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I'm apologize in advance if I upset some of you fine people with this post. Why do you guys mess with around with all these apps when you can just use Excel. We're doing serious work here and that's a professional tool. When a mechanic works on an engine he doesn't use the light or pretty tool or the fancy tool. He uses the professional tool that gets the job done right. Why is this stuff any different. On this thread people are freaking out because google will discontinue this functionality or the other. You don't have that with the professional tools (Excel). Nobody worries that their vlookups are gonna stop working tomorrow. So let's get serious about this stuff and use proper tools.

Is there any reason why you guys are so focused on google sheets?

I don't think it works with google sheets. Pretty sure it's just for excel.

Have you thought about using excel with the IB API? What does the IB api provide? It does lots of things. You can even trade from excel. But you can definitely set up stock lists and then pull prices and quotes from IB. That's very easy to do. If you're a coder I'm thinking that you can do many cool things above and beyond that. I have an IB account but I don't pay for the real-time data feeds. Is the API still available, or is it only for paying data customers? Thanks. The API is available for everyone it's not tied to data. It's basically meant so you can use a lot of TWS without being in TWS. Since IB started offering free delayed data, my guess without a market data subscription when you pull data you'll just pull the delayed market data.

Have you thought about using excel with the IB API? What does the IB api provide? It does lots of things. You can even trade from excel. But you can definitely set up stock lists and then pull prices and quotes from IB. That's very easy to do. If you're a coder I'm thinking that you can do many cool things above and beyond that.

Have you thought about using excel with the IB API?

I got housewives asking about bitcoin and eager to get in on the action.

SD, as I understand it you are a Canadian so I will address this for the Canadian point of view. Firstly, you are wrong that you are not taxed on FX for personal use. FX is taxed in Canada. It doesn't matter if it's for personal use or not. The CRA is not unclear about this. There is a small exemption. FX gains and losses under $200 CAD do not have to be reported - this intended to exempt most of the personal FX use. If the gain/loss the exceeds $200 CAD the whole gain/loss has to be reported and is taxed. It can be taxed as capital gain or income depending on the circumstance. Secondly, crypto currency in Canada is considered a security not a currency. So no $200 exemption as for FX. You need to report income/losses like you would for a stock. Thirdly, the offshore scenario you describe is impossible. There is no such thing as an entity that exists purely in cyberspace. Every legal entity exists in a legal and geographic jurisdiction. Furthermore Canada has very strict rules about offshore money. You need to have legitimate offshore command and control over the funds. That's expensive and you cannot have anything at all to be with the money, otherwise it becomes very taxable. Of course, you could do x,y, and z and hope that the government doesn't find out. But that doesn't fall into the legal bucket and is another cup of tea.

I'm not sure about the US but FX is most definitely taxable in Canada. Where your stuff exists doesn't matter.

I just default to morningstar now. TWS with the reuters add-in works very well (has more data too) and is quite cheap. Of course this means that you need to have TWS open. I liked google finance cause I can just do a quick lookup without needing to have TWS running.

I haven't heard from them but took a quick look. Snazzy website. Looks like a private REIT (an alarm bell goes gets warmed up to ring). Almost everywhere I try to go on their website they require me to create an account with the company. That's weird. Now the bell rings. Ok on to the SEC we go to look them up. Yea ok they're a ripoff gang. Their properties earn 7.4% gross rent yield. Gross rent/value of properties. Then there's the advisor. The advisor receives. 1. 3% of the value of property purchases (read your capital) up front 2. 1.2% of property values per year (they list it as 0.1% per month. clever.) 3. 1% of all mortgage financing 4. Maintenance fees: all mentainance costs reinbursed plus 1.5% of gross rents 5. 6% of gross rents for being a leasing agent 6. etc There's probably more fees but I gave up since I got the gist of it. Fees to affiliates in 2016 were almost as much as rent. General and Admin were almost 2x rent. No wonder these uncles are rich, they have all your money.

I hope a google bot is following this thread. ;D

Note I wrote paradise papers, not panama papers. Paradise papers was all legal, even the leftwing propaganda machines admit that, it's just that the general populace doesn't think it's fair. Plus the "journalists" (thieves) that "acquired" (stole) the papers from the law firm are not condemned at all for their heighnous act. They publically shared private information obtained by theft against the will of those involved. Such honourable people. And myself? I'm much too small a fish to setup tax structures liked that without the costs exceeding the savings. No true. Of course the law differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but in Canada it is illegal not to report foreign bank accounts and holding and income thereof. There are a number of people in Canada that are in hot criminal water because of revelations from the paradise papers. I'm that's true for other jurisdictions. So no, it was not all legal. Also I'm not a lawyer but leaking company documents I think lies more in the firing offense bucket than the criminal offense bucket. Publishing materials someone dropped in your mail box is also perfectly legal and does not constitute theft. Even I know that.

Oh crap! This is devastating. It's now only 20% above where it was last week. I can't believe it. That may be true. But stores of value are not supposed to do that and this thread is about bitcoin as a store of value not how much money you've made on bitcoin.

Oh look... Bitcoin drops 20% in hours. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-29/wild-bitcoin-ride-erases-2-200-in-five-hours-after-record-rally Feel the store of value.

HA! Republicans being hypocritical. That's a new one lol. Anyway, I think this may have some significant impacts in some corners. On this corner for example I think Berkshire will divest of a good chunk of Wells Fargo before this passes through.

There is no reason a government couldn't issue money on a blockchain. But you know they would never relinquish control over it. It wouldn't be a mined public blockchain, it would be a private blockchain running on government servers. They would have complete control and could issue new units at will just as they do now only they would have perfect record keeping over who owns what and where they got it from. It's the IRS's dream come true. Man I really hope this happens. No more panama/paradise papers! They could also freeze the entire economy and everyone's assets simply by shutting down their servers. A hacker/terrorist could do so as well. That's not really much different than what we have today in developed economies. The currencies are basically electronic. In Canada last time I checked physical currency made about 5-7% of money. In the US it's probably more because there's a lot of mattresses stuffed with 100 dollar bills abroad but for the real economy i suspect it's in line with Canada. On top of that you have central clearing at the Fed. So the Fed essentially is aware of all of the transactions. This doesn't impact the tax situation much because the Fed doesn't share the data with the IRS. Furthermore, If you were to shut down the Fed's clearing servers you will create chaos in the economy. That's why the clearing system is designed to be highly resilient.

I think you guys are getting some stuff confused. The economic store of value function of currency is about stability. Basically that you can expect to buy roughly the same amount of goods as today at some point in the next too distant future. That's why central banks strive for low and stable inflation. Anything that goes up/down more than a bit in value is not a good store of value by definition. Btw, gold is also not a good store of value. Along with a host of actual currencies.

It's usually done in the last couple of trading days. I always keep an eye on the markets on new years eve.

I'll second that. There's no value in reading the book. If you want to know about Donald Trump is look and listen to him. It's not like he's a reserved fella.

I'm not sure about I would be so excite about these. Regarding the banks. You're talking about banks in a jurisdiction that is bankrupt and was bankrupt before disaster struck. It's also safe to assume that a lot of the collateral was destroyed. Moreover they operate in a jurisdiction that was facing a lot of emigration which is likely to increase. This is a horrible environment for a bank. Haven't checked lately but a year or so ago Korean banks were trading at those valuations without the gory details. As for the tech outsourcing shop. It's hard to do a lot of tech stuff without electricity. I don't know the outfit but my guess is it doesn't have a lot of power over it's customers and its main thing was cheap labour on the island. Probably the labour that is or will be emigrating so not very promising growth prospects. Their clients are probably not thrilled about the power outages either. It's really sad, but honestly Puerto Rico is probably way more screwed than Greece.

Yeah, gotta be one of the stupidest f'ing things in the proposal. There's nothing stupid about it. I suspect it's actually pretty smart. This provision should bump up tax receipts from capital gains. That in turn will help with scoring of the bill and parliamentary procedures/restrictions (the 1.5 trillion cap). Scoring is similar to saving... every little helps.

There's also the possibility that intelligent life is relatively new in the universe and we may be among the first. Or there are other intelligent species that are developing roughly at the same pace as us. The hard to fathom distances preventing contact. Intelligent life takes time to develop. To get that time you need a period of galactic calm. As the galaxy was a lot more violent in its (not too distant) youth intelligent life had a much lower probability of developing as well as surviving.

Yes you are exactly correct in the paragraph above. The conclusion I draw is that we have not been visited, or at least we are no longer being visited. My personal opinion based on nothing concrete is that intelligent life is rarer than most scientists think and we may be the only intelligent species in the Milkyway right now. There are surely others in other galaxies (there are just too many of them to think otherwise), but we may have this one to ourselves. Or it could be that the theory of relativity is the final authority on space travel. So it's impossible or impractical for intelligent intelligent species to meet. It may be that there's a lot (relatively speaking) of intelligent species out there but we were never meant to hang.

The balance sheet gets a "reset" to zero, everything "left" [so far] goes into the income statement. It's IFRS accounting. So something along the lines of an extraordinary loss for that year? Thanks again! There should be any extraordinary loss if this is indeed a leasehold improvement. As far as I remember the accounting rules the depreciation should be based on the economic life of the improvement or the term of the lease - whichever is shorter. So at the end of the lease the asset should be zero because it's all been depreciated away. You may want to doublecheck that though. Look at note 1 or note 2 of the FS.