I wasn't making a value judgement on the piece (or the author's credentials). My point was that someone took the time to share something with the world and you dismissed it after making (incorrect) assumptions about their background. You'll miss out on a lot of good stuff if you've already cast judgement before you finish reading the title.
In any case, it's a <3min read and it does offer a few non-BS pieces of advice that may be useful to some.
I was not highlighting the author's background to appeal to authority. I was pointing out that what OP dismissed as "coder philosophy drivel" (likely from skimming the title and nothing else) was written by someone who has nothing to do with that field.
In fact, by doing that, OP made an anti-appeal-to-authority. You seem to be interested in logical fallacies.. could you help me out and tell me if that one has a specific name?
Sure, you seem intent on making a point that has nothing to do with OP's assertion or my observation, so go for it. (That's a strawman fallacy, right?)
It looks like it is using the "Tufte" style, named after Edward Tufte, who is very famous for his writing on data visualization.
More examples: https://rstudio.github.io/tufte/
No; that's different from a non-compete. The practice of "gardening leave" is giving an employee a relatively long notice period (say, 3 months). If the employee gives notice, the employer tells them to stay home during the notice period; they are still technically employed during that period, however.
Gotcha; never been subject to gardening leave myself, but I always assumed it exists for the same purpose as a noncompete, i.e. to provide a 'cooling off' period to lessen the competitive impact that the exiting employee can have by switching to another firm. I assumed that since it's been around a while in finance that the "paid noncompete" idea became a negotiated part of the comp.
So funny to hear this. 3 month notice periods (in either direction) are bog standard in parts of Europe. And it's entirely normal to just keep working, training your replacement/finishing off stuff.
That's my point about it being funny. In one place a 3 month notice period is considered a gardening leave for special higher level employees and you still basically get escorted out of the building.
In other parts of the world it is just the bog standard notice period and nobody is escorted out of any building and expected to keep working during that 3 month period.
Depends on how you look at it I guess. The history of the Chinese empire had periods of relative stability, separated by periods of rebellion, civil war, and strife, sometimes hundreds of years long. There were even periods where the empire was ruled by outsiders.
At the end of any given dynasty, it would be hard to say whether the empire is truly crumbling, or merely transitioning to a new dynasty. Who knows, maybe 1,000 years from now communism and the period of strife in the 20th century will just be seen as an unstable period preceding a dynastic transition.
Since the IRS has custody of other people's sensitive data, they should be held to a different standard than the carefree homeowner in your example.
If I pay my bank for a safe deposit box, good security is part of what I am paying for. If it can be shown that they were lax/careless/negligent in the event of a theft, then I certainly would lay blame with both the bank and the thief for loss of my assets.
This is even more the case for a government with vast resources.
It's bad because the majority of people who invest their own money invest without enough information about the company. Finance is almost deliberately obfuscated to keep retail investors out, and unless you have the time and the knowledge, it's going to be difficult to make decent returns unless you're investing in mutual funds, ETF's, etc.
Disclaimer - founder of http://capp.io and this is basically what we found in our market research.
Depends on the size of the company, IME. Small to mid-caps can be very transparent. To add extra protection, buy at the lower end of the market cycle or when the sector of the stock is out of favor.
No idea. I think investing is advanced enough that you typically need somewhat complex jargon and data to actually make money - over time it's basically become an old boys club and no-one's really trying to make it accessible to regular investor.
I'm sure falseprophet's response would be something along the lines of "index funds bla bla bla professional investors bla bla bla efficient market hypothesis bla bla bla" which isn't necessarily wrong (I agree with this line of thinking myself, mostly) The problem is when people complain about new opportunities for average folk and use an argument that amounts to "we need to protect dumb people from themselves" which is too simplistic an answer for complicated problems, in my view.
Often, people end up being smarter than you think, when given the opportunity (not that I'm endorsing Robinhood... I'd be very cautious about using them, based on first impressions)
If we stopped protecting dumb banks from themselves and everyone else, we wouldn't need to worry so much about protecting dumb people from themselves.
As for efficient markets - I'm still trying to understand how social institutions that melt down every decade or so and are a consistent focus of criminal proceedings can be considered 'efficient.'
We are probably in the same camp; I just wasn't sure if GP was comparing casinos with 'stock trading' or the equity asset class in general, which, if one subscribes to the 'boring' methods of index fund investing, are hard to beat over a 5+ year time window.
I would hope ETFs are available on this platform, since they trade like stocks.
He's probably suggesting that it's risky, because it is. Laypeople should know what they're getting into. I've had the opportunity to invest a sizable chunk of change into the US equity market twice in my life: once in 1999, and again in 2006. I lost my shirt both times. The stock market is not for everyone. It is not always a magical money-increasing machine, although it might "statistically" and "historically" produce positive returns over a long enough term.
If "laypeople" just means "not financial industry insiders", then no, it's not necessarily bad.
If "laypeople" means "people who haven't bothered to spend any time at all learning how the market works (or at least, how it's supposed to work)", then yes, it's a very bad idea. For those people, the market may end up being functionally equivalent to a casino, but without the free drinks.
I think if an ignorant person wishes to trade stocks, the lack of a platform like this won't stop them. Retail brokers like Etrade and Scottrade got the pennystock crowds long ago.
Mentioned in another reply, I would hope ETFs are available on a platform like this, since they trade like stocks. Hopefully that would allow more people to put small amounts of savings into index funds. That being said, Robinhood wouldn't be very innovative on that front, since many brokers offer the more popular index-based ETFs without fees anyway.
Wow, this is a long read but definitely worth it. I have never read anything by Pettis, but I am thinking about picking up The Great Rebalancing if it explores similar stuff more deeply. It doesn't always come naturally to look at country economies as a bunch of open systems all operating in a closed system, but this read will certainly encourage that kind of thinking.
His book "The Volatility Machine" was one of the best I have ever read on global macro. Perhaps due to publication timing, it's managed to stay under the radar.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
P/E approaches infinity as you near "break even", so for a company like AMZN with both massive revenues and expenses, P/E is not useful when the two are almost equal. You must dig further and look at things like cash flow, revenue (not earnings) growth, operating margin (not profit margin), etc. These things give a much clearer picture than an odd-looking P/E. If a company with high P/E had operating margins that ware closer to profit margins (not triple, like AMZN) I would be a bit more concerned.
If capital expenditures are reduced just a bit, or if margins are improved slightly, the E part of the fraction will jump and P/E will fall massively.
All of that being said, there are still plenty of things that could go wrong for AMZN.
