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baccreditedon Ask HN: Your experience with realty investment startups like RealtyShares?

With fundrise and realtymogul I feel more like a partner in the investment. I'll talk about the fundrise Income eREIT for a second. The returns are solid with better transparency and diversity. With a single 50K investment I'm exposed to many properties. If some of those properties had poor returns fund performance would suffer and so would Fundrise's reputation. And part of it is deal size too. You think RealtyShares is gonna pursue that default on a 500K borrower the same way Fundrise is going to think about their $30 million investment in an apartment complex?

baccreditedon Ask HN: Your experience with realty investment startups like RealtyShares?

2015 to 2017

baccreditedon Ask HN: Your experience with realty investment startups like RealtyShares?

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Three-fund_portfolio

If you prefer a book The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins is pretty good.

baccreditedon Ask HN: Your experience with realty investment startups like RealtyShares?

>So what's the advantage again?

I didn't say there was one. I invest in real estate because it has historically strong returns and is not 100% correlated with the stock market. That is very different from an 'advantage'.

baccreditedon Ask HN: Your experience with realty investment startups like RealtyShares?

>if you tried to sell your holding during a market downturn

This is not possible with Realtyshares at least. You have no way to sell your holding. You just have to wait it out.

baccreditedon Ask HN: Your experience with realty investment startups like RealtyShares?

I would not say they are better, but they are different. REITs are stocks, so they tend to rise and fall with the overall stock market. Take a look at what happened to VGSIX in 2008 (when the SP500 was down over 36%). VGSIX got crushed as well.

Would that have happened to individual investments at Realtyshares/Fundrise/Realtymogul had they been around at the time? Doubtful.

baccreditedon Ask HN: Your experience with realty investment startups like RealtyShares?

I invested over 40K with RealtyShares and made over 7K. I will NOT be investing with them any further. Problem is that there is no transparency on the old deals, so you can't see which ones failed or (more likely) locked up your capital many months after they were predicted to end.

I have over 50K with both fundrise.com and realtymogul.com and would consider investing more with both of them.

I also like peerstreet.com as an alternative to lendingclub. I have been slowly draining all my money from lendingclub over the last few years. Returns are simply too low for the risk you take on. Also, with peerstreet your P2P loans are backed by real assets which can be seized and sold to recover your principal if the borrower defaults.

Better than all of these are stock market index funds, which are over 50% of my portfolio.

Any questions? Ask me anything.

baccreditedon The Great College Loan Swindle

UVA - $5 Billion

http://endowments.com/university-of-virginia/

baccreditedon The Great College Loan Swindle

Because they are basically becoming hedge funds with an university attached.

'I was going to donate money to Yale. But maybe it makes more sense to mail a check directly to the hedge fund of my choice' - Malcolm Gladwell tweet

https://www.thenation.com/article/universities-are-becoming-...

baccreditedon Estonia blocks electronic ID cards over identity-theft risk

estonia id card question: can ANYONE create a website that uses the card to authenticate? Or is it a estonia whitelist of services only?

baccreditedon Ask HN: Do you hold any cryptocurrencies?

I have approx 1% of total net worth in the following portfolio

coins:

  BTC
  FIL
  SALT
  LAT
  COB

companies:

  balance - wefunder.com/balance
  polymath.network
  shapeshift.io

I consider all of them short term, except BTC (which I will sell when I retire, or it is superseded) and Shapeshift (which I'm forced to hold until a liquidity event).

I could see going as high as 5% of total net worth in crypto, but not yet.

baccreditedon Ask HN: Aging, mediocre programmer seeks fellow technical-minded individuals

Well I know I was vague but I really mean the systematic approach to saving 25X your annual spending, investing to earn over 7%, withdrawing 4% per year, and living forever on that plan. You can spend frugally to get to that 25X number, or save aggressively. I'm drawn to the latter.

>Back to the original intent of the post, even if I save sufficiently I would still be interested in doing useful productive work, there are some real life problems to be tackled

The beauty of achieving FI is that you can work on ANYTHING you want. Including noble pursuits like yours.

baccreditedon Ask HN: Aging, mediocre programmer seeks fellow technical-minded individuals

The approach I have taken is to pursue Financial Independence. I'm in mid-40s and will be FI by 2022.

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...

baccreditedon Ask HN: Where do you find out about alt-coins that are about to release?

I've participated in 5 ICOs. I don't recommend buying unless a) the company looks great (like filecoin or similar) and b) you get in at a substantial discount.

What I'm seeing now is even good companies that trade below ICO prices after they hit some of the exchanges. Example is https://www.saltlending.com/

Actually that is probably a better strategy: buying good companies that are down since their ICO.

baccreditedon Active investing: what's your approach?

Do you share your ICO investments anywhere? I'd love to read about your investments.

I've done the following ICOs: filecoin, saltlending, latoken.com, cobinhood.com, polychain

It is HARD to find info about actually legitimate ICO companies.

baccreditedon Active investing: what's your approach?

>* Where's the best place to get data for testing purposes?

If you open and fund an account at tradier.com they give you access to a REST API that includes some good stuff. I also pay $50/mo for some additional data from ycharts.com. But you can also use some free libraries that pull from yahoo and they sorta work.

>*What kind of trades do you do? Is it mostly buying and selling actual stocks, or do you go after more complicated trades like shorts/puts/options?

My algorithms are long-only and I buy stocks and hold them for at least one year. If the algorithm could exceed the high cost of short-term capital gains, I would hold for a shorter period.

You could also try quantopian.com for some super short term trading. I personally think that is a poor use of time.

I REALLY wish there was some place I could enter competitions and make my trades public. I'm using motifinvesting.com for now but would enter trades at other places if I could.

I played around with instavest.com (a YC company) which was promising for a while but it stopped working and I suspect they are on life support or something.

baccreditedon Active investing: what's your approach?

I'm a self-taught quant, not an 'active' investor, but here's what I do. I use factors like trend and momentum to develop algorithms. Then I backtest my algorithms against decades of data. Then I buy/sell stocks based 100% on what the algorithm says to do.

If you hand pick stocks, you will lose. A simple index fund will destroy you over, say, 10 years. I'm happy to back up that claim with cash if you will make your picks public. $1,000 to the charity of your choice.

baccreditedon Ask HN: What is a good free alternative for Picasa for photo editing?

There isn't a good alternative. I prefer to pay for Acorn flyingmeat.com/acorn and pay $30 only once, rather than pay an eternal $10/mo to Adobe.

baccreditedon Show HN: CoinHub for iOS

Does any app just show your portfolio and its value on the home screen? That's what I'm really looking for

baccreditedon Interview with Mr. Money Mustache

Can you help me find the RSS feed? I'm trying to subscribe in a popular iOS podcast player (Overcast) and struggling to find the feed.

Never mind found at: backtracks.fm/ycombinator/ycombinator/feed

baccreditedon A new kind of map: it’s about time

Agree. Show me a time map for nearby draft beers with Beer Advocate or Ratebeer scores and I would use this all the time. Bonus points to restrict to certain styles like IPA, lagers, etc. Untappd could actually do this if they wanted.

baccreditedon Ask HN: What is everyone currently working on?

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...

baccreditedon Ask HN: What is everyone currently working on?

Started with some FundersClub funds that try to hit 10 to 20 YC companies at once (Wefunder used to do same but has discontinued). Hand picked a few companies. Followed some great syndicates on angel.co

Jason Calacanis' new book ANGEL advice to early angels actually very closely matches what I started doing in 2013.

On paper gains I'm up, but need a few big exits to actually declare success. Can start judging in 2020, since avg exits are in the 7 to 10 yr timeframe.

baccreditedon Ask HN: What is everyone currently working on?

Buying index funds - will allow me to retire by 2022.

Angel investing - invested in over 100 companies since 2013.

Digital Currencies - Investments in companies: Filecoin, Shapeshift, and Balance

Oh yeah I have a full time day job as a cloud computing architect

baccreditedon Ask HN: Are there laptops with batteries that last a week?

I have this thing and it is a beast. Doesn't exactly answer your question, but might help you anyway.

Might run your laptop for a week: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06W9FWFXD/ref=oh_aui_sear...

baccreditedon LoRa Backscatter [pdf]

YesScript worked for me on Firefox. Thanks for the idea. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yesscript/dev...

baccreditedon AWS Network Load Balancer

Does it support ipv6?

baccreditedon Postmates laid off all its city managers yesterday

They've raised $51 million. Imagine how big they would need to get to give their investors any return at all.

baccreditedon Postmates laid off all its city managers yesterday

As an investor, I wouldn't touch any of these companies: Postmates, Seamless, DoorDash, ChowNow. What a terrible category.

UberEATS and Amazon PrimeNow will probably survive, but their parent companies can afford to run them at a loss pretty much forever.

baccreditedon Ask HN: What is the best resource out there keeping track of great tools?

http://alternativeto.net/ is pretty good. You need to know one tool in the area you are looking for, but if you do it gives a good list of alternatives.