131–140 of 150 posts
The two graphs have visibly quite different volatilities. A number like 20% is not meaningful unless you also somehow state the risk, eg in terms of volatility or beta or other measures.
3 years is not far enough to draw any meaningful conclusion and it abruptly ends in early 2023.
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If the 'other investing approach' is a broad market index like the S&P 500, where is the 'appearance if insider trading'? GP's point is that they could be almost entirely in the S&P500, with some minor innocuous deviation (tracking error, frankly!) and it would look the same. So this isn't really suspicious at all. Sure it's a US-focussed index, but isn't that you want from your politicians? (Outsider perspective her…
Anecdata to follow. Does this not look suspicious? https://www.threads.net/@quiverquantitative/post/CzcB_jyA_pD The politician in question is a 69 year old former football coach who bought stock in a cloud-based e-commerce software vendor before the company was acquired, then when the stock spiked 50%, he sold it right away.
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at the same time let's remove the immunity of politicians and prevent long terms that keep people in office until they die.
> prevent long terms It is a quandary. Some pols burrow in and never go away, to the detriment of the people they're supposed to be serving. On the other hand, term limits just empower lobbyists, who don't have them. You think capture is bad now, just wait until all elected officials are perennial novices at the game.
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> There are actually people that aren't self interested in public service, they do exist. relying on altruism is not what i would call scalable nor stable. The rules of the system should be such that the optimal/desirable behaviour is also the selfish behaviour. If something selfish or damaging is beneficial to the individual at the expense of someone else, then the rules must be changed to even it back out.
Selfishness is anomalous if the consensus of research literature on the topic is to be believed. Without dropping volumes of research, you can derive this intuitively. Think about how people respond in disasters. Running into danger to save strangers is common for things like floods or bystanders trying to save someone in a car crash. Prosocial is the norm. These days extreme selfishness is an indicator of autistic s…
It's hard to find a calculator/data source that takes dividends into account, but it looks like if you bought an S&P500 index fund in May 2022 you'd be up around 18% depending on which day you purchased. So not very dramatic IMO
Radical proposal: Rather than trying to police leakage of insider information, level the playing field for both politicians and fed employees by creating a dozen or so national mutual funds of at least 1,000 equity positions each that intend to model the US economy as a whole. Anyone can invest in them, but all US Federal employees and immediate family members are required to liquidate all other positions and hold on…
Many federal employees do in fact have to limit what securities they can purchase or hold. For example, if I recall correctly, patent examiners cannot hold more than $20,000 in investments for an industry that they examine patents in, and they cannot hold more than $10,000 in stock for any company they may examine patents for. The guidance tells them to prefer index funds that capture the entire market rather than individual companies or sectors. This is explicitly to prevent conflicts of interest. If you are high up enough in these federal positions (without having to be a political appointee), you even have to complete a financial disclosure form (SF-714), and people do check these things for potential conflicts.
That said, many federal employees invest heavily in TSP funds, most of which are managed by BlackRock, so your last point about distributing them among multiple fund managers is not true in practice, since I imagine most federal employees have their investments heavily in funds managed by BlackRock.
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Selfishness is anomalous if the consensus of research literature on the topic is to be believed. Without dropping volumes of research, you can derive this intuitively. Think about how people respond in disasters. Running into danger to save strangers is common for things like floods or bystanders trying to save someone in a car crash. Prosocial is the norm. These days extreme selfishness is an indicator of autistic s…
Always fun to scroll hn and get some drive-by ableism. The majority of autistic people aren't in full time work, they probably don't resemble that remark.
On the one hand, asd people are everywhere including in positions of power.
However, if you had a system which, by design, considers a subsection of asd people as the only ones qualified to hold power, you would be missing out on the contributions of everyone else which we should be including, you know, as a virtue of democracy.
To circle back around, the premise that people are fundamentally selfish is what's being rejected. The reality is (some small minority of) people behave in ways that might be considered fundamentally selfish and they've been thoroughly studied by behaviourists and psychologists.