rpadebet

I am an immigrant, going through the process and the heartache for a lot of years now... If you are sure about the facts involved, then I would escalate it irrespective of the fact that I might lose my job to them or otherwise. If something is illegal, it is illegal. Not a lawyer, but I think willful blindness to something illegal is also illegal and might be construed as abetting the crime. There are legal ways to do what you describe the team is doing, so not sure why they would choose this route..

Tweedy Browne funds are pretty good for international exposure

Hey bobp- Look at the last paragraph of the article you posted: The bottom line is this: If you don’t have a $2,000 emergency fund, your life is going to be miserable because every single financial contretemps is going to make you scared instead of just annoyed. A $2,000 emergency fund is $1 a day for less than three years. If you’ve been working at some kind of job for three years and haven’t been able to scrape together a dollar a day, go over your budget with a fine-tooth comb. It’s just not that much money. Find a way to do it. Your blood pressure will thank you. I think this sums it all up. A $2,000 emergency fund is $1 a day for less than three years? Most Americans are just bad at math! :) haha. Nice catch, my fellow Ohioan. ;) He is probably assuming 60%+ compounding there. Buffet said he can compound at 50% with a 1 mill portfolio, so 60% with penny stocks shouldn't be that difficult ;)

Proportional distribution is a well known rule for Traditional IRA to Roth IRA conversion. However I am not completely sure if After Tax 401K is treated as traditional IRA (If I had to guess --I would guess it is not so unless you roll over your after tax 401K to Traditional IRA first---not sure why anyone would do that)

I am guessing it is A too, but I didnt have any deductible IRA left to worry abt. All converted to Roth. Probably best to ask a tax advisor or do some research on that Fairmark forum.

I am not a tax advisor here but having done this, this is my understanding. Yes your 401K administrator will send you a check for the amount rolled over. You have 60 days to deposit it into Roth to avoid early withdrawal penalties if I am not wrong. You owe taxes on the difference between the rolled over amount and contribution. Typically if this is done every 6 months or so, that is not a huge amount to be concerned about. Note: If you lose money during the period there is no tax loss allowance for it The entire rolled over amount is considered "rollover contribution". 5 year clock starts for this the year you do the roll over and after 5 years the principal is available to be withdrawn without penalties. Withdrawal rules are like the Roth conversion thing and age alone doesn't determine the withdrawal penalties. So if you want to tap the rolled over contribution before or after 59.5 penalty free, you need to have it invested for 5 years at least. Here is a good overview of distribution rules (this is treated just like a conversion). http://fairmark.com/retirement/roth-accounts/roth-distributions/distribution-overview/

Yes 401K after tax contribution rolled over to Roth IRA is a less understood under-utilized option not many people are aware of or have access to. Good way for high earners to stuff more of your net worth into Roth IRA.

Zach, I wasn't writing off Bridgewater :). I have a lot of respect for their analysis, performance and intellectual contributions. I think Ray Dalio is probably one of the few who gets the macro picture right AND is able to profit from it. The question was about risk parity strategy and its practical implementation. On a certain theoretical level I agree that one should have their asset allocations such that they have equal risk contributions from all underlying's. That part makes sense - If I had knowledge before hand what the risk of each underlying was ( at least in relation to one another) I would be able to then weight them appropriately according to this logic. The problem I have though is with its practical implementation. Risk is equated with volatility (to me it makes intuitive sense to think of risk as something which can cause a permanent loss and not something that wiggles a lot) and then volatility is equated to standard deviation of historical returns ( I have an issue with that, because I don't think +10% should be same as -10% ) So I am not writing them off. I just have a nuanced disagreement with their and others implementation of it.

Hopefully you already saw this from bridgewater (this strategy has its intellectual genesis from here) https://www.bwater.com/home/research--press/risk-parity--portfolio-construction-white-papers.aspx?agreed=64913 In my opinion it extends the concept of risk=volatility=standard deviation and basically generates portfolio allocations where the low volatility stuff is highly weighted compared to the high volatility stuff. If you think in terms of bonds and equity, as opposed to the mutual fund standard 60%/40% benchmark, this strategy gives about 90%/10% allocation. Almost all backtest's I have seen employing this strategy have a good historical performance, which I think is mainly because Bonds have been in a secular bull market now for 30 years almost. It is anybody's guess how it will pan out in the future.

They are doing this in Puerto Rico already in order to balance the budget. Just a matter of time before they do it in the mainland. Btw, in PR, I think the asset tax is partially deductible against the corporate income tax, so if they implement it here net effect might not be 15% on JPM.

Completely agree. Starting with A's is difficult. I started by cloning ideas of great investors. Learnt why they might be good investments (reverse engineer). Tell myself there is no selling for next 5 years before each buy to limit myself to the best ideas. I learnt this the hard way even after reading a lot, but recognizing that we are the biggest risk to our portfolio is huge and more often than not, just by not doing anything we can minimize that risk. Read as much as you can. Don't watch CNBC.

If you think about it, its not a new set of users. It is the same set of users. The overlap is definitely >95%. So they are paying $19B to reach the same users. I think this $40 per user is more like maintenance capex for facebook. As their MAU's peak and as users spend more time on other apps, they have to follow their users to sustain that advertising revenue. Last year they did this with instagram and this year with whatsapp. I think as new apps get launched and acquire a decent user base, facebook will have to buy them to maintain their user base from moving away. This does not seem like a one time acquisition strategy.

Bought some JPM and GM.

I now tell people to visit betterment.com and watch some videos there. These guys are doing a good job for regular people as far as i can tell.

Chemical Engineer->Software Developer for large Tech firm (2+ years) -> MBA -> Index business @ large European IB in NYC (8+ years) My day job does well for me if the market is efficient and my investment portfolio does well if it is inefficient. I think i will do well if I can just make up my mind one way or the other.

I have got BP, NOV and Altius. All >5% positions. BP because it is depressed, NOV because it is almost a monopoly selling shovels and pipes and Altius because it is cheap, unique business model and good management. Still building Altius position, but it is definitely running away the last few days. Maybe it is a recency bias, but I am excited about Altius the most.

Yes, I have also wondered what happens to XIV if VIX jumps 100% in a single day (not inconceivable now given VIX is in the 12-14 range). These products are based on VIX futures. Would the exchange allow a +100% move on the futures in a single day? Aren't there margin rules and/or disruption rules designed to limit the movement in a single session?

Short VXX and/or Long XIV (for a small portion of the portfolio though) has been a consistent winner the past few years. I don't think it is entirely luck, the construction of these products has something to do with it. As long as you can stomach the volatility of these volatility products, I think the shape of the VIX curve kind of guarantees some of this return. I hope they don't pull these products from the market soon....

x2. They're exactly right. Interesting discussion. I agree too that taking Kraven's advice is the sensible thing to do. "Follow your heart" advice is theoretically the correct thing to do, but in practice you need to know where your heart is going to be in a few years time. We may think we know where it is now, but no one knows what we would like to be doing in few years. Did you know for sure that your heart will be here 10 years ago? "Following opportunity" is the practical thing to do. Honestly, in your specific situation both your choices are not that different. You could be a HY/macro PM now and that doesn't preclude a career as Equity PM later in life. All knowledge compounds, that includes macro knowledge as well. In a corporate setting you have to assume you are "told" not asked. But since they are making it appear as if they are "asking" and wooing you, you could use the "favor" you are doing them to negotiate your way into future opportunities/incentives if you play your cards right. Like someone already mentioned, "follow the opportunity" until you get to the FU money and then you can "retire and follow your heart".

New list to rank 1. Dick Fuld and Joe Gregory/ Lehmann 2. Chuck Prince/ Citi 3. Stan O Neal/ Merrill Lynch 4. Joe Cassano/ AIG Making loans with other people's money and writing insurance are the easiest things to do, especially if you don't bother with creditworthiness or risk or liquidity or any such pesky little things. Lot of people got rich of it.

Microsoft+Ballmer, who here thinks he is a genious?

There seems to be fallacy in her approach to her career. And I am afraid to say that it is all too common. Why did she only try to be a journalist earlier and why is she trying to be only a lawyer now? You don't have to have a career exactly matching your educational qualifications. You have to look at skills earned during an education as transferable She must know the basics of journalism and given her law degree she must also be adept at going through and understanding legalese. I see three outs for her. 1. Combine the skills you learnt from both your degrees and try becoming an investigative journalist focusing on crimes happening near her. It could be a freelance blog site, but if she is any good at it, in this day and age somebody might hire her. She might have to do a lot good work, but if she demonstrates competence and builds a record of her work that might open doors for her. 2. Consider the education she got as a sunk cost and focus on acquiring skills which are actually in demand in this market. Pick up a few books and maybe learn some software skills like building a website. Do some freelance work on the side to gain experience. I hear healthcare.gov is hiring ;) 3. More in line with the spirit of this board, take one year's salary of 25K and invest it at a 26% rate of return. In 10 years she will be debt free! 250K debt is not a problem. How she thinks about repaying it is. The reason one might not want to get into a long term relationship with her would not be her debt, but what she "not" doing about it.

Just an alternate point of view here. I want to be upfront and disclose that I invested (speculated?) in BBRY as well, not for the risk arbitrage trade, but hoping for a clean bidding and selling process. I still believe if it was broken up and sold quickly, there was a high probability that the shareholder proceeds would be greater than $9 a share. We don't and might not even know if they tried that option. I misjudged the probability of that happening. Clearly it has not worked out as expected for me and it is not PW's fault that it didn't. I did it with my eyes open and had my own rationale. It was my mistake and I hope to learn from it and not repeat it in future. PW has built a great business and has been a super investor all these years. This debacle with BBRY shouldn't take anything away from the respect and reputation he has built over the years. Even if this thing goes to zero and he loses everything he invested here, a few years from now people will still look back at PW's record with the same kind of admiration they do now. It will knockoff a few basis points from his eventual compounding record, but that number will still be huge. More importantly beyond the numbers he puts up, he already seems to have a reputation for being an upfront and nice human being and that is something everyone should aspire to. However, there are a few things he said here which in retrospect he would have been better off if he didn't say. Again, investors should have looked at what he did with the LOI and what the market was telling to make their own judgement, but nonetheless statements like (paraphrasing here ) "...we wouldn't put our name on the line if we were not confident about securing the funding", "....BBRY has a better chance of restructuring as a private company", "....we wouldn't commit more FFH capital into this" and then making an about turn within 6 weeks, doesn't help further a WEB style reputation for trust. Granted he is not WEB and they are different people and that he never compared himself to WEB and that "we" hoisted the reputation on him. One can also argue that he had to say that in the interest of the deal, but couldn't he have said something more ambiguous to go with the theme of the LOI? ;) In the grand scheme of things and in the long run this will all be forgotten hopefully, but someone with such a great reputation to preserve could have been more careful in hindsight. If anyone of us had the reputation he has, wouldn't we try to preserve, protect and enhance it, even if it came at the cost of a lowly 2% position going to zero? Why risk it at all? That is what I don't understand. Investing mistakes- big deal, everyone who has invested in anything has those, it is a probability game and he is one of the best at it. A few dollars more or less doesn't make any difference to the man or his record.

I would go with Services and People based firms. There are many IT consulting firms which are publicly traded (CTSH comes to mind which is undervalued currently in my opinion for their growth). Of course marketing/advertising/research firms are other candidates. About capital heavy firms, don't discount them completely, one would need to look through to their pricing power. In the short to medium term, capex might not significantly affect some of these firms especially if their assets are long lived. Combined with that if they are able to increase their prices, that could be a significant inflation hedge. Take a look at some of BAM's assets, they have inflation protections in built into their contracts. Yes they are capital heavy, but their Assets are very long dated and don't require replacing all that often. Insurance companies: They are getting killed right now because their reinvestment rates are the lowest in a generation. High inflation implies higher interest rates and reinvestment returns improve. Asset Managers: Have fee based income. Are "people" firms. They are not totally an inflation hedge, but I can see them continuing their margins and cash flow.

BPY fits that thinly traded bill then. 1.5 bill market cap, 80 mill shares outstanding, approximately 80-90K of that trades each day on average @$20 so average daily turnover approx $1.5 mill. If his portfolio is $8 mill => $2 million position, it takes time to accumulate without moving market. Also he mentioned something about "...putting to work crap loads of money", these guys have demonstrated for years how they can put to work crap loads of money ($180 bill or so in AUM for BAM) and they are asking for more funds to put to work..