That was my first question too. What "engineer" has $50K sitting around to practically throw away? Then I remember, when it comes to tech reporting, "engineer" could mean anything on the spectrum between "7th code monkey from the left" to "CTO".
I think you misunderstood my point. I'm not at all surprised that he has $50k to do this with as an engineer (I could do the same). Engineers, as a class of people who work at companies like Amazon, are very well paid.
I was more commenting that many other people outside the industry are going to become familiar with this idea on a somewhat more visceral level now that it's at the point that CNBC is talking about it.
As an aside, you might be surprised at how many of those "seventh code monkey from the left" are clearing over $200k per year at Amazon. The last time I spoke to people I know at Google/Facebook I was hearing total annual compensation packages of about $250k for senior level in NY and CA.
If you don't have a family and aren't growing your spending habits to match your pocket you can easily have that much extra cash lying around (NB I hesitate to use words like "easily" because people tend to have an indignant reaction, but that doesn't really alter my point).
I think y'all are overestimating the risk. He isn't throwing it away. He's mentioned here that it's max 1 trade of 1 share every 5min. The initial portfolio is very diversified, so barring a concerted attack this experiment's returns likely won't be much different from a random actively managed mutual fund -- with the advantage of having no management fees and no trading fees either.
Everytime you buy and sell a stock even if the stock didn't move and no fee, you loose at least 0.01 usd per share because of the spread. Ie. Apple trades 123.45 to buy and 123.44 to sell.
Plenty of knowledge workers are able to effectively write off tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars if they so pleased. No different than making a fun {car|house|vacation} purchase. People are wired differently, right?
