Ambele's comments

If the banks aren't paying interest on deposits anymore, does it now make sense to withdraw some of the money and store it under a mattress somewhere?

Obviously there are theft, fire, and police confiscation risks that need to be overcome first.

Yes, greenhouse gasses and lung effects aside, the sulphur mixes with carbon dioxide and other airborne oxides to becomes sulpher dioxide. This makes rain water acidic and causes the erosion on the Statue of Liberty.

Do you have a link to this article that you read about?

I can't help but think this glitch was a good thing and Robinhood investors would do better if they traded less anyhow. According to an OpenFolio correlational study, traders who trade more than 12 times per year make 0.5% less than traders who trade less than 12 times per year. OpenFolio was one of the first three websites to have an API integration with Robinhood portfolios.

The divorce rate in Maine correlates with the per capita consumption of margarine.

Also, the number of letters in the winning word of the U.S. Spelling bee correlates with the number of people killed by venomous spiders.

Spurious Correlations: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

Now's one of the best times to start evaluating long-term mutual fund managers based on performance. It's hard to tell who's swimming naked until the tide rolls out. Does anyone have any funds they personally use that they recommend I look at?

I put a small portion of my short-term portfolio into shorts on a basket of high-valued, money-losing, non-dividend paying, declining companies last friday. I can't predict how this will pan out but at least it will be a hedge. A full 80% of my non-retirement portfolio was in a short term treasury bond ETF (SHY) after I blanket-sold everything in January to try to make a down payment on real estate. I figured I could handle the extra volatility of SHY over SHV.

Those statistics are crazy. I'm not sure how the world still functions.

It sounds like if someone invents or mass-deploys a controlled denitrification machine that turns nitrogen in the water into nitrogen gas, he could be made rich through government and state grants. The grants could be fully or partially funded through a fertilizer tax, sewage leak fines, and/or taken from current farming subsidies.

They're not going to want to piss people off because it's viewed as an inherently destructive act. Instead they'd look for more positive resolutions. I can only speak for one Big Japanese Car Company having worked in their corporate office in the decision-making department.

- They'll use Microsoft Sharepoint and Microsoft OneDrive for file and document management, not because they're better products but because Microsoft wishes that they don't use a competitor's products and Big Japanese Car Co respects the desires of their partners.

- After a demo between a new company with superior in-car tech and an old partner with inferior in-car tech, BJCC chooses the old in-car tech because once you're a partner with BJCC, BJCC takes care of you through the good and the bad.

- If you direct a meeting, whether small or large and you say something incorrect, the one person in the crowd that noticed your mistake won't say anything and will actually nod their head in agreement and respect. This is due to the saving-face aspect of the culture.

- Bringing others on board with a decision when you don't have access to the primary data or analytics is much easier when it involves copying a competitor. It also diffuses responsibility if things go south. Saying we did secret teardowns of a Tesla model 3s and are basing our design decisions off these teardowns means you can say it was Tesla's decision, not "my" decision.

On the other hand, BJCC has historically cared a lot more about not pissing off car owners by making more reliable vehicles at fair prices that are less likely to break down. For that reason, at the end of the day, I buy a BJCC car.

It's the old argument of individualism vs. collectivism. The right balance is probably some amount of both.

Hey John, I was providing you with an opportunity to share some of your wisdom regarding correlations you have noticed. Presumably a number of intelligent readers are curious about wealth given they clicked on the title of this article. Correlations do not always establish causations but causations sometimes require expensive studies to establish.

What correlation have you noticed?

Buying your first piece of real estate will provide you with a neutral stance on the housing market. Buying REITs like Camden, or another REIT from this REIT list also works if you don't overpay: https://www.reit.com/investing/reit-directory. Buying a consumer goods seller like Apple stock or Target stock helps if the concerning inflation happens only in the consumer goods sector. I'm not a fan of large allocations of TIPS because the returns are so low.

A study was done to pay people to build sand castles. In the experimental group, the people were told afterwards to knock down their sand castle (because the researchers said they wanted a different sand castle or something to that effect). In the control group, people were also told to build a new sand castle but in a different spot and so they would leave their other castle there. In the experimental group, people became very very demotivated and felt that their work was pointless and boring. It doesn't matter if you're ADHD or not, if your expectations are greater than reality and you have to kick your sandcastle over after building it, you're not going to do as well at your job.

As a code reviewer they should be giving you a compliment sandwich where the criticism or constructive feedback is placed in between two compliments. As a coder, I've found adding async and await to functions does a lot to make your code look sexier to code reviewers even if it doesn't have a perceptible performance impact on non-network calls.

If I were to comment on a new plan for you, I'd say let flow state be your friend and not your enemy. After all, you have a chair you probably have to sit in for ~8 hours a day while you stare at a computer screen full of code and that's hard for anyone to do for that long let alone someone with ADHD. Flow state will give you an advantage over others. Invariably, your flow state will break. Use that time to spend more time talking to the stakeholders in your group because sometimes stakeholders want what they want and nothing else. They'll appreciate the time you took to listen to them, they'll trust and believe in you more (instead of you being an unknown variable), they'll be more confident that they'll get what they want, and you'll benefit from the confirmation bias. If you deliver what they want, it's less likely that their sandcastle will get kicked over -- though still not unlikely.

That sounds incredibly smart because crypto taxes are a huge headache to do yourself and crypto-tax preparers charge $500-$1000/year. Does having the LLC increase your tax complexity? If so, by how much?

Only if you're losing money on your cryptocurrency trades... in which case it's probably better to stay in the U.S. Dollar and tape off your trading finger. If your cryptocurrencies finally turn positive after you've harvested your losses then you'll owe it all back in taxes. If your trades never go south, then you'll be better off with tax-free gains.

Credit card interest rates typically range from 20 to 25%. Students have a thin credit file and wouldn't qualify for lower rates.

Student loan interest rates range from 6.6% to 7.6%.

If a percentage of student loans were allowed to default, then student loan rates would have to increase much more for the lenders to break even. Hopefully the Fed would consider bailing out the students like they did with the big banks but I wouldn't bet on it.

I can't speak for others but I can share one anecdotal experience by sharing my story.

I started investing in middle school when the social studies teacher enrolled all of his classrooms into a virtual stock market simulation. Everyone starts with 100k, must own a minimum of 20 stocks on any given day, and tries to make the most within a set amount of weeks. Short-selling is included. I don't remember how well I did but I got an ornate Dominos Pizza gift certificate (which I never spent because it looked so beautiful) so I must have done well. That was 13 years ago. Today, I have a 40k Robinhood investment account which is enough for a home down payment and I plan to use it to buy a modest ~200k home in a few months.

I outperformed significantly in my early 3 years of investing with real money with a 38% return. However I have underperformed in the last 1 year and thus underperformed the market overall with an 18% overall (4-year) return not including dividends. This is because my favorite investment data app, StockGuru Pro, that cost $10 was discontinued and I don't have a suitable replacement (at all). I expect to underperform in the future unless I find a well-priced replacement or cough up the hundreds of dollars for better investment data. The ICE buyout of the NYSE has caused the price of market data to skyrocket which lead to that app's discontinuation.

The wins I experienced at a young age were very positive because it gave me a reason to save my money instead of spending it on all the things I wanted. Savings account interest rates of 0.01 to 2% interest isn't motivating at all to save because it takes more than 36 years to double money at that rate. If it weren't for learning to invest at an early age, I'd be just like the rest of the average Americans. The 50th percentile for my age (27) has a net worth of $5000 and I would be average with $5000 too if I didn't have that reason to save!

It also provided a good learning experience from which I have formed 5 principles:

1) Take calculated risks

2) Protect your principal but it's okay to risk the interest. (Phrased another way: don't lose money.)

3) Don't put all of your eggs into one basket. Diversify!

4) Don't use margin if you don't know what a margin call is.

5) Options are for viewing, watching, and analysing but not for trading (even if Robinhood makes trading them free). 90% of people lose money trading options.

Overall, an anecdotal positive experience here that I'm happy to share but with a small sample size of one.

People focus on the investment losses more because a loss is more than twice as negative to them as a gain is positive. You can gain an edge on the market if you view gains and losses for exactly what they are. The beautiful part about investing is that the downside is limited (because a stock can't go below 0) but the upside is unlimited.

The multi-baggers in the portfolio such as: 4x gains in Netflix, 4x gains in Amazon, 3x gains in Microsoft, and 11x gains in Shopify over the last 5 years will have outweighed GE dropping 50%, GM dropping 1x*, Seers dropping 1x, and Kodak dropping 85%.

I'm not as familiar with the Nifty 50 probably because I'm younger. Investopedia says it was the popular large-cap NYSE stocks of the 1960s and 1970s without an official list. but could also mean one of at least 6 indexes on the indian stock exchange[2]. Gurufocus claims they were Large Cap Growth Stocks with an average P/E Ratio of 42x.[3] Large caps are known to underperform overall in the long run but outperform more frequently in shorter 1 year time frames.[1] The same is true with growth stocks vs value stocks.

It seems to me that the reason the Nifty 50 "lost 80% to 90%" [3] is because it was overweight in large cap and growth stocks while neglecting value stocks and small cap stocks.[1] This is evidenced by the S&P 500 growing 6.78% per year annualized from 1960 to 1979 and showing a positive return over every 15 year period in recorded stock market history.[4]

[1] http://www.moneychimp.com/articles/index_funds/why_sv.htm

[2] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/nifty-fifty-50.a...

[3] https://www.gurufocus.com/news/594692/faang-plus-m-and-the-s...

[4] http://www.moneychimp.com/features/market_cagr.htm

> If emotions are a part of your decision, you're going to perform poorly.

I agree. Hacker News readers are more logic based but the rest of the world is more emotional based. For most people, the emotional half of the brain dominates the logical half of the brain. I think we can agree that being invested in a diverse basket of 20+ stocks with 5% or less of the portfolio invested in each is regarded as a pretty safe bet. I also think we can agree that anyone who invests will do better in the long run than people who don't invest.

The news commonly sells convincing chichen-little fear that the sky is falling, the market's gonna crash, and we should all flock to gold. But I know with higher certainty that Amazon will keep shipping packages, Target will keep selling merchandise, Apple will keep selling more iPhones, and VISA cards will keep collecting interchange fees.

We can debate though whether it's better to hold an index fund you might panic sell or individual stocks that you plan to hold forever.