It’s probably hard to change the UI of an existing brokerage service though. Tons of testing required given the potential size of the transactions involved.
Vanguard UI is so bad for actively trading or even checking your positions that at this point I can only think its somehow part of their brand where they think they would actually lose customers if they updated it.
Literally use it for 5 minutes and you’ll understand.
1. Excellent watch list functionality including showing pre-market change separately from regular hours change.
2. Automatic alerts when any stock hits a new 52 week high or low as well a 5 or 10% move in either direction
3. Ability to trade starting at 4 AM which is at least 3 hours earlier than almost every other brokerage. This allows for earlier trades on big news.
4. Best mobile charts including the ability to show candlesticks with numerous indicators at many timescales. You’re not stuck with the bare Robinhood charts.
5. Excellent market information section showing top movers, highest volume, upcoming earnings, breaking news
6. Detailed information on large inflows and outflows for every stock
I have many more but I’ll start there because the charts and watch list alone make it easily better than the competition.
The IRS has identified that certain refundable credits (EITC) have a very high error rate (25-30%). As I understand it, it has created a mostly-automated mechanism to identify the filing errors that lead to these issues.
Should the IRS not be doing that because it lacks the resources to perform audits which are less subject to automation? Or should it not be doing that because EITC is only paid to lower-income households?
Some fraction of the incorrect EITC filings are undoubtedly fraudulent. What, in your view, is the acceptable rate of potential fraud that the IRS should detect, but ignore, based on income level?
I think I remember seeing similar comments in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018...
Snark aside, if your timeline is more than 10-15 years, why should you worry at all about recessions next year? On a long enough timeline, a recession is just a great buying opportunity.
>> if your timeline is more than 10-15 years, why should you worry at all about recessions next year? On a long enough timeline, a recession is just a great buying opportunity.
> Did you miss 2001-2008? Or are you being purposefully deceptive.
January 2000: 11,722.98
December 2001: 10,021.57
March 2003: 7,673.99
October 2006: 11,850.21 (beating the high of 1/2000)
October 2007: 14,164.53
March 2009: 6,507.04
December 2010: 11,577.51
January 2015: 17,164.95
Here we have a 15-year period which starts at the high price before the period you "called out". What are we supposed to view the low points as, if not great buying opportunities?
(Also, it's pretty apparent that 2001-2008 doesn't make sense conceptually as a single period.)
Not sure, what to take away from this list of numbers. From 2000 to 2010 I see a lost decade, with the index back where it started. You added the note "beating the high of ...". why not add two years afterwards "beating the low of ...", etc.
I added the note to October 2006 because that was the only reason I included it in the list at all. It wasn't a high point or a low point, just the middle of a long rise. March 2009 is a low point.
The bull market has been long. The crash is inevitable to be within a year or two. Of course various doomsayers have been vocal for a long time, but things eventually must come down.
When people like Ray Dalio are vocal about it there is something to it.
So? What if the market does crash? Just buy more index funds during the crash because after the crash the recovery is inevitable. If you are young (most HN commenters are), you can afford to wait for the recovery.
- There is a well-known business cycle that goes from boom to bust in about 7 - 10 years on average.
- Unemployment is at multi-decade lows; if you look at FRED graphs the unemployment hits a low right before the recession. Of course, nobody knows how low it will go, but it can't go much lower than it is now.
- Bond yields have inverted, which has been a reliable recession-in-one-year signal.
- The trade war can't improve corporate earnings.
- Maybe the trade war triggers something bad in the US and/or Chinese economy and we have another 1997.
- Any one-time earnings juice from the tax cuts is over, so the year over year comparisons are harder.
- The markets flipped out in Dec after the Fed raised rates (I think that's what it was) and dropped 20% in a week or two. The Fed made some conciliatory statements and the party was back on. The RMB appreciates by only a few percent, but over some psychological threshold of 7 RMB to 1 USD and the market flips out, dropping 3%. It feels to me like everyone is trying to pretend that the party is just getting started, but if you keep drinking, sooner or later you pass out. It's been 10 years, it's getting pretty late, people have to stop and go home sooner or later. Sooner or later something random is going to happen like in Dec and everyone is going to flip out. But this time they'll stay passed out for a while.
There are lots of indicators of worldwide trade slowing down. In the tech world there has been a rush of IPOs, signalling that the private funds are running dry, and so on. Companies like Ray Dalios Bridgewater track these things better then anyone. When he says that their projections point to it then there is little doubt.
One thing, however, that bothers me lately is the pursuit shareholder value above all else. The commentary always arrives at that end (shareholder value) in order to justify the means every time a company's direction might not translate so nicely for customers: YouTube ads, Uber rate increases, Boeing cutting corners, etc.
Being a profitable company is one thing, but I can't help but watch and think, I don't feel any sense of compassion for shareholders losing a few bucks because they were impatient or made a bad investment. Of course Boeing's shareholders want <insert new Boeing thing> delivered yesterday, but the "bloody ROI"[1] can't be what drives Boeing development.
This should be easy to change. Make shareholders culpable for management failures. Balance this with an oversight structure that gives shareholders a direct influence on corporate ethics, with the power to investigate and terminate management malpractice and systemic abuse.
Of course the whole point of public share ownership is profit without responsibility. The distancing of benefit from external consequences is considered sacrosanct. So this suggestion is the the worst kind of heresy.
But why should share ownership somehow magically excuse consequences that would be considered criminal in other contexts? If management has to justify its actions to people who share the risk and the blame, it's going to pay a lot more attention to consequences.
Two additional datapoints - shares are used as part of the incentive structure for senior management, and can dwarf salary. Share gains are also taxed less.
It's a simple feedback loop. It gets pretty silly when you look at the share buyback plans many companies operate, huge sums are "invested" in the company's shares for a relatively small - a few million - return to individual management.
In science and engineering, PhD students are typically paid a salary and have their tuition waived. This is mostly funded by the federal government though the NSF, DOE, DOD, etc.
I think the stipend is much lower but yes. It also depends on the university how much the stipend is. At some schools it might only be like 15k which is not enough to live so you would have to find some way to work also.
Many training funding mechanisms (ie. NIH Training Grants, Fellowship awards, & Career Grants/"K-awards") are not allowed to fund non-residents [1]. Funding international students is a difficult problem for most PhD programs in the life sciences. I don't have direct experience in physical/social sciences, but I believe similar restrictions apply to NSF funds.
I believe most PhD programs cover international students using a mixture of direct project funds (ie. an NIH R01, the same grant that covers reagents/equipment), private fellowships, and endowment money.
