RichardGibbons

That's super helpful! Thanks, EliG.

That number isn't actually what they're asking for. According to this CRA link, for property held in an account with a Canadian registered securities dealer (section 7), they want the "maximum fair market value during the year". Most of the time that value will be an intraday value. It can only be calculated by recalculating the value of your account when the price of any foreign security in it changes, then figuring out what value is the highest (i.e. it requires taking into account millions of data poinnts and is basically impossible for anyone to calculate except maybe a brokerage). That said, I basically do what you do. But it frustrates me that they're asking for information that's almost impossible to calculate and then making me assert that the number is accurate.

Yeah, I've filled it out. It frustrates me because it's an ask that's super hard to do accurately.

I use multiple brokers because: 1. 2008 proved that big, well-respected brokers can fail. 2. Investor protection (CIPF) is capped at $1M. 3. Even if investor protection were unlimited, I imagine the payout wouldn't be quick. It would be annoying and stressful waiting to get access to my money if I had it all at one broker that failed. Richard

It's probably about a year ago, but one thing that completely uprooted one of my beliefs about the world was Hans Rosling's analysis of population growth in . I believed that world's population will grow indefinitely, eventually resulting in fierce competition for resources. The video has a bunch of really interesting information, but the most noteworthy is Rosling's argument that the world's population growth will flatten out over the next few generations. If something more recent is required, I have to go with politics (apologies for introducing that topic, but this is a big shift in perspective for me). Bills C-25, C-51, and C-69 have convinced me that Canada's Liberal government is implementing discriminatory laws, and therefore has to go.

This is a pretty awesome perspective. So if I'm getting what you're saying, it's totally okay for anyone who owns a construction company to burn down your house, since they will have created net positive houses in the world. It's okay for a woman who's had a bunch of kids to commit a few murders, since she's created a net positive for human life. Oh wait, I misunderstood. What you are actually saying is that there should be no consequences to someone burning down your house because there's a chance in the future that they might build more houses. I find it interesting you could have looked at these cases said, "These people broke the law and faced the consequences. Now we have to fix the system so that everyone faces the consequences, not just those who thumb their noses at power." Instead, you say, "These people broke the law but because they might contribute to the world, they should not face consequences." (In a way, that's the most left-wing suggestion I've heard on these forums--anybody should be able to break the law without consequences because they might do something later that is a net positive for the world.)

Yeah, I think this is a great example of the unpredictability of the effects of climate change. I mean, someone who's ignorant about meteorology might believe that high temperatures are the only factor that impacts the strength of hurricanes, when other factors like wind shear are just as important. Similarly, changes in wind patterns and changing ocean currents can dramatically affect where hurricanes will appear. So, I think you're right, Cardboard. Climate change results in unpredictable changes around the world--hurricanes, flooding, and droughts. Since it's hard to do prediction accurately, there's value in reducing CO2 emissions to slow the rate of change to reduce the massive negative impacts of climate change and allow the models to catch up to the impacts of climate change on our world.

My general thought on LEAPs is that there ought to be a way to use them reliably to get unusually large returns. My reasoning is that LEAPs are largely priced based on the volatility of the underlying rather than the fundamentals of the business. Thus, if one finds a sufficiently undervalued business, the business ought to be more likely to have higher future volatility on the upside than the downside. Thus, if you can find such businesses that have LEAP calls with low implied volatility, those ought to have above average returns. That said, that's how it works in my head, but I haven't implemented that strategy yet. (Partly because it's a lot of work, and it's mentally draining doing options investing because, done right, I think you get a bunch of small losers, and a few big winners.)

I've bought leap puts on UVXY in the past, though mostly just out of the money, and typically, after paying for the spread, have made small returns. In general, I haven't done deep out of the money UVXY puts because when I do the math it doesn't seem like they will pay off very much (but I haven't looked at it in years). I think that you can probably win with them, but closing them could be a challenge. The problem is, if you close them early, then you don't get the full impact of the contango and the spreads can be high, both of which impact your returns. If you close them late, you're risking a 100% loss if the market moves against you near expiration. So, historically, I concluded that it was probably profitable, but not worth the effort and the taxes. If you try it (or even model it), and find different results today, I'd be interested in hearing about that. Keep in mind that we've just finished one of the most low-volatility run-ups in history, so it's a bad idea modelling the decay of UVXY based exclusively on that. Though having volatile volatility is actually good for a short UVXY position, I suppose. With higher volatility of volatility, you might get lower gains from contango, but more gains from losses in UVXY due to fluctuations in a leveraged ETF. (It's also worth noting that I've owned large positions in SVXY in the past, but ditched them when the VIX fell super low, and I realized that there was a real possibility of a 100% loss on a volatility spike.)

I don't think that the SVXY volatility options were nearly as obvious a bet as you think. They are hugely path-dependent. In other words, if implied volatility goes from 10 to 30 in 10 days, it's a very different outcome for SVXY than if it goes from 10 to 30 in one day (like the difference between SVXY falling to 90 and SVXY falling to 12). In fact, I think that the only reason SVXY is trading around 12 now is because hedge funds manipulated the VIX futures to ensure that on the one bad day, SVXY would fall to 15 rather than 60 (immediately after the market closed--in the 15 minutes before SVXY was valued--the VIX futures spiked to 37, and then immediately fell back to the high 20s, basically ensuring that SVXY would do far worse than it would've done if it were priced when the market closed). What's more, when you're holding the SVXY puts, you're not just suffering time decay on the options, but dealing with the growth in SVXY itself as a result of the contango in the futures. So, I think leap puts on SVXY was not at all an obvious bet.

LOL. Honestly, my favorite post from you ever, Cardboard, particularly since there's a kernel of truth to it. The two things the federal Liberals have done recently that have got my panties in a bunch have been Bill C-25, specifically PART XIV.1 172.1 and Trudeau's "let them eat cake" attitude towards housing prices. (Well, and stating that there is a strong correlation between an national agreement on the environment and the construction of a pipeline. I'm not keen on such intellectual dishonesty.)

It will be interesting to see what happens here--if Horgan was going to back off, he probably shouldn't have raised the issue in the first place (unless he genuinely believes he'll win in court.) By acting as he did, he's raised the profile of this again and added gasoline to the environmentalists' fire, increasing the chance of civil disobedience. It seems like a bad strategy for a government to increase the chance that people don't obey the government. That said, it would be pretty interesting if Notley did restrict BC-produced gas. That'd totally play into the environmentalists' hands and make it far less likely for the pipeline to go through as Notley cut the legs out of the pipeline's supporters in BC.

You're awesome, Cardboard. Because of flak you got on other threads for ad hominem attacks on other people, you were trying really hard not to insult people here. But in the end, you couldn't resist. It reminds me of a 4 year old doing the marshmallow test. (I'll remind you if you don't want me to respond to political threads, just leave political threads in the politics section. But I know that's just another marshmallow to you. :) )

Fair point, Stubble. I don't totally agree, but I think what you say is likely far more true than not true.

In that case, you should know that this pipeline is a pretty big deal to people in BC. A recent survey indicates that 23% say that they are willing to perform acts of civil disobedience to stop the pipeline. Most of the 23% are lying, but if only 5% of them are serious you still have 1% of the population of Greater Vancouver willing to commit acts of civil disobedience to mess with this pipeline. And a small minority of those could be total psycho extremists, willing to do things like violence or sabotage. I think the housing crisis in Vancouver also magnifies the potential for extreme behavior as the millenials realize just how badly the government has screwed them, and a lot of that anger will (irrationally) spill over to the pipeline. Gross inequality creates instability. In sum, I think it means that there's likely to be a lot of grief building this pipeline, and it still isn't clear it will happen. (My bet is that it will, so I think it's over 50% likely, but I don't think it's over 80% likely.) So, if you're trying to analyse investment based on this pipeline, these possibilities are worth throwing into your analysis.

LOL, no it isn't. Other than the link, this is the entirety of what you said in the initial post on this the thread. I mean, I get that you want to lie about why you're posting something, but if you really want to pretend a thread isn't isn't political, you should at least delete the really politicial initial post so that your story is at least a bit plausible.

This is largely misunderstanding the issue. From what I read, the indigenous people are mostly the ones concerned with a pipeline leak. The issue almost everyone else seems to be more concerned about is a dilbit tanker leak because it's unclear how to clean it up--there's even debate on whether or not dilbit sinks, which to me seems like a pretty basic attribute. It might be Horgan just looking for excuses to say "No" when he says we ought to understand how to clean up dilbit before increasing dilbit shipments, but it actually is a real argument. Dumping 100K tonnes of a slow-degrading carcinogen in Vancouver harbor or the Georgia Strait seems likely to me to have a negative impact. That said, Stubble's post about the NEB taking responsibility for pipeline spills is reassuring (since I assume it would also apply to tanker spills). I'm not keen on the government paying private expenses, but it's certainly better than nobody paying for it.

My best guess is that there is no audience for Cardboard in the politics section, so he needs to post here.

I didn't realize this had happened. Is this what you were talking about? I'm guessing not, because it isn't what you described. If you have a link to where they signed such a contract, then that certainly changes my view. (I mean, I still don't think that the government should be subsidizing businesses, but taking care of the monetary environmental costs is a big deal.)

This is an issue that I actually changed my mind on--two years ago, I was pro-pipeline, now I'm not. The real issue is the negative externalities. I can totally see why many Albertans would support these pipelines--they bear few of the negative externalities of pipelines and receive the vast majority of the benefits. In contrast, British Columbians get a huge number of negative externalities, and a tiny portion of the benefits. Why the heck would anyone in BC want to sign up for that deal? The simple solution is to have the pipeline owners pay for the negative externalities. Estimates are that the Valdez would've cost about $13B to clean up today. So have Kinder put $13B into escrow to deal with spills (and they can get the money and the interest returned after the pipeline is decommissioned.) Until businesses start paying the cost of negative externalities, they'll deal with this environmental fight on every project that has huge negative externalities. That said, I can understand why businesses are displeased that they now have to pay a major cost of their project that they historically dumped on the government.

That article was total drivel. Moat doesn't equal monopoly. Free competition doesn't mean no competitive advantages, it means trying to gain competitive advantages and overcome others' competitive advantages. What does the guy envision, a USA where every product has completely generic packaging, no brand name, and the exact same ingredients and recipe as every other item? The innovation he wants comes about because people are striving to gain competitive advantages. If you make competitive advantages illegal, you'll also eliminate most of the innovation. I don't think I've ever seen an investment-related article that's so wrong in so many ways.

This is by far your best post on this topic. Thanks for that. That cars vs trucks chart is particularly insightful--I never would have guessed that. I think maybe you still don't understand the concept of a tipping point not because of a lack of intelligence, but rather because of the arguments you're making. For instance, you seem to believe that only rich people will go for EV, whereas I think the tipping point will come when the cost of EV is lower than ICE. It could be that EV will have a problem in some areas where being environmentally unfriendly is a point of pride, but I feel like when the economies of scale kick in so EV becomes the obviously cheaper option, the world will change pretty fast. USA might be one of the last converts because gas is relatively cheap, but I think it will tip when the economics make sense. Based on your numbers, to get a 5% drop in gasoline use from transportation in 2 years, you need about 3/4 of people in a given year to go EV--not an unrealistic ask if the economics hits a tipping point, particularly since dual car families with ICE and EV will likely favor EV for most trips because of the lower operating cost. (And remember, I'm not hypothesizing that the entire drop in energy usage will come from EV, but rather the focus on anti-carbon technology solutions. That the math seems to imply that when we hit the EV tipping point in the USA, a 5% reduction in oil usage in two years could come just from EV is pretty surprising to me. ) That said, maybe you're right and the economies of scale for EV are still years away. I'm not sure--it's really hard to distinguish between hype and realism, and everyone seems to have an agenda.

Hmm, this is a really good point, DTEJD1997. It makes sense to me that autonomous driving may be a 90/10 thing like so many things in software engineering. Thanks for this--it's certainly changed my mental model of how this change will occur.

The main reason I don't spend a year researching a topic before posting an open-ended question to a message board is because it's a terrible use of my time. I thought the point of the General Discussions message board was to discuss things and try to learn from others' opinions. I imagine that you'll probably have to scold me soundly for my curiosity in the future as well, since I'm much more interested in learning from random people on the internet about things I'm not an expert in, than the things I am.

I agree with you, DTEJD1997, that we aren't at the tipping point yet when it come to electric and autonomous vehicles, but I'm also not sure that I'll be able to identify that tipping point accurately when it arrives. That make me reluctant to invest in energy--it feels akin to pennies in front of steamrollers. Plus, I'm concerned that, if I actually had a major position in energy, it would impact my thinking about the transformation, always thinking that I had one more year in these cheap stocks before everything falls apart. One factor that seems to be overlooked is autonomous vehicles, and I feel like that transformation will be mostly complete in 10 or 15 years. With my car, there's about a 15% difference in energy usage between my wife's driving and mine. I'd guess that this sort of spread isn't unusual and that most people aren't driving in energy-efficient ways, while autonomous vehicles will. If you assume that autonomous vehicles gain an average of 10% fuel efficiency over human drivers, then--with about half of oil used to power vehicles--you've got a 5% drop in oil usage there alone. (And really, autonomous vehicles can make energy-saving decisions that human drivers can never make (e.g. coast well below the speed limit for a few blocks because there's no value in arriving at the traffic light before it's green). I wouldn't surprise me if, over the long term, autonomous vehicles are far, far more efficient than human drivers.)