others. But even he - with the Great Depression seared in his memory - twice was wiped out before I finished my childhood. Why? Investment margin. That he was able three times to pick himself back up required an enormity of will that few in these times can comprehend, let alone emulate. Fortunately for him, after that second time he learned his lesson.
As for me, I benefited from the prior generations' travails and, in my first career as an investor never extended myself beyond what I knew I easily could cover. After releasing to others what I had acquired, shunning all that wealth and for a quarter-century living the life of a scratch-bottom backwoods Alaskan, in this my second investor career I certainly have no taste ever for margin. Of the firms I worked for, though? One was owned and run by some for whom margin was a natural part of their investment behavior, and when the Crash of 1987 occurred, they were blindsided and, falling from their lofty perches as being quite close to Masters of The Universe - as the Wall St. biggies were called then - they hobbled along in the nether regions for too many years without ever being able again to grasp the brass ring, and 2008 finished them off.
THIS FORUM - this thread - is self-selecting in that so many of us have joined one of the great capital-creating stories of history - some earlier, some later - and just by virtue of us, collectively, so wonderfully sitting in that position it is possible to fall into the trap of believing that I - you...he...she...we are somehow smart enough and agile enough and clever enough to be able ever to elude margin's fatal jaws.
That it may be so. History - MY history, my immediate family's history - says otherwise. I would counsel all to take the last four letters of the prior sentence and hold onto them, and eschew margin, as fiercely as you hold on to TSLA.