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LewisBraham
Hi Hank,
Your satire came across very well. Don't worry about the user name.
Best,
Lewis
@Mark Both poor performance and growth stocks lagging are most likely factors, but another important factor is the massive shift that is occurring from actively managed mutual funds to cheaper indexed ETFs. Especially in areas that are bread and but…
@hank I agree with the benefits of diversification between these asset classes and their different performance characteristics. Rebalancing can also enforce a certain value discipline as you state. I disagree with the notion that equal weighting the…
Gold and out of the money put options or a collared options strategy for your stocks. Perhaps a bit of the stablest foreign currencies that might rally if the dollar collapses. Again, a highly unlikely scenario. But S&P 500 options are in effec…
@stayCalm Here's just one popular public sector union punching bag for the rightwing and what their starting salaries and final salaries average by state and nationwide: https://nea.org/resource-library/teacher-salary-benchmarks
As far as I'm concer…
@sma3 And I could provide any number of charts like this one below explaining why there are government pension short falls and large amounts of debt because we are borrowing from the wealthy and thereby increasing our federal and state debt instead …
@sma3 Show me the union worker who gets paid what Carly Fiorina did for driving Hewlett-Packard into the ground. There are any number of terrible executives who routinely get paid hundreds of times what the average worker makes for significant wealt…
@Observant1 +1 That analysis of the consequences seems correct. The U.S. has the largest most important securities' markets, and those markets are based off the "risk-free" rate of T-Bills. Every bond issued is priced at a certain spread above T-Bil…
I think what happened with McCarthy is just a prelude of the new regime here, and I expect the moderates in the GOP and many Dems to yield in this game of chicken every time because they don't want calamity. It will be up to voters to push back if t…
I'm inclined to agree with sma3 only because it's important to remember that the entire Congress also has significant amounts of money invested in stocks and bonds, and would stand to lose "bigly" in the event of a default. How does the value of the…
My question is when will the new AANA ETF be launched? I imagine the existing LCR ETF will get investors part of the way there, both with more nuance regarding current conditions—good thing—and much higher fees for active management—bad thing.
@davi…
If safety is the primary concern, I would see no reason for favoring German Bonds, Exxon or Apple over Treasury bonds and T-Bills in particular. If T-Bills failed because of financial terrorists holding our government hostage, every other securities…
While I agree with the idea of diversification and disagree with posting articles’ texts in their entirety here, my main comment revolves around the hindsight is 20/20 and past performance is no guarantee of future results caveat. If anyone here co…
If the U.S. defaulted on Treasury bonds, everything would decline significantly except perhaps gold. It would be a disaster for capitalism as we know it of epic proportions. Even looking at history as a guide isn’t accurate because securities market…
@sma3 Unfortunately, crypto promoters’ lobbying has affected both political parties as the GOP and Dems are eager for campaign contributions regardless of where they come from: https://thenation.com/article/politics/democrats-crypto-sam-bankman-frie…
Why would anyone assume that nations’ governments—and notably, the U.S. government, which has the world reserve currency—would let themselves be disintermediated by an artificial unregulated unaffiliated currency used often for crime and tax evasio…
There are 200 million Muslims living in India, a nation of 1.4 billion people. Hinduism under Modi’s nationalist regime is increasingly being seen as the state religion. The unsettling reality is you can still have an authoritarian nationalist ruler…
The quality of the asset backed securities in auto loans can vary dramatically, being tiered like mortgage-backed securities, but my impression is that FPA invests in the senior ones that are from the highest credit quality borrowers and that get fi…
The reason is that a house, and a primary residence especially, is the ultimate illiquid investment. If you pay down your mortgage and have little cash left over afterwards you are what is often called house rich but cash poor. If you suddenly need …
I was wondering if it would be possible or wise if it is possible to match a long-term bond with a comparable yield to one’s mortgage. That way an investor would have a more liquid vehicle—the bond—to cancel out the mortgage interest cost instead of…
@kings53man The problem with the "strong leader" is the strongman leader is the hallmark of fascism. In fact, one could say the "only I can fix it" strongman leader is the defining characteristic of fascism. Usually, the leader's popularity and stre…
Another excerpt:
The Ukraine war, compounding the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, has fueled the country’s ascent. Together they have pushed corporations to make global supply chains less risky by diversifying toward an open India and away from C…
The article is by no means a recommendation to buy Indian stocks, but an exploration of a potential new world economic order and its implications. 1.4 billion people and India’s increasingly scary nationalism can’t be simply ignored. This is especia…
I would think of floating-rate loans as a potential equity substitute at this point. I think Giroux sees them similarly--that their risk adjusted return profile offering similar upside but less downside than stocks makes them appealing currently. Th…
The other issue is that the global economy and global securities markets are two separate things. People can be suffering economically and Wall Street might like it, especially now as labor costs have been rising because of low unemployment. Wall St…
AIEQ seems closer to AI and so far results have been meh: https://etfmg.com/funds/aieq/
Another one is AIVL, also a poor performer so far: https://wisdomtree.com/investments/-/media/us-media-files/documents/resource-library/investment-case/the-case-…
I think given the wide ranging nature of this conversation it belongs here. That said, a new discussion started about AI investing might make sense in the Other Investing category. I would say, though, that algorithms written by human programmers in…
I wouldn’t count humanity out just yet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_extinction#Risk_estimates
Simply by discussing the extinction risks with as clear a head as possible— being neither foolishly optimistic nor grotesquely pessimistic—we tak…
If you want to really freak out, read this: https://vox.com/the-highlight/23447596/artificial-intelligence-agi-openai-gpt3-existential-risk-human-extinction
I honestly think this is an excellent fund for a conservative investor to buy, and my opinion remains that today. Regarding the value vs blend shift, since value stocks have performed so well in 2022 the shift may indicate that the managers think th…
It’s worth noting that Tesla has a market cap significantly larger still than its competitors like GM and little debt as far as I can tell. I don’t think it’s necessarily toast. The honest and fair question to ask is what is an appropriate valuation…
I do think it’s hard to figure the true value of a house you live in as an investment. I could think of a number of different approaches to it involving repair costs, comparable savings over renting, tax deductions from mortgage interest, property…
One thing I think Krugman overestimates, which is to Tesla's advantage, is the ability of the big car makers to compete. My impression is it is not so easy for Mercedes, GM, Ford, etc. to just retrofit their factories to manufacture electric cars wh…
Even if Musk isn't ill, Krugman's question about Tesla's valuation and Wall Street's expectations of it as a business versus other tech giants is a valid one. From the article:
Even if that’s the case, though, it’s hard to explain the huge valuatio…
You're probably right that I'm being overly-sensitive to the term "enemies." But then I think the term is also almost certainly being used by some of our own current leaders to refer to these nations and they aren't referring just to leaders like Pu…
I suspect some of the board members here are old enough to have been alive when the first atom bombs were dropped, or, at least, to have grown up with the "duck and cover" school lessons in the early years of the atomic age. I sometimes wonder what …
https://theage.com.au/business/companies/did-the-tesla-story-ever-make-sense-20221228-p5c91f.html?ref=rss
I don’t agree with everything Krugman says here, but the differences between Tesla vs Microsoft and Apple are important ones.
At what point does referring to fellow human beings who share 99.9% of the same DNA with you as “potential enemies” become self-destructive if you and the potential enemies both have weapons that can end life on the planet and the planet is facing a…
Kind of remarkable he posted this today right after the market closed: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1607850458554449920?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
Perhaps “remarkable” isn’t the right word.
