Off the top of my head:
Bitcoin was around $1k in 2017 and, after jumping up to about $20k, was back at around $4k in 2018. It's recently been over $100k, and fairly reliably been over $40k for much of the time in-between.
Gamestop's share price was below $10, stock split-adjusted, for many years, bottoming at $1 ($4 unadjusted). It infamously rocketed to over $100 ($400) in January 2021, with several similar, seemingly-random bursts of upward volatility since. Even now, depending on your entry, buyers from before the high would have seen somewhere between 200% and 2000% returns. There are a number of other so-called "meme" stocks which briefly performed similarly, though most have not retained even a fraction of their increase.
Both could have been used to hit $2m or more with a single set of buy-sell transactions. That's not considering leveraged trading like options. Keith Gill infamously turned $50k (briefly) into a billion dollars (and is likely, more durably, a centimillionaire).
In short: crypto and options, buying early and holding long. 2017 was actually almost the perfect time to jump in. Someone who was looking in the right direction could easily have struck oil, as you say. (Let's not even talk about the guys who made $660m off the negative oil price incident in 2020.) ZIRP and lax oversight of the securities market structure make odd things happen.
Retroactive analysis like this is almost worthless because these were incredibly risky investments in the moment and would have required a prolonged commitment to them that most didn't have and/or couldn't maintain. Considering the original claim here was that getting these returns wasn't possible without already being wealthy, you might as well ask why OP didn't get a loan to make these investments if they were such a sure thing.
GP asked how it could be possible, this is how. GGP suggested that he'd made such an investment, just at too low a principle amount to see such huge returns. If so, it doesn't matter that the investment was risky; the Sith lord in question made the investment in 2017, and would be looking at crazy returns today if he'd had $100k to put into it, rather than whatever sum he actually did.
As to
>why OP didn't get a loan to make these investments if they were such a sure thing.
You could ask him. Perhaps he didn't qualify. There are people who did this; depending on entry timing, you would certainly have seen enough returned to at least cover interest payments.
The article talks about Saquon’s bitcoin investments and investments in startups. The same argument can be made there as well.
Yes, I have made the same argument elsewhere in this thread saying there is little reason to believe Saquon's record of successful investing is due to anything but luck (and access due to his celebrity)[1], but at the very least he does have a track record of actually making those investments while your comment was purely a retroactive hypothetical.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45131713
Fair point.
But I will say that Saquon has access to deal flow that most of us will never have access to (they mentioned Anthropic and Stripe, for example).
And that was my original point.
> If I had access to private markets like startups, it would be worth even more.
If you (a retail investor) had access to private markets, they wouldn’t be private markets, they’d be public markets.
The chances of being Keith Gill are probably the same as winning the lottery, and I would bet most retail actually lost money in the meme stock craze.
None of those are reproducible investment strategies, they’re “dumb money” gambles.
If someone did turn $100k into $2m using crypto and options, the smartest thing they could do is to cash out and go home, as they will never get more lucky than that.
[not financial advice]
>If someone did turn $100k into $2m using crypto and options, the smartest thing they could do is to cash out and go home, as they will never get more lucky than that.
And the true problem here is that this would be true if they turned $100k into $200k, $100k into $300k, $100k, into $400k... That is always the problem with these crypto discussions, it's all hypothetical, but anyone in this actual situation would have felt an incredible pressure to start taking their profit before they got to the most astronomical returns that are often cited.
As for your last statement, I don't disagree.
As for your first two, none of that matters, because all you asked for was a publicly-accessible way to turn $100k in 2017 into $2.5m today, in response to the claim that GP could have done it. A crypto or a stock YOLO is how. From what he said, he probably did purchase Bitcoin or something else that went up massively in value, but not enough of it to see a large absolute return. I myself was aware of Bitcoin just after its creation, and had a small amount to invest, but instead put most into a blue chip stock on advice from family. Forget $100k, I could have been a millionaire off of $1k. And I can tell you that I probably would have made that wager if I'd had $10k to invest at the time, let alone $100k. I wouldn't have been expecting such ridiculous returns, very few were. However, the common investment wisdom of relying on "time in the market" would have seen at least a portion of the initial investment through to today.
But that's a little beside the GP's original point, which was that generational wealth made those kinds of (highly speculative) investments tenable. I don't see the point in arguing that they don't when they clearly do. You're on a website founded by a company that exists specifically to invest in such a manner. The entire point is to find the "unicorn".
Fair point, I can’t argue with that.
But I will say, finding the unicorn is always a trivial exercise in hindsight and it’s a more difficult exercise to pick tomorrow’s winner. Everyone has a story of, “if I had just invested in Amazon in 2000, I’d be rich.”
If anybody has the next unicorn picks they want to share, I’m open to ideas :)