Not making a special effort to move out of home when I started university.

Allowing akrasia to prevent me from applying for a single graduate position at any of the many companies that were hiring Computer Science graduates in my final year of study.

Allowing akrasia to prevent me from joining any clubs or associations at university.

Not getting a minimum-wage job for work experience when I was still young enough that the minimum pay for me was lower, giving me a competitive advantage.

Every time I lie, I regret it a little bit, as I wonder whether the long term trajectory of my life would have been different had I been totally truthful instead of 'polishing' the truth.

My comment was very (perhaps overly) vehement. That said, the two main problems arising from increased maternal age that are most typically cited are:

• Infertility and
• Increased rate of birth disorders,

both of which become very significant after age 35.

By saving youthful genetic material, egg freezing solves these problems. However, in almost all online and in-person discussions I've participated in on the subject of maternal age, egg freezing isn't even brought up as an option and (this is more common in-person) people are either unaware that it exists or unaware that it is an established and reliable medical procedure rather than a fringe experimental one.

Of course, the processes of retrieving the eggs and implanting them can be unpleasant and stressful, but I really do think that this is on a different order of significance than "if you don't get pregnant before a certain age your body may become unable to conceive a healthy baby." There are also a host of other lifestyle concerns, such as the desire to have children early when one is more youthful and energetic. However, those tend to apply to men as well as women, and again are more a matter of preference rather than a universal and insurmountable thing on the level of infertility after a certain age. Egg freezing isn't a solution for everyone, sure, but when I see women planning their whole lives around having children before 30 I do get frustrated when they haven't even considered egg freezing.

An interesting subset is the bad decisions you made that you knew at the time were bad, not just in retrospect, but did it anyway.

I don't know. I am hesitant.

I can think of instances in which someone has started talking about an anecdote and the other person wasn't really responsive at all. (And, yeah, more than anything it was I who were telling the anecdote.) I guess it requires social savvy to pick which anecdote to tell.

I don't think engaging someone meaningfully (i.e. "hooking") in a conversation is as easy as making more statements as opposed to asking questions.

Conversation is more of an art than an exact science - 'tis true...

Anybody wants to call me so they can hear my totally irrelevant anecdote?

Are you claiming that there is literally no way of using this information to reliably extract money from the stock market? This surprises me.

I'll reuse my example: if you knew for certain that Facebook would be as huge as it was, what stocks, exactly, would you have invested in, pre-IPO, to capture gains from its growth? Remember, you don't know anything else, like that Google will go up from its IPO, you don't know anything about Apple being a huge success - all you know is that some social network will some day exist and will grow hugely. The best I can think of would be to sell any Murdoch stock you owned when you heard they were buying MySpace, but offhand I'm not sure that Murdoch didn't just stagnate rather than drop as MySpace increasingly turned out to be a writeoff. In the hypothetical that you didn't know the name of the company, you might've bought up a bunch of Google stock hoping that Orkut would be the winner, but while that would've been a decent investment (yay!) it would have had nothing to do with Orkut (awww!); illustrating the problem with highly illiquid markets in some areas...

Would you expect Vaniver's indexing to at least reliably turn a profit? Would you expect it to turn a large profit?

Depends on the specifics. Suppose the home robotic growth were concentrated in a single private company which exploded into the billions of annual revenue and took away the market share of all the others, forcing them to go bankrupt or merge or shrink. Home robotics will have increased - keikaku doori! - yet Vaniver's fund suffered huge losses or gone bankrupt (reindex when one of the robotics companies suffers share price collapses? Reindex into what, exactly? Another one of the doomed firms?). Then after the time period elapses and your special knowledge has become public knowledge, the robotics company goes public, and by EMH shares become a normal gamble where you could lose money as easily as make it.

(Is this an impossibly rare scenario? Well, it sounds a lot like Facebook, actually! They grew fast, roflstomped a bunch of other social networks, there was no way to invest in them or related businesses before the IPO, and post-IPO, I believe investors have done the opposite of profit.)

Certainty is irrelevant, even if you are certain you still have serious problems making any use of this knowledge; there is no convenient stock named RBTS you can just buy 500 shares of and let it appreciate.

Example: in retrospect, we know for certain that a great many people wanted computers, operating systems, social networks etc - but the history of computer / operating system / social networks are strewn with flaming rubble. Suppose you knew in 2000 that "in 2010, the founder of the most successful social network will be worth >$10b"; just how useful is this knowledge, really? Do you have the capital to hang out a VC shingle and throw multi-million-dollar investments at every social media thing that comes along until finally in 2010 you know for sure that Facebook was the winning ticket? I doubt it.

So, from a time savings perspective you would want a fund that specializes in home robotics. If one of those exists, though, that suggests that your knowledge isn't as unique as you'd like.

What I would probably do is find a news website for home robotics producers- a trade magazine is what used to fill this niche, and might still do so- to have a good idea of how relative companies are doing. This looks like a promising place to start, but that gets you as informed as similar investors, and you'd like to be more informed.

Then, try to keep a portfolio that's fairly balanced in all noteworthy home robotics companies. I'd probably go the 'buy and hold' route- try and keep your portfolio roughly apportioned relative to market share by buying up shares of companies underrepresented in your portfolio every month. This is the 'indexing' approach- basically, you trust that the home robotics market as a whole will go up, and that the market is better at predicting who will go up than you will.

If you're more confident in your ability to predict trends, you want to hold companies relative to their expected market share at the end of your trading period- to use an old example, the first strategy would have you holding lots of Blockbuster and some Netflix and the second strategy would have you holding lots of Netflix and some Blockbuster.

There is a giant obstacle here, though, which is that a large part of the stock price is determined by the financials of the company, which take a relatively large investment of time and energy to understand. If you're indexing, you basically offload this work to other investors; if you do it yourself, you can have a decent idea of what the companies are worth on the books, and then adjust by your estimate of how well they'll do in the near future.

At a guess, I'd say you should buy stock in companies working on home robotics.

How to Buy Stocks

First Option:

1. Acquire at least $3,000 in a checking account, and grab your account number and routing number. (It's written on the bottom of your checks.)
2. Go to Vanguard.com and open an account.
3. Buy into VTSMX, the total market index fund, or VFINX, the S&P 500 index fund. If you have trouble picking, flip a coin; they're very similar funds.

Second Option:

1. Go to Sharebuilder.com and open an account. They shouldn't require a significant starting balance, but might.
2. Sign up for automatic investing to take advantage of dollar cost averaging.
3. Buy VFINX or VTSMX.

Third option:

1. List out what you know about a company.
2. List out what the market knows about that company.
3. If your knowledge is better than the market's, then proceed. Otherwise (including if you don't know how much the market knows), go to option 1.
4. Go to your bank and read about their brokerage accounts. If the fees aren't excessive (check Sharebuilder and other banks and stuff like etrade), open a brokerage account, or go to option 2 and open a Sharebuilder account.
5. Transfer money to your brokerage account.
6. Plan out your trades: under what conditions will you buy a stock? (not "the price now is ok" but "if it's less than $60 I think it's worthwhile.") Under what conditions will you sell a stock? This is mostly a restatement of steps 1 and 2, but it's nice to have these numbers for every individual stock.
7. Execute trades; the interface should be straightforward.

The last option is very rarely a good idea. You cannot pick good stocks- good stocks do not exist. What exists are good companies and good opportunities. Companies that everyone knows are good- like Apple- are rarely good opportunities, but sometimes the company is so good that it's worth buying at a premium. I'm up 9x on Netflix over 4 years, even though I bought it at a fairly high price, because I recognized that it was going to reshape its industry and eat Blockbuster's lunch. I'm up 50% on BP because I was able to identify the point of maximum pessimism and buy then. That's 2 significant winners over the last 4-5 years of active investing. I'm in the black overall only because of how awesome Netflix was; there's a lot of stocks I bought that lost a bunch or merely tread water. I now take the opportunity approach seriously.

The moral of the story is that you should hunt opportunities where you have something the market lacks, and then bet big on those opportunities. If you don't have any more knowledge than the market, bet on the market as a whole in an index fund. I had more foresight than the market as a whole when it came to Netflix (but not to many other things I bought) and a sterner stomach than the market when it came to BP, but without that edge I'm not comfortable betting on anything but that the general trend of the market is up.

(You can still lose when you've got an edge- one of my friends called the tech bubble and shorted the market, but was early by a few months and lost quite a bit of money- but it's the best and most consistent way to win.)

We all enjoy defecting of a salesman, who doesn't cooperate holding a price high, but defect and lower it to have a gain.

The defection in economy has its implication in this mechanism of pricing.

The defecting is just as crucial!