Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Titan launches its mobile ‘not a hedge fund’

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 56 posts

Re: Titan launches its mobile ‘not a hedge fund’

#41

Post by Havoc »

kgwgk wrote: post #28
Havoc wrote: post #27

>What Robinhood did to democratize buying individual stocks, Titan wants to do for investing in a managed portfolio. huh? RH's success comes from letting people play wall street hot shot trader for free. "OMG did you hear what Musk just said?". If they think they're capturing the same kind of audience attention with a managed portfolio then they legit don't know which way is up. >Titan picks the top 20 stocks based o…

reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets gives a good idea of where Robinhood's success is coming from.

Yes that's the idea I wanted to convey.

For the record though wsb will judge 99% of RH to be peasant grade though - PTD rule and insufficient options yolo

Re: Titan launches its mobile ‘not a hedge fund’

#42

Post by chkdsk »

pmart123 wrote: post #33
wyldfire wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would go beyond that and say that the average person should use those retirement date targeted funds. Those are usually cheap and minimize risk towards your retirement date.

There can be several large issues with target date funds. 1. Ignores income streams from things like social security, reverse mortgages, held away assets 2. Ignorant to future medical advances that could change life expectancy 3. Built on past assumptions of bond yields and interest rate levels 4. higher fees than an equity ETF 5. large discrepancies between each one 6. Bonds are not necessarily less risky than stock…

Not sure why you're being downvoted. None of these assertions are wrong.

I have many family members who still have big company pensions from back in the day and also own target date funds in their 401ks so combined with social security income they end up being massively over-allocated to bonds (a pension & SS can be treated as bonds).

Re: Titan launches its mobile ‘not a hedge fund’

#43

Post by AznHisoka »

norswap wrote: post #40
AznHisoka wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep and it makes this statement rather suspicious:“Of the ~3500+ hedge funds out there, we track ~5% of them. We believe these are the good guys: long-term oriented and rigorous in their research.” Its the 5% that performed well in their backtest, but that doesnt mean they will perform the best going forward. What Titan did in 2016 was chose the top 5% of funds that did well up until that point. Then when they saw it…

Do you have any evidence for any of this, or did you just pick the most uncharitable possible scenario and present it as factual?

This is just all theory, of course but this is something most backtesters do, so I wouldnt rule it out.

It helps to be overly skeptical when anyone claims to beat the index. Because it is such a powerful claim.

Re: Titan launches its mobile ‘not a hedge fund’

#44

Post by sseveran »

norswap wrote: post #40
AznHisoka wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep and it makes this statement rather suspicious:“Of the ~3500+ hedge funds out there, we track ~5% of them. We believe these are the good guys: long-term oriented and rigorous in their research.” Its the 5% that performed well in their backtest, but that doesnt mean they will perform the best going forward. What Titan did in 2016 was chose the top 5% of funds that did well up until that point. Then when they saw it…

Do you have any evidence for any of this, or did you just pick the most uncharitable possible scenario and present it as factual?

They should disclose how many backtests were run along with the methodology for evaluation. Backtests should be very rarely run.

Re: Titan launches its mobile ‘not a hedge fund’

#45

Post by chkdsk »

kgwgk wrote: post #28
Havoc wrote: post #27

>What Robinhood did to democratize buying individual stocks, Titan wants to do for investing in a managed portfolio. huh? RH's success comes from letting people play wall street hot shot trader for free. "OMG did you hear what Musk just said?". If they think they're capturing the same kind of audience attention with a managed portfolio then they legit don't know which way is up. >Titan picks the top 20 stocks based o…

reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets gives a good idea of where Robinhood's success is coming from.

If you ever find yourself questioning the validity of all the studies indicating how terrible retail investors are at investing...read r/wallstreetbets and realize you and your index funds are still in the minority.

Re: Titan launches its mobile ‘not a hedge fund’

#46

Post by sseveran »

Hasz wrote: post #15

1% of capital every year is crazy money. If the fund is really that good, they'll take x% of the profits and not charge a fee on capital. You take capital because you're not really that good, and you don't know (like basically everyone else) what's going to happen. Funds know they can't reliably beat the market, and thus don't offer such structures. I want a ratcheting fee structure. No capital fees, and no fee if th…

I think you are misunderstanding what many (maybe most) funds actually say they are offering. The investment is often positioned as an asset class with low correlation to other asset classes. Whether they actually offer this or not is a different story but many funds are not out promising to beat the S&P 500 every year. Indeed if you look at something like REIF from RenTech they are trying to offer lower volatility than investing the index itself.

It should be noted that many (if not all) investors in hedge funds already own significant diversified stock holdings. They likely already own other asset classes with less correlation to the stock market like certain types of real estate.

Just to pick a practical example from recent headlines. Elliott Management undoubtedly points out to potential investors that buying sovereign debt and litigating defaults has little correlation with the S&P 500. So when is building a truly diversified global portfolio an allocation to hedge funds (or PE or VC) is often looked at through the lens of correlation, and not necessarily absolute return relative to the S&P 500.

Re: Titan launches its mobile ‘not a hedge fund’

#47

Post by mmt »

Bedon292 wrote: post #17
Hasz wrote: post #15

1% of capital every year is crazy money. If the fund is really that good, they'll take x% of the profits and not charge a fee on capital. You take capital because you're not really that good, and you don't know (like basically everyone else) what's going to happen. Funds know they can't reliably beat the market, and thus don't offer such structures. I want a ratcheting fee structure. No capital fees, and no fee if th…

That would be awesome as an investor, but is that actually sustainable? I guess if the benchmark looses money, and they loose less they get to take a % of something? But they you are paying them for having lost money? Seems odd. I think I don't mind a minimum fixed %. Though as you say, 1% is pretty high still.

> I guess if the benchmark looses money, and they loose less they get to take a % of something? But they you are paying them for having lost money? Seems odd.

I don't see a problem with it. This scenario, like negative interest rates, or negative electric rates [1], may be counterintuitive and seem odd, but it makes sense if you think about it.

I'd be paying them for losing less money that I would have otherwise, and "losing less" is just another way of saying "gaining more".

[1] Discussed recently on HN in the context of wind turbines in Europe, IIRC

Re: Titan launches its mobile ‘not a hedge fund’

#48

Post by berberous »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #13
Bedon292 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that is what I have mostly done, the retirement date funds I have had access to tend to have significantly hire fees (sometimes close to double) compared to the index funds. Not sure their performance actually justifies it either.

Is this through a 401k or through individual IRA/investments accounts? If the latter, I'd suggest moving to a provider such as Vanguard, with very low expense ratios [1]. If through your 401k, I would suggest encouraging your employer to seek out options where you're not overcharged (preferably as a group of employees, as there is strength in numbers). Failing that, max out your 401k with just enough funds to obtain…

Even the Vanguard retirement funds though have expense rations that are multiples of the underlying funds, assuming you have enough cash to qualify for admiral shares of the underlying funds. But you get automatic rebalancing and lower minimums. 0.15% is low enough though that I don't personally worry about the difference that I'm not saving by switching to manually investing in the underlying funds.

Re: Titan launches its mobile ‘not a hedge fund’

#49

Post by Havoc »

chkdsk wrote: post #45
kgwgk wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets gives a good idea of where Robinhood's success is coming from.

If you ever find yourself questioning the validity of all the studies indicating how terrible retail investors are at investing...read r/wallstreetbets and realize you and your index funds are still in the minority.

>and realize you and your index funds are still in the minority.

Quite the opposite. Index fund are busy eating the world alive.

If you've got massive money flowing into the top 100 in the index thanks to ETFs the smart money is on companies 101 - 120. Similar risk profiles to the top 100 but their price earnings profile hasn't been distorted yet but the wave of incoming index wave.

Passive is indeed the truth but don't swallow it wholesale...you're just buying into a top 100 self-reinforcing bubble that has no economic backing without realising it.

Re: Titan launches its mobile ‘not a hedge fund’

#50

Post by neonate »

AznHisoka wrote: post #43
norswap wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence for any of this, or did you just pick the most uncharitable possible scenario and present it as factual?

This is just all theory, of course but this is something most backtesters do, so I wouldnt rule it out. It helps to be overly skeptical when anyone claims to beat the index. Because it is such a powerful claim.

You said "What Titan did". That's a far cry from "I wouldn't rule it out".
Post reply on HN