misnamed

Unless you have a large subscribed audience, titles are important for getting people to click in.

Why not remove comments entirely? Most people engage on secondary platforms (twitter, facebook) anyway, and most comments are garbage in my experience.

Ironically, while trying to post this comment I got ... Bad gateway: The web server reported a bad gateway error.

Maybe not work life, but social life sure died down around that time (people having kids, etc.).

Their last tweet - RIP, pigeon fleet.

https://twitter.com/fly_pigeon/status/685041481887944704

Need the Firefox World expansion pack for F4

"It feels fast and light and I may just make it my default browser again once the stable version comes around."

"Is Firefox Quantum significantly better than Chrome? No. But they are on par again"

Well this ringing endorsement sure sold me. Anyone else? Bonus: you can mix your own Firefox Quantum using two regular Firefox Colas, some Jet and Nuclear Materials at any crafting bench.

His blog also nets him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I'm sure that helps him feel smug and safe in early retirement.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/29/mr-money-musta...

All I know is he makes good money off the blog, and his affiliate link disclosures (e.g. Betterment) are often poor (e.g. at the end of an article, which doesn't conform to federal guidelines). It also, of course, calls his judgment into question, though naturally he swears up and down he loves the companies that sponsor him.

According to this New Yorker article, the blog makes hundreds of thousands a year. So now his 'early retirement' is starting to look like 'smart career change for getting much richer.'

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/29/mr-money-musta...

1. Diversify into bonds to reduce stock risk and volatility (either a Total Bond or Treasuries fund)

2. Diversify globally to avoid single-country political, economic and geographical risks (add Total International to balance your domestic stock)

3. If you really want to, buy a commodities ETF to further diversify (generally not recommended at more than 10% of portfolio and not a big deal either way)

4. But we've already seen that after fees they come out behind, so their 'better information' isn't translating into higher returns

The idea that 'too many indexers will kill indexing' has been around for a while and debunked for an equally long time. Here's a source for that:

http://www.etf.com/sections/index-investor-corner/swedroe-ne...

At the end of the day, there's just no need to get crazy with things. Indexing works. It's reliable. You can sleep at night. I can't really imagine putting my money in the hands of a manager (or set of them). What if they get sick, or bored, or were just lucky early on? No need to add that layer of risk.

It's so simple and obviously true yet a shocking number of people think it could be otherwise (e.g. if too many people index).

True with a caveat: they will never balance completely because of taxes and fees - active traders and funds will always underperform in aggregate.

Stocks should outperform bonds because they are riskier than bonds. Why would you expect or want it to be otherwise?

I wrote out a whole response (then deleted it) with that link in mind - perfect example with the other commenter's number (15). Didn't even know Bernstein's old site was still on anyone else's radar!

Index funds have to outperform active funds and traders in aggregate by definition. It's not a claim or debate, it's simple math. After savings on taxes and expenses, indexes represent the average + a fair bit more than other options. There is no feedback effect, except that more people indexing will lead to more trading arbitrage opportunities, which people will take and which doesn't hurt indexers, who will continue to take the market average return plus what they save in expenses and taxes. As an aside: the last place to get financial advice is Zero Hedge. Try this instead:

http://www.etf.com/sections/index-investor-corner/swedroe-wh...

It sounds nice in theory as a cheaper way to de-prioritize certain roads. But in practice it also means a lot of dirt and dust kicked up, mucking up the air. Not really great if you're living or working alongside these roads and used to the fresh air.

It's theoretically possible but I'll believe it's actually possible when I see it. I don't see volatility data in the linked article, but if they released it somewhere we could perhaps model a stock/bond portfolio of comparable volatility and see how they did. I would be willing to bet the stock/bond approach would win on a risk-adjusted basis, but can't say without data.

Meanwhile, though, a generic vanilla Total Bond market index fund over the past 10 years returned 4.3% annually. A $100,000 investment would have turned into over $150,000 over the course of the bet, higher than the hedge fund collection. So the hedge funds would have to have less volatility than a very steady intermediate-duration bond fund, which, incidentally, had far lower draw-downs in its worst years. So at the very least, in plain language, if 'big drops' are a measure of risk, then the hedge fund set was riskier than bonds and still lost to bonds.

Exactly - the headwinds in this case are strong. Even if you're just talking about actively-managed mutual funds versus passive indexes, you're talking about overcoming the 70th percentile after fees/taxes on average. So you can't just beat half the other players, and you can't just do it one time - you have to beat more like 2/3 and do it consistently over the years to overcome drag. In studies done on this, most active managers who beat the index either (a) take on a lot more risk, and/or (b) can't do it consistently and eventually fall behind.

I would like to see them compare themselves to a stock and bond portfolio of similar volatility. Ordinary investors can reduce volatility with bonds for a lot less in fees.

It's not like we don't have various periods to look at either - from the chart I saw it looked to me like the hedge funds lost 9 out of the 10 years. So sure, you can say 'some unusual stuff happened in there' but ... 9 out of 10 years speaks for itself.

According to research, only 1 in 20 investors can pick 3 active funds that beat index funds over a 20-year period. The answer, as far as I'm concerned is: don't try.

https://portfoliosolutions.com/latest-learnings/blog/1-20-fu...

> You have to consider risk.

The question is: OK, you account for risk, now what? You can manage risk by tempering an all-stock portfolio with bonds, lowering volatility. Why pick high-cost hedge funds over that option?

> Throw them all together in a pot and all the spice is gone.

Except if you look at the breakdown, any one of those sub-funds did poorly. None beat the S&P.

> Plenty of individual funds did beat the S&P

But how is an investor to know in advance? Also: winning funds tend to rotate around - can't use past performance as a reasonable guide to pick a fund going forward.

> You have to wonder how the bet would have fared had we not experienced the unprecedented reaction of central banks to the crisis.

You can always argue this time was different, but the reality is we had roughly 7% average returns on the S&P over the course of the bet, which is pretty typical. It wasn't just some short period, either - for nine out of the ten years the S&P won the bet against the group.

> You can find long periods in the past where the S&P was sideways.

Which is why a smart portfolio is three-fund, covering global stocks and bonds. A portfolio of that makeup does not tend to travel sideways for long periods like the US market can alone. Take for instance 2000 to 2010, in which US stocks did go sideways - bonds and international stocks compensated for that.

At the end of the day, instead of excuses/explanations (no offense intended) I'd like to see you make a case for who should be using hedge funds and why.

This calculator has been around for a while, but they keep improving it and I recommend it all the time. Have to be really really careful with inputs, though - like: don't just accept their projections for a portfolio's growth, as it will depend heavily on your stock/bond ratio, etc...

You know the same headline could be written in reverse and still work. Of course, it would get fewer votes and clicks. The actual bottom line is they are going for the same size of home ... surely that's not either generation's fault.

The Deck is (or: was) pretty unique in the space - high-quality sites and much higher rates of pay than any of the competitors that tried to follow suit. Getting similar rates with even much larger and lower-quality ads would be hard.

"When we signed up to pump money into this juice company, it was because we thought drinking the juice would be a lot harder and more expensive." Priceless.

I feel like there's less choice in that case. With Uber, I can flip to lift or a taxi or black car service with the push of a button - don't have to think about what's closest or in-plan.

Bandcamp

I don't get it.

Let's play this out: CA secedes and suddenly there is no hope of blues winning elections in the US for the foreseeable future. So suddenly CA is a nation surrounded almost entirely by a Republican-run United States with all that goes with that. Sounds like a bad situation for everyone involved.

What really blows my mind is that Buchanan himself conceded the point - he said very clearly he thinks the ballot design accounted for him getting a bigger percentage in districts that used it.