Hi, Eric from Time to Retire here. I bought £3
,000 worth of NASDAQ three times short this morning.
Now, if you watch the financial press, you won't
have missed that flurry of news around the NASDAQ
and the S &P 500 teetering on the brink of collapse.
Now, this news has been mainly driven by the
circular trading with Nvidia buying into OpenAI,
who then returned the favor by buying Nvidia
chips. Not a great look, you'll admit. But will
this be enough to ruffle the feathers of the
tech markets? I'm not so sure. But if you want
to follow along, I'm going to sell my investments
of £3 ,000 in 14 days on the 30th of October.
And what I want to do is every day I'm going
to post a video here with an update on how my
£3 ,000 investment's getting on and what's happening
in the US markets to drive any changes. Now,
the NASDAQ three times short is a bit of a gamble.
and as a youtuber i do get paid to produce silly
content sometimes and as part of that i can afford
to do silly things occasionally now if this was
just my own investing i would not be doing something
like this so please see this for what it is which
is entertainment and definitely not any kind
of financial advice now in case you don't know
what the nasdaq 3x short is then I'll explain
in the next few videos. But for now, all you
need to know is that if the NASDAQ goes up by
10 % in the next two weeks, I'll lose about £1
,000. See you tomorrow. Hey guys, Eric from Time
To Retire here. Yesterday, I put £3 ,000 into
the NASDAQ three times short. And in 24 hours,
I've made 5 .6 % on my investments. Just luck,
you say? How very dare you. It's down to precision
timing, expert knowledge, and an instinct for
market changes. No, yeah, you're right. It's
just pure luck. Probably sometime later today
or Monday morning, things are going to flip and
I'll probably be worse off than when I started.
So this is day two of 14, because in 14 days,
I'm going to cash in my investment to see how
my gamble went. Now, I can tell you, I'm not
hopeful really. I mean, here's the performance
of the index I've invested in over the past six
months. Grim, isn't it? There are even warnings
on the investment page that holding this index
for anything other than a day or two is never
a good idea. So why am I doing it? Well, because
I make YouTube content and I thought it'd be
interesting. Now, I'm not recommending this and
I'm not trying to give any financial advice here.
So, I would absolutely love to cash in my £142
.28 profit now and use it to buy lots of tapas
next week when Tracy and I have a few days in
Spain. But, in the interest of my YouTube channel,
I'm going to leave it exactly where it is until
the 30th of October. So I have one question for
you. I put £3 ,000 in yesterday. Today I've got
£3 ,140. In the comments below, I'd love it if
you would put in your best guess of how much
I will have on the 30th of October. Now, shorting
or inverse position means the investment is designed
to profit when the underlying asset or index
goes down in value. So, for example. if the underlying
index falls by one percent then a standard inverse
product would aim to gain one percent now the
3x or the triple leverage part means that the
fund attempts to magnify the daily returns by
a factor of three so an example here would be
that if the underlying index falls by one percent
the 3x your product aims to gain three percent
or three times the inverse return and of course
vice versa on that as well so my short position
is not just a gamble it's actually a gamble on
steroids i mean markets are closed over the weekend
so i'm not gonna be able to let you know how
i get on tomorrow or sunday but i will be back
on monday and i'll let you know how i'm getting
on then thanks for watching see you soon okay
i'm an idiot i've lost over 10 % of my investments
in 24 hours of trading. Now, Friday morning,
my investment was at 5 .6 % up, and now as the
markets open on Monday morning, I'm 4 .7 % down.
Now, what did I do wrong? All the advice I hear
is to invest in market indices. i invested in
the nasdaq an index of us companies well with
a tilt towards tech stops but it's still an index
well two mistakes jump out immediately firstly
i bought the inverse of the market so as the
market goes up my investment goes down secondly
i bought a product that uses derivatives to apply
a three times multiplier to my investment so
when it does go down it goes down three times
faster Now, of course, the inverse would be true
if the NASDAQ. My investment will go up by three
times the amount. The only problem with that
is that the NASDAQ has recently been on one of
the best performance runs ever. So my little
experiment is now in day five of 14 and over
a third of the way through. Now, the experiment
is to invest £3 ,000 in an attempt to. time the
market for a crash in the ai stocks hey that's
a really good idea and that's being widely predicted
some even give the 29th of october as the day
and i finish on the 30th now time in the market
though is really a bad idea nobody can predict
a market rise or a market fall over a 14 -day
period now give me a 14 -year period I can give
you the right direction 99 .9 % of the time.
The market will go up in the next 14 years. And
I'll take a bet from anybody on here on that.
14 days though, that's a coin flip. Let's see
how I get on tomorrow, where likely I'll be in
an airport. More then. So, my NASDAQ experiment
took quite the hit yesterday on day 5 of 14 of
my stock market crash test. I mean, NASDAQ three
times short. It hasn't moved much this morning,
but the last few trading days have been a bit
of a roller coaster. So this morning, I'm in
an airport about to catch a flight, but I want
to explain what went so wrong yesterday. Why
did the NASDAQ increase so much? Well, this week,
tech are really delivering some results. So we've
got Netflix leading the charge today. And investors
there are going to be looking at subscriber counts.
But you've also got Coca -Cola. And their report
today, and this will give a bit of a read on
consumer strength. Now, tomorrow, Wednesday,
all eyes are going to be on Tesla. I mean, it's
coming off a record quarter for deliveries, but
it is facing quite a lot of questions about its
lower cost models, thinner margins, competition
from China. Intel also reports on Thursday. analysts
there will be watching for the recovery of the
pc and the data center businesses and they're
both under pressure from ai driven competitors
like nvidia and amd so is there any good news
for me this week well the september cpi report
hits this friday and it's expected to show inflation
does remain stubbornly high particularly in services.
Economists anticipate that the headline figure
will hover around 3 .1 % year over year. Now,
the ongoing government shutdown means economic
visibility is still pretty murky, really. Much
of the usual labour and spending data hasn't
actually been released for three weeks, and that
makes the CPI data even more important. Now,
Fed officials have signalled that another 25
basis point cut is likely. if inflation cools
just enough to give policymakers room. And the
market seems to be pricing that in with some
growing confidence. So I'll see you at the halfway
point tomorrow, day 7 of 14, from some distant
shore. Okay, day 7 of 14, halfway through my
experimenting time in the market crash. I've
got a few different pension pots and the one
I'm using for this experiment is my 10 -year
SIP or the free trade SIP that I won't be actually
accessing for at least 10 years. This means my
risk appetite is a bit higher than my main pot
which I hold in Interactive Investor. And that's
a pot I'll be drawing down from in the next 10
years. Now, anybody who is a member of my channel
on here will know that I detail my individual
investments regularly. So at the midway point
through my NASDAQ three times short, I'm £94
down on my £3 ,000 investments or just over 3
% for the week. So I'm happy overall. No sign
of that imminent stock market crash. See you
tomorrow. So week one is behind me in my two
week experiment to time the market for a crash.
Last night was the big one. the Tesla earnings
call. Now, Tesla said its profit fell more than
a quarter due to a trio of issues, an increased
cost of US tariffs, the loss of emissions credit
revenue, and also the vast expense of its pivot
towards robotics and AI. All three of these things
ate into its margins. Now, Elon Musk said its
third quarter adjusted net income fell by 29
% year on year. to 1 .8 billion which missed
the expectations of 1 .9 billion. Now investors
had hoped for a boost from record vehicle sales
in the quarter as consumers rushed to make purchases
before the end of the US green vehicle incentive
but extra costs including spending on AI talents
actually eroded Tesla's profits. Revenue did
surpass the analyst estimates of £26 .6 billion,
rising 12 % to £28 .1 billion. However, its operating
margin of almost half to 5 .8 % from 10 .8 %
per year. This meant that Tesla's shares on the
announcement dipped by 3 .5 % in aftermarket
trading. It'll actually be interesting to see
where they go when the markets do open a bit
later. So, for the week, anyway, I'm £630 up
in this portfolio, but £34 down on my NASDAQ
3X. See you tomorrow. Eric from Town to Retire
here. Welcome to day 9 of 14 of my time in the
market crash experiment. I mean, after some good
news for me with a very poor Tesla quarterly
report, I had some bad news from Intel. They
did quite a bit better than the analysts expected.
The share price jumped. up about seven percent
overnight so over the nine days i'm in the red
by 110 pound on my 3 000 pound investment now
the whole premise of the experiment is based
on ai creating a bubble latitude to burst now
of course intel do make computer chips but they
focus on cpus rather than gpus and the gpus are
the ones that are driving the world of ai so
for an indication that an ai bubble was imminent
we'd be more looking to likes of nvidia results
rather than intel or even microsoft google amazon
all of whom are very heavily dependent on ai
for their future growth my portfolio for the
week is is up 1100 pound so overall i'm pretty
happy see you tomorrow I'm Eric for Time to Retire.
Now I'm nine and a half percent down in my time
of the market crash with only three days left
to recover my position. Now over the weekend
I have been thinking about the impact of index
investing on the markets and in particular the
Nasdaq which is after all the index I'm betting
against. Now in a fair marketplace the share
price for companies who are overvalued based
on their performance drops. And the share price
increases for those that are undervalued. But
passive index investing screws this up. The percentage
of investments going to index funds, passive
investing, has been growing rapidly. Passive
funds account for around 29 % of the total investments
across the world. But in the United States, where
my Nasdaq 3X short lives, passive index funds,
which include... index mutual funds and etfs
have reached a significant milestone as of august
2025 index mutual funds and etfs accounted for
50 .6 of the total nest assets in long -term
mutual funds and etfs been even worse for domestic
equity funds where the index share of total assets
is higher and reportedly at 61 .7 % and rising.
So the idea that the share price for overvalued
companies will drop, I think could be broken.
Share price is so heavily influenced by people
passively investing in the whole market. And
my experiments is focused on the overvaluation
of the Magnificent Seven because our index investments
uh market capital weighted then every time you
put a hundred pound into a nasdaq investment
you're putting the largest percentage of that
into the magnificent seven even if they're overvalued
so has the stock market been broken by too much
passive index investing let me know in the comments
and i'll catch you up tomorrow two days two days
left to recover my 10 loss on my experiments
to time a market crash for the Nasdaq. Now, I've
blamed Intel, I've blamed index investors, but
it's about time we faced reality. A reality we
knew all along. Time in the market is not big,
and it's not clever. Fortunately, my entire portfolio
is made up of medium -term investments that have
done really well, and I'm up about 25 % over
the last six months. And that's even when you
include my failed bet on the market crash for
the NASDAQ. Imagine, though, I'd gone heavy.
I mean, as it is, I put about 1 .5 % of my SIP
portfolio into this experiment. So a 10 % loss
reflects less than 0 .2%. That's pretty much
a flicker in the volatile market environment
we're currently invested in. Anyway. As promised,
I will be selling up on my NASDAQ three times
short position on Thursday morning. And I will
come back to you then. Lest anything dramatic
happens over the next 48 hours. I'll see you
Thursday morning, 30th of October. My experiments
over. Over the two weeks I held the NASDAQ three
times short, my investments dropped by nearly
11%, meaning a £3 ,000 investment. ended up at
£2 ,673. So big shout out to Mike Todd who predicted
my investment would end up at £2 ,640. So really,
really close. Now the time in the experiment
to end on the 30th of October wasn't random as
you probably guessed. The Federal Reserve announced
a 25 % basis points cut last night and that was
as the markets expected. And had been priced
in for months, to be honest. Now, if they hadn't
cut rates, this could have been a very different
ending. Now, on the same evening, we had Microsoft,
Google and Meta with quarterly results. Again,
but no major deviation from market expectations
there. And lastly, Trump announced an agreement
on trade with China. Although my investment did
improve today by 3%, it wasn't nearly enough
to reverse my losses. But hey -ho, the moral
of this little story is that time in the market
is never a good idea. Thanks for watching.