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LewisBraham
Hi Hank,
Your satire came across very well. Don't worry about the user name.
Best,
Lewis
Great article in NYT today about child labor in the U.S. It’s actually pervasive:
https://nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html
These workers are part of a new economy of exploitation: Migrant children, who …
I think Invesco sometimes cuts bait too soon when it comes to its ETFs and also tends not to explain or promote them too well to investors. In particular here, good multi-asset allocation ETFs are in short supply and some of these being liquidated h…
It seems DFA is one of the few shops that has pulled off such conversations well, drawing a lot of assets. But it has a specific advisor based niche audience that wants ETFs now, low fees already and an investment style that can work well in ETF for…
From the looks of it, you are correct: https://cambiar.com/etf/camx/ Conversion to ETFs is indeed a trend, but one interesting development is it hasn’t worked for most mutual funds trying to increase their assets. They’re still losing money after th…
@Old_Joe I agree. One of the moments among many that shocked me about Trump's original campaign was when he boasted of evading his income taxes during a presidential debate by saying: "That makes me smart." And he was cheered for doing so. It seems …
@Baseball_Fan The fact that you assume a wealth tax is proof of the existence of some form of autocracy when countries like Belgium and France have had one, with, admittedly, some difficulty enforcing it, and the fact you make no distinction between…
Guilt is unnecessary and solves nothing, but acknowledgement at least of the lack of a perfect union back then and now would help. Without that acknowledgement, people can continue to pretend that nothing needs to be done to address problems which p…
@Junkster I'm sorry to tell you that the gold old days of the 1950s weren't so good for people who didn't look like you. Half the population, women, faced limited job, salary and education prospects because of discrimination while many in the remain…
Why is it people always remember the lower prices from the past, the music and young love, but so rarely the horrors? Wally and the Beave weren’t the 1950s reality for many if not most people who lived back then. I doubt it was even the reality for…
Here's an illustration of Warren's version of a wealth tax: https://brookings.edu/opinions/whats-elizabeth-warrens-wealth-tax-worth/ But a more aggressive estate tax, which some economists view differently from a wealth tax, might be more easily adm…
There are some asset taxes in the U.S.—estate taxes for the extraordinarily wealthy, low capital gains taxes 20% for investors who choose to sell, local property taxes to pay for schools in some states. All of the above taxes have proven evadable in…
I agree that there is a tremendous amount of greenwashing going on. This is why the investment community and companies themselves can't be trusted to solve these problems on their own. "Self-regulation," an oxymoron if you ask me, just doesn't work…
@sma3 Green Century has a particular focus on environmental issues so they will have exposure to some other problematic companies in industries like pharma. There is no perfect solution here. That said, even when they own problematic companies, they…
It’s odd because I often hear from the usual pundits that any attempts to tax people or regulate industry are socialist and anti-American, but I can’t think of anything quite so anti-American on the right wing as crypto. Its existence is an attempt …
It helps to understand the difference between investment and speculation when saying crypto is “just another vehicle to invest in.” Can something be an investment that produces no cash flow as a business or institution, produces no product, pays no …
@yogibearbull An "absolute return strategy" is a generic term that means trying not to lose money rather than beat a benchmark, so it can come in many forms, including strategies that don't use any hedging like short bets or derivatives. A manager c…
@larryb Thanks, Larry. I try to be helpful.
@Baseball_Fan It is not far-left socialism to believe the capitalist game should have rules and be played fair for all stakeholders--shareholders, employees, consumers, communities, the environment. Ther…
@larryB In aggregate, Wall Street doesn't care. Individual ESG managers do care, much like individuals of conscience throughout the world care about issues most overlook. It is also worth noting that deeply flawed though they may be, ESG ratings ser…
Since railroads are one of the older American industries and have been subject to corporate abuses in the past, it is interesting to reflect on what regulation of that industry with actual teeth looked like in previous eras. A fascinating State of t…
To me the stock's muted reaction to this devastating environmental news indicates that Wall Street thinks our regulations and regulators have no teeth. If, say, we had a more "high-road" capitalism approach in which all stakeholders mattered--people…
The thing about a properly run S&P 500 index fund is the unknowns are “known unknowns.” We never know how the market will perform in the future, but if you own a low cost index fund that tracks the market well, you know you will get that market …
It also reminds me of Capote’s In Cold Blood, and what a sensation that story originally caused because the killing of one family seemed so random, and in that case it wasn’t completely random. The randomness is what makes it so unsettling—no motive…
Given the size of the Buffett's estate, the 90% allocation to stock index funds might be far more acceptable than in this case. If you've got several billion dollars lying around, losing a billion or two to a stock market decline in a year isn't lif…
While all this debate on the performance numbers of SCHD and FXAIX has a certain value, in the absence of an explanation or understanding of why either fund did or didn’t do well in the past and an analysis of whether or not said performance is repe…
How the index SCHD tracks works:
https://indexologyblog.com/2023/01/20/the-dow-jones-dividend-100-indices-part-1-a-focus-on-dividend-sustainability-and-quality/
And this provides further useful analysis of the index as it stands today:
https://in…
https://commondreams.org/news/tech-layoffs-wall-street
https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1617334412148109312
https://barrons.com/amp/articles/fedex-stock-layoffs-ratings-upgrades-51675344138
Some Google employees didn't realize they were laid…
There are some Barron’s stories that are online and meant for Barron’s financial advisor channel. This is one of them, so it won’t appear in the magazine. But basically the premise is correct that fee waivers at Vanguard have disappeared because in…
To me it sounds like stupidity, incompetence, laziness and skimping on independent film safety budgets that caused the death. Involuntary manslaughter is the right charge. I don't think it's a conspiracy. The reaction to it however is carefully orch…
I think Baldwin deserves these charges. What isn't deserved is the false moral equivalency in the right-wing "internets" between Baldwin who is an actor with zero impact on our lives and Trump who is a reality TV star that happened to become presid…
@sma3 I'm sorry if what I said hurt you, but the mistake you're making is assuming I am talking about you specifically. I think it is wrong to generalize about the 1619 Project by anyone because it is a diverse compilation by different authors on ma…
Nuance, details and context matter. Making generalizations about the 1619 Project is foolish. (And “foolish” is a polite word for what I think of doing this.) The original 2019 publication in the NYT magazine was 100 pages of ten different essays …
I had some debt when I graduated, but nothing compared to what college students today face. Perhaps instead of debt cancellation, the young should be fighting for a return to generous Federal Pell grants for education and increased state subsidizati…
I see. There's truth to that about the arms race. I think though a lot of the funding from the government has dried up in the case of public universities, and that is also a reason tuitions have gone up. Meanwhile, grants for students such as the ol…
