Viewing profile — bolu

Engineers probably have more leverage now than at any other time in history. We can now make great tools that empower large numbers of people in a matter of days. Join our team of …

Engineers probably have more leverage now than at any other time in history. We can now make great tools that empower large numbers of people in a matter of days. Join our team of …

Engineers probably have more leverage now than at any other time in history. We can now make great tools that empower large numbers of people in a matter of days. Join our team of …

This reminds me of YC's "Apply without an idea" experiment. Both experiments seem to arise from a innovator's insight that a whole class of otherwise highly qualified candidates se…

FutureAdvisor is an eight-person, Sequoia-backed startup remaking saving & investing for the average American family. Today customers already entrust us to advise them on $4 Billio…

FutureAdvisor is an eight-person, Sequoia-backed startup remaking saving & investing for the average American family. Today customers already entrust us to advise them on $4 Billio…

Active investors of all kinds definitely try, but again as a whole they've failed. I'll try to dig up the data and put it into an article sometime, but the fallacy that you should …

Thats true, but we must remember that for folks who _did_ try to time the market many will have actually had negative returns because of failing timing attempts. For example, there…

Your point about the single month as the timing period is definitely valid - in hindsight the article would have benefitted from having that be maybe 6 months or 12 months instead.…

You've pointed out the exact nature of the problem. They made a killing that day, and they probably will continue to make a killing as long as naive investors believe they can beat…

They're both part of the same story: that individual investors are bad at this, and professional managers aren't any good at it either. Fair point though, that was definitely a con…

Good question. The inflow/outflow data is from the ICI (Investment Company Institute - a consortium of fund companies) and is dollars in/out which is independent of asset performan…

Indeed - yet individual investors try anyway, and the futility of this is all we're trying to point out.

You're right that the article should have been more clear - it's looking at retail investors specifically (in your example; Person2), which is the audience that FutureAdvisor focus…

Because we used the inflows & outflows of a couple large retail mutual funds as proxy for investor demand, you're right that the story actually is "retail investors are bad at timi…

Good data for the performance of hedge funds as an asset class that account for survivorship bias is somewhat hard to find. Off hand, Swensen in "Unconventional Success" recounts t…

Well, just like the average retail investor buys last year's hot mutual fund in the hopes that (usually lucky) outperformance persists, institutional investors also got sold the "l…

The Emperor of All Maladies - spectacular journey into the history of the disease. Filled with great human stories of discovery, and also taught me a ton about the currently unders…

You're absolutely right, and I agree with your advice. Also contributing to your 401(k) - assuming your options aren't terrible - is in the same realm of advice. We should have bee…