alt Hacker NewsI feel this article is saying people from UK/US/etc. want to maximize upside, and people from DACH (Germany etc.) want to minimize downside.
I was a bit shocked when I talked to an Austrian colleague once and they told me they wanted to get into investing, but losing any money at any time was completely unacceptable. They had looked at investing in S&P 500 ETFs etc., but felt they must have misunderstood something, as they didn't understand why anyone would invest in anything that might go down, even temporarily.
So the thesis of the article definitely feels plausible to me.
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And that's why real estate market is so bad in DE/AT. Folks are terrified of investing in stock market, even through ETFs.
So it's either put everything in a Sparkonto, where it gets eaten by inflation or buy housing.
Real estate, gold, crypto, in that order. That's where people from DACH invest, also valid for rest of the Europe. Mediterranean people additionally invest in lottery tickets. I wouldn't exaggerate saying people are keeping their gold bars in their otherwise empty investment apartments.
European banks play very negative role because they aggressively upsell their investment funds and schemes so for many people stock exchange means investment fund with management fee which oftentimes losses yet the growth, if happens, never catches up with the market growth.
I'm glad this one interaction helped you understand an entire people. That's efficient.
If you invested in the S&P 500 in 1968, you'd be waiting until 1992 before you saw any return on that investment after accounting for inflation, and the inflation adjusted S&P 500 was on a net-losing streak for the whole period from 1968 to 1982 before it started going up again.
People believe the line will always go up, and maybe it will, but it's still at least possible for it to be on a quite painfully downward trend for over 12 years at a time.
I'd argue it's also not at all irrational to worry that we may be on the precipice of a similar situation right now, or perhaps even on the precipice of the situation at the end of the 1920s, where it would have taken more than 35 years for the S&P 500 to recover from its previous highs.
Your colleague is probably more risk-adverse than is rational (and I would say more risk-averse than most Austrians or Germans), but I would also argue that a lot of people blindly throwing all their retirement money at the S&P 500 might not realize just how much risk they are exposing themselves to.
https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat...