351–360 of 430 posts
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All the major US brokers started doing free trades for stocks and etfs. For Vanguard, most of the index expense ratios are really low, like %.05 percent, but that’s not a trading fee.
How do they make money from you as a customer?
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> I treat buying individual shares as yuppie gambling at this point. It can be fun, but it’s usually a bad strategy. I would actually recommend the opposite - buy shares of a few companies that you know exceptionally well. That is, not just the companies, but also the market, the industry trends, etc. Charlie Munger recommends holding 5 stocks at max, while Peter Lynch suggests industries that are tangential to your…
The problem with ETFs is that many of them have crazy management fees. Don't just blindly buy an ETF that fits your investment goals. Many of those bespoke ETFs have 1%+ management fees. You can look up how even a 1% fee can gobble up piles of money over years.
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> I've ironically lost more money the more closely I've paid attention to my investments Money Magazine a few years ago compared various investment strategies in stocks. The #2 best performing one was investing in the S&P 500. The #1 best performing strategy was the "dead man strategy". The dead man strategy comes into play when the investor dies, and his estate gets frozen until it winds its way through the courts.…
Just yesterday it was announced that Bitfinex will be returned the 95,000 bitcoin that were lost in a 2016 hack. These coins will be returned to the account holders which were affected by the hack. At the time the bitcoins were lost, they were worth ~$575 each. Today those returned tokens are worth close to $100,0000 each. I doubt anyone who was affected by that hack realized they just got involuntarily forced into t…
I haven't seen any reporting on that. Bitfinex, the corporate entity, is receiving the coins recovered from the feds. It's up to Bitfinex how they device to dole out those funds, if at all.
When these things happen, often times exchanges will make their customers whole by giving back the monetary value of the coins at time of loss. It's very rare they repay them 1:1 in bitcoin.
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A few years ago cost structures for managing one's investment portfolios were also significantly higher than today! There's an even better alternative for someone willing to put in the leg work: (1) Figure out your investment horizon. For many people, this is way shorter than suggested by generic advice, which makes some diversification beyond "stonks go up" meaningful. (2) Figure out what costs you'll incur by rebal…
I'd be interested in reading more literature (e.g. from Carver) if you have any links!
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> I've ironically lost more money the more closely I've paid attention to my investments Money Magazine a few years ago compared various investment strategies in stocks. The #2 best performing one was investing in the S&P 500. The #1 best performing strategy was the "dead man strategy". The dead man strategy comes into play when the investor dies, and his estate gets frozen until it winds its way through the courts.…
Just yesterday it was announced that Bitfinex will be returned the 95,000 bitcoin that were lost in a 2016 hack. These coins will be returned to the account holders which were affected by the hack. At the time the bitcoins were lost, they were worth ~$575 each. Today those returned tokens are worth close to $100,0000 each. I doubt anyone who was affected by that hack realized they just got involuntarily forced into t…
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How do they profit? There must be a cost somewhere? Another reply mentioned spreads - still a cost (you lose money when you trade).
the sell order flow to market makers who gobble up the other side of bad retail trades
I suspect they're in the business of collecting the spread on lots of small trades that they can assume are largely random.
I've ironically lost more money the more closely I've paid attention to my investments because I was naively confident in the market's ability (or as I've come to suspect, willingness) to react to evidence of fraud. The amount of deceit put out into the world and gobbled up, on purpose, in business is obscene and seriously depressing. The magnitude of damage to psyches and thus economies that anyone acting in a fraud…
> The amount of deceit put out into the world and gobbled up, on purpose, in business is obscene and seriously depressing. In business, politics, everything. It almost seems like everyone is quietly agreeing that "if we pretend the pesky truth doesn't exist for long enough, we can literally change reality to be what we want". I feel like I'm going crazy. There's no way that's how things can work for long, right?
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I remember listening to the theme song for "The Social Network" often when I was frustrated at work about 12 years ago in a different job in a different state in a different life. Scala & Kolacny Brothers -- Creep It's a haunting choral cover of the Radiohead song.
The Social Network soundtrack is essentially mandatory to listen to when coding, I've heard it thousands of times by now.
I've ironically lost more money the more closely I've paid attention to my investments because I was naively confident in the market's ability (or as I've come to suspect, willingness) to react to evidence of fraud. The amount of deceit put out into the world and gobbled up, on purpose, in business is obscene and seriously depressing. The magnitude of damage to psyches and thus economies that anyone acting in a fraud…
> The amount of deceit put out into the world and gobbled up, on purpose, in business is obscene and seriously depressing. In business, politics, everything. It almost seems like everyone is quietly agreeing that "if we pretend the pesky truth doesn't exist for long enough, we can literally change reality to be what we want". I feel like I'm going crazy. There's no way that's how things can work for long, right?
This is probably why when somebody looks to try to find the cause for e.g. the collapse of the Roman Empire there were a surprisingly large number of potentially serious issues all happening simultaneously.
The reason is that the empire probably collapsed decades before its fall and so the stupid decisions and actions all continued to pile up, seemingly without consequence. All until the inertia finally ran out and suddenly the entire house of cards came crashing down.
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The problem with ETFs is that many of them have crazy management fees. Don't just blindly buy an ETF that fits your investment goals. Many of those bespoke ETFs have 1%+ management fees. You can look up how even a 1% fee can gobble up piles of money over years.
I didn't mean buy any ETFs either. I was making the case for individual stock holding, as a response to my parent comment.
I think there's value in having things diversified and rebalanced automatically, especially if you don't have any confidence in your own ability to do so. Yes, you sometimes get stuff that's overvalued and thus over-represented, but in theory if the stock tanks the portfolio will be rebalanced and thus become a smaller percentage of the total holdings.