Passive investing isn't zero sum - it's positive sum. If you could buy a fraction of earnings from every business in the economy (i.e. both businesses that currently exist, and future businesses that are founded in the future), then you get a rate of return that is roughly the growth in GDP.
Concentrated portfolios are also positive-sum, and have returns higher than passive investing if you are smart or lucky.
> When we first started investing, we approached it from two beliefs: 1) you are unlikely to grow a portfolio without a small percentage of it allocated to more active investments
I wish you all success, but this assumption goes against about a half-century of academic research. You might say "but it's crypto!" But the law of averages is brutal, and it is agnostic to whether we're in a crypto world or not -- if some fraction of market participants get an above-average return, mathematically, some must get a return that is below-average.
Possibly -- you sell stock in fossil fuel companies, and reinvest in some other, hopefully more sustainable, company. It's not the divestment part that helps, it is the reinvestment.
Yes, the story is inaccurate: the study was about how power, not luck, changes perceptions. But the message is still right. It's easy to be a jerk if you are powerful. (And it's easy to be negative when you're just commenting on the Internet.)
Edit: I got it wrong, the original study was four people as Lewis reports, not five as some commenters here believe. Lewis is also right about table manners, btw.
This is factually incorrect, in addition to being bad advice. You take on debt when the net present utility of the purchase is greater than the price of the debt.
Here's a simple example to illustrate: you have an interview tomorrow, and you want to buy a suit to be sure you are appropriately dressed for it. The net-present-utility of the suit is quite high -- not having one may cost you the job opportunity. On the other hand, a suit is a depreciating asset. It is also not an income-generating asset (i.e. you may sell the suit the day after the interview at no loss of income.)
Using the reasoning of "debt for appreciating/income generating purchase" will preclude you from buying this suit, sensible though the purchase is.
Before you buy into the negativity of some comments on this thread, take a moment to pause. Andrew has achieved some truly remarkable feats. Why not accept what he has achieved is many standard deviations away from the average, and try and learn from what he thinks was useful?
To me, that the top comment right now is about how Baidu "cheated" on an AI benchmark says both that no one can have perfect oversight, but also that no matter your other achievements, someone will always point out a shortcoming.
I just checked their site, and they act less like a hungry startup, and more like a don't-care near-monopoly.
Three examples:
- You can't see prices for many items without logging in. For a site that is geared towards price-conscious consumers, this is such a silly move. Alternatively, they consider login/registration as a worthwhile conversion (otherwise they could show you the price when you add something to cart.)
- Yet, their registration page doesn't let you create an account with Facebook, Google or anything else. If you care about conversions, act like you care!
- Their Help is an email address or a phone number. Seriously? No chat? No FAQ? Even Comcast has this figured out. If your LTCV is > $500, there is no reason to skimp on support when you don't have traction.
I misphrased above. The index fund will pay out a dividend if the underlying stocks do. Fortunately for investors, Companies are paying dividends less and less frequently, preferring to do stock buybacks (which improve the stock value) instead. Dividends are also "qualified" if you've held the stock long enough, so you pay the lower capgains rate.
Articles like this are evidence that people are still surprised that capital grows faster than labour. At least in fair capitalist society the surest way to become wealthy (statistically speaking) is to understand:
- The total wealth of the world is expected to keep increasing
- Capital grows faster than labour
- Taxes and disasters redistribute wealth
This is why investing in index funds that don't pay dividends is such a good idea.
You only pay capital gains taxes when you realize gains, not every year.
Trump would pay 15% of $20B = ~$3B, so his net worth would be $17B. And this is assuming that his stock investments don't pay qualified dividends that are reinvested. So, yeah, he'd have much more than $12B.
Yes, you can save yourself from the fallout (which decays exponentially with distance anyway). Unfortunately within around 15mi, you're still going to get pretty bad burns, unless you duck into your shelter immediately after the explosion. That's where the early warning systems are useful-- you get 6-8min with an ICBM strike.
The rational reason we don't build nuclear shelters anymore is because they're no longer effective. As weapon yields increased, it's become apparent that a concrete, underground hideout is not going to save you.
Is this a serious post, or are you being sarcastic? I honestly can't tell. JS the language of the future? Why? It has probably the worst gotchas of any language I've coded in, it's verbose, and weird scoping. Nor is it especially nice to optimize for/with.
I can certainly see being stuck with Javascript (just like we're stuck with the x86 instruction set even if simpler alternatives exist), but I'm not sure it's something I rejoice about. Javascript is like anti-Batman: a language we all deserve, but not one we need.
The prize money is definitely a great idea. It'll probably be seen as a rich-company-PR move, but in hindsight, I think we'll see it as a sign of the times.
Computer science seems to be going through a similar transformation as Palo Alto. Just as Palo Alto went from a place where people were modest about their wealth to one where vanity license-plates decorate Teslas at the curb-side, computer scientists seem to have transformed in public imagination from quiet nerds to celebrity saviors of mankind. I'm not sure the image is well-deserved, but so it goes.
Commodities I think no longer do, but did until recently.