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Ask HN: I have $450K cash, what should I do to maximize my return?

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Re: Ask HN: I have $450K cash, what should I do to maximize my return?

#131
Don’t take financial/tax advice from random internet people.

Go to a fee-only financial advisor something like this https://www.feeonlynetwork.com in your state and take their advice that is a fiduciary. It will cost you a few hundred dollars but that is entirely worth it, we don’t know your whole tax and risk situation.

Re: Ask HN: I have $450K cash, what should I do to maximize my return?

#132
post #60

I’d buy more cash flow generating real estate. As others have noted, we are printing cash and all assets valued in our currency are likely to be impacted. Unlike gold, real estate should be able to generate cash and not cost you cash to hold. They aren’t making more land. With rising sea levels there will likely be less land. Midwest is a great place to invest. So is the south east. If you want more information about…

Property taxes are likely to go up as municipalities struggle with budget issues due to a short and medium-term economic problem of reduced income in retail and other industries.

A huge number of people are thrown out of work and many of those people are renters, and renters pay rent to owners of property, and those property owners rely on the income to pay their mortgages.

They capped property tax and local tax deductions federally, they capped the mortgage interest deduction and can potentially go further in that regard.

I'm playing contrarian not because I think property shouldn't be owned or invested in (I did it as owner-occupier and landlord), or because I disagree with the statement about printing cash having to go somewhere, but rather because your comment is one-sided and sales-y.

Re: Ask HN: I have $450K cash, what should I do to maximize my return?

#133

Just skimming some of the replies here makes me think you will get better advice on the Bogleheads forum [1]. Despite the minimalist appearance it is actually a great place to get sensible financial advice. I would start with the wiki page on managing a windfall [2], then search through older replies to similar questions. This kind of question gets asked there a lot, so there should be some recent threads. [1] https:…

Looking over the wiki so far, looks like a great resource. Thank you!

Re: Ask HN: I have $450K cash, what should I do to maximize my return?

#134

Surprised not to see this mentioned anywhere. In finance, we don’t look at maximizing total return but rather risk adjusted return. Buying a lotto ticket has amazing total return if you hit the jackpot but really bad risk adjusted return. The thing you should spend some time doing is deciding what your risk tolerance is and how much variance in your portfolio you can stomach. Then you can start talking investment str…

Ok so say I have enough risk tolerance to put my money in something other than cash, but not more aggressive than a fund that tracks the S&P, what precise steps should I do to live off of my cash stack while doing absolutely 0 work other than sitting on my couch?

Re: Ask HN: I have $450K cash, what should I do to maximize my return?

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this over and over again. Beating the HFT firms, insiders, big money shops and so forth. It's not a zero sum game necessarily. A stock picker approach that you have as a retail investor that many trading shops do not have is this: time. You can make your bet, and if it fails in the short term you can hold onto the stock long term, unless the company is going bankrupt (which hasn't been a common occurrence up t…

> It's not a zero sum game necessarily. It is, actually. William F. Sharpe laid it out in the 1991 paper "The Arithmetic of Active Management": * https://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm * https://www.jstor.org/stable/4479386?seq=1 Sharpe won the 1990 Economics Nobel for other work: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Sharpe The more active a trader is, over a longer time frame, the more likely…

That can't possibly be true in the limit though. A market with no active management would allocate capital arbitrarily, without an eye to returns. A company burning money on making millions of unwanted skunk-scented bouncy balls would be as likely to attract capital as one that made, say, food or medicine. Resource allocation would break down if nobody made active capital allocation decisions.

The question is how high the share of passive investment can go before we see misallocation.

Re: Ask HN: I have $450K cash, what should I do to maximize my return?

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this over and over again. Beating the HFT firms, insiders, big money shops and so forth. It's not a zero sum game necessarily. A stock picker approach that you have as a retail investor that many trading shops do not have is this: time. You can make your bet, and if it fails in the short term you can hold onto the stock long term, unless the company is going bankrupt (which hasn't been a common occurrence up t…

> It's not a zero sum game necessarily. It is, actually. William F. Sharpe laid it out in the 1991 paper "The Arithmetic of Active Management": * https://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm * https://www.jstor.org/stable/4479386?seq=1 Sharpe won the 1990 Economics Nobel for other work: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Sharpe The more active a trader is, over a longer time frame, the more likely…

I'm happy to go through these in some depth, but the most obvious first response to this is, 1991... Is the landscape of 1991 the same as the landscape of 2020, with its 10% of the s&p in just a few companies, with Robin Hood kids, with money printing, with Seeking Alpha and information overload? Talk shows about stocks and news algorithms pumping stocks to the masses?

Some of your links are for active fund managers versus passive fund managers. Again, a red herring. No, there's not JUST a choice between bogleheading and day trading, and none of us here are active fund managers? Are fund managers (who have clients) compared to the likes of you and me ?

Some individual stocks you buy for the long term, others you trade short term. And sometimes, you can long a stock but only trade a percentage of the holding. You can keep it for a day or for years.

Re: Ask HN: I have $450K cash, what should I do to maximize my return?

#140

Surprised not to see this mentioned anywhere. In finance, we don’t look at maximizing total return but rather risk adjusted return. Buying a lotto ticket has amazing total return if you hit the jackpot but really bad risk adjusted return. The thing you should spend some time doing is deciding what your risk tolerance is and how much variance in your portfolio you can stomach. Then you can start talking investment str…

Ok so say I have enough risk tolerance to put my money in something other than cash, but not more aggressive than a fund that tracks the S&P, what precise steps should I do to live off of my cash stack while doing absolutely 0 work other than sitting on my couch?

If it’s all in the market, most wisdom says you can take out 4% a year and never run dry. Is 4% of your stash enough to live on? Congratulations you are financially independent. You can read through mr money mustache if you want more depth..
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