SmallCap

how?

i have used the importXML function to import option data from Yahoo for a few years but for the last few months it isn't working and from looking around it seems that yahoo did away with this functionality. I am trying to find another solution for options data, the only thing I have found is the ability to import the data for the next 3 months of options from NASDAX. Any other solutions out there?

There has been at lot made of the assumption that self driving cars will replace truckers, taxi/uber drivers and others in the transportation industry so I started thinking about other smaller areas where similar tech will replace jobs. I was wondering when these techs would arrive at the point of serious impact. So the measure I am using of serious impact is the date that tech will replace 50% of the current jobs, to put it another way if there are currently 1 mil jobs in the US of cutting grass then what is the date that there will only be 500K jobs cutting grass. So what order do you expect these jobs to be affected by tech Cutting Grass Pickup trucks plowing out parking lots and driveways Municipal level snow plowing Forklift driving Airline pilot Truck driver Taxi/uber driver - TAS Fedex/UPS driver USPS delivery person If you want to go further, what year do you expect that tech will replace 50% of the jobs?

Thinking about teaching my kids the fundamentals of investing and by that I don't mean the fundamentals of the financial markets, I mean the fundamentals of buying a $1 for $0.50 and either waiting for it to be recognized or selling it in a different market/different way to realize the $1 value. FYI my kids are currently 8,6,4 I would love to show them how to be able to buy something tangible and either add value to it or realize the value through marketing/selling. It is a combination of investing/entrepreneurialism. where would you look for opportunities that involve tangible items, under $100 price point, where there possibly is a scaleability issue that would prevent big money from dealing with it. They are currently learning how to do work for others (outside of family) and get paid for it. And that's great as far as it goes so they now have some savings but I would like to help them learn how to make their money work for them instead of just working for money. Any ideas or input?

I live over on the other side of the state of Michigan in the town of Holland on the shores of lake Michigan. I have had some simple success with walking into the assessors office and asking him to take a look at the value of a property. I bought a house for 34K and it had a taxable value of 58K so I walked in and asked him to look at it and he came back with a taxable value of 29K :) One cool thing about Michigan is that as long as I hold it the taxable value can only go up by the rate of inflation. So even thought I put 12K into the house and it's now worth 140K-160K, the taxable value is only 31K. Also if anyone is curious I am currently renting this house out for 1200. My tax bill is $1853 and insurance is 650.

Some really good thoughts here, thanks for the input. Johnny, good thoughts on the entire "collectibles market" DTEJD1997, I wonder what I could teach my 8 year old about investing by doing some investing in very low end coins. SharperDingaan, brilliant statement "The money in collectibles is in recycling them, not holding them." I am thinking of selling the coins that I have that are worth over say $10 and keeping the rest for no good reason, they might be interesting for my kids to see I have no idea what to do with my stamps, probably no stamp that I have is worth over $10

A couple of anecdotal observations and some questions that result. I remember reading some old investment books from the 80's and they advocated a portion, say 10% of your investments be in collectibles, they primarily recommended coins. They could point to some very consistent and nice returns on those collectibles over the previous 50+ years. What do you think, does this have any relevance to investing today? My father and I collected a bunch of coins and stamps during the 80's and he justified it based on the long history of steady increases in the values of coins and stamps. But looking at it now it seems like that was the high point for prices and the have trended down since then. Baseball cards have followed the same path but more dramatically. The trend seems to be general down since the 80's and from what I have heard, values dropped a lot in 08 and they haven't recovered since. Not counting bullion values, do you see any change in these trends or reasons why collectibles deserve a place in your investment plans? Now let me take this to my situation personally, I have kept those coins and stamps in boxes in storage for a long time. I haven't really kept up with the market until now. I originally assumed that it was worth holding onto because they would just increase in value. I had a very vague idea of doing something with them with my kids. But now that I have kids at that age I am questioning if I want to really get them involved in collecting and my desire to keep things around that aren't benefiting me somehow has greatly decreased as I have loved decluttering my life. what are your thoughts? outside of sentimental value is there any real reason to keep these boxes of coins and stamps?

Nate, do you happen to have a link to the American Heart Association's diet advice from the 1990?

Your right I don't think that anyone here has read some other posters well thought through argument on a topic and suddenly smacked their head with their palm and said, "wow, they are so right and I am so wrong, now I am thinking straight" That doesn't happen, especially among people who have considered these issues in the past. Here is what does happen, I read someones well thought through and argued post and their opinion is different then mine, I at the time acknowledge that they do have a point and it makes me start the process of rethinking my own thoughts. For any intelligent thoughtful person this doesn't happen in 5 minutes, we would never be ready to concede that we were wrong all these years. But the seed of a new thought sticks in our heads for days, weeks, months, years. We read more topics on it that call our original thinking into question and possibly reinforce that posters point. Finally a long time later my thinking and opinion have changed but by that time I usually have forgotten all about that original post that started me thinking and I think that I have come to this way of thinking all by myself or I convince myself that I have really always thought this way. So it seems pointless because we never see dramatic conversions but there are conversions, they are just slow. Also on any thread like this the majority of posts are worthless but there are golden ones in there and we don't always know which ones. I sometimes get tired of sifting through the trash on a thread like this but then someone comes along and explains something that is outside of my existing echo chamber and explain it in a way that makes sense.

I have pretty much lived without debt my entire life. no college debt (never went) paid cash for each of my cars (most expensive of which was 8K) Paid cash for my first home at age 26 (simple 3/1 ranch for 125K) have moved 4 times since then (bought all of them from HUD foreclosures) and each house I made a nice profit on because of making them much nicer then when I bought them. Only times i have been in debt is a 12K balance on a 0% CC for an investment into my business, (paid off before interest started) and a 50K LOC on my house to buy a rental (paid off in 4 years from the rental So yeah I think it's very doable, but it takes some shifts in thinking and practice. And if your thinking that I had help from family, Nope, My dad died when I was 12 and had no insurance, I and my two brothers supported our family working through our teen years to support the family. Age 7-10 I had a paper route Age 8-12 I had a snow shoveling route Age 9 I started helping my older brother with his lawn mowing business on the side I would get my own jobs of leaf raking, wood stacking, cleanup and whatever else was needed. in my teens i started working full time and by 17 was doing 60-80 hours a week. I spent very very little of it beside helping the family out but even then I was able to save. by age 12 when my dad died I had saved up 4-5K and it was earning nice interest, at age 14 I became interested in investing and learned about mutual funds and started investing everything I could in them. At age 20 I skipped mutual funds and started investing in stocks. I have never bought a new house, car, bike, appliance and never really felt like I was missing out on anything. So yeah it's doable but it takes some shifts in thinking

This when combined with the cubs winning the WS and the election debacle can only point to one thing... the end is near. ;)

Trump supporters say that a vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Hillary. Hillary Supporters say that a vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Trump. How does that actually work???? Is one of them right or are they both wrong? If only one of them is right then which is it and why?

Until after the US election, macro is just politics now. So your saying that after 6 months of pointlessly arguing about the election, in a few more weeks we can go back to pointlessly arguing about macro economics. Yay, I'm in! Anything is better then this election.

Agree with this... But also think that presidents do have influence over the economy but that influence doesn't necessarily line up with their term in office. Their influence lives on far into the next presidency and it's very hard to tell exactly where their influence starts and stops.

Could someone explain what the difference is between a bubble and a market top?

one of the many benefits of living in Holland Michigan is New Holland brewery and the many other micro breweries that it has spawned and inspired. I love NHB and its poet stout but have hung out more at our brewery which is 3 doors down from NHB and has no national distribution but some really great beers.

Nate, I am a retail customer but also own two small businesses but not ones that I have needed a loan for equipment, I have raised money from investors but not banks so your right there is a need for local people. I am not questioning the need for local bricks and mortar, I go to the bricks and mortar around 3 times a year for some of those needs that you mentioned. I don't see a time of doing away with all branches what I am questioning is the continued proliferation of branches even when they have two other branches in the same city of 35K, those times i need a bank I can drive a few minutes to see an actual person.

In my small town of Holland Michigan we have a plethora of bank and credit union branches sprinkled throughout the city but what surprises me is that this last year they have built 3 new ones. I don't understand why they are building more bricks and mortar branches. Some of these branches are from banks that have other branches within 5 miles. Personally I almost never go to a bank branch, haven't for many years and I just don't understand who exactly uses the branches and why banks need all these branches. Does it seem to anyone else that the branches per capita ratio has grown dramatically over the last 20 years? here is someone saying that trend is coming to an end. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/future-retail-banking-thorsten-linz?trk=eml-b2_content_ecosystem_digest-hero-14-null&midToken=AQET-U9lvg_BlA&fromEmail=fromEmail&ut=11HRySb09zl7k1 what does this mean for everything from small town banks that Nate talks about all the way up to BOA?

Is there a place to find an overview of what traffic currently goes through the canal? from and to which ports, is it asia to NY or asia to europe? What are the major categories of stuff being moved through there currently? I don't think it will change the pattern of what and where things are being sent but will just increase those current patterns.

listening recently to the Vlogbrothers (youtube) discus the "fact" of global climate change (or global warming, take your pick) and while I agree with some of what they said and have some skepticism on other things they said, it made me wonder "what if". What if everything that this cloud of experts is saying is true and we are in for some unprecedented change in our weather patterns (i am deliberately being a bit vague)? Now please, please don't take this thread into a discussion of whether these facts and experts are right or not or whether we are going to have significant climate change, Lets just go forward with the assumption that they are generally correct in their assumptions. I know that there is wide variations in those assumptions but you get the idea. we've already had thread discussing our opinions on whether these things will happen or not. Lets assume that they are and will happen and lets also assume that humans are significantly contributing to it and that humans won't make widespread change until there are significant obvious consequences. So keeping those assumptions in mind and that this is the type of future that we are all going to live in, if you truly believed all this how would you live your life. Not how would you try to change the world but how would you live your life. Reason I am asking this is that I see what I consider to be strange behavior on the part of the people who say they believe in this future. Extreme example but I would think that some of these people would start investing in coastal property in northern Alaska, Canada and Siberia instead of continuing to buy and live in Florida and NYC. It seems that while they are predicting a dire future just a few years down the road, it seems that most of them aren't making some common sense changes in their own life to both thrive and even benefit from these coming changes. So my question to all of you is given the assumptions I laid out, how would you change YOUR life to both thrive and benefit from these significant global changes? I'm looking for more then what companies you would invest in, though that would be interesting, but things like where and how would you life, what education would you get, what resources would you accumulate?

We were married 10 years ago and the cost was around 5K We had around 200 people but we also had these advantages the wedding was in a church that she attended, the reception was in the new wing that the church had just added and was amazingly sized just right for the reception. We had plenty of food at the reception but it wasn't a sit down meal with assigned seating because we preferred a lot of mingling and conversation. Net cost of facilities $0 My sister happens to be an amazing seamstress who did the wedding dress. cost -400 for material largest expense - photographer - and she was worth it in my opinion next largest expense - flowers - we overdid it here because we had live flowers in hanging arrangements lining the center isle, it was beautiful but we and family and some guest got to enjoy those flowers for the rest of the summer. Looking back I'm not sure i would change much in how we spent money, I'm not sure spending more would have made it any better.

Just remove the home interest tax deduction completely. that will make it simpler and fairer. I see no reason why we need a home interest tax deduction. People say it's a middle class tax break, but really its a tax code benefit for the banking system not for the people.

Does anyone else besides me start losing interest in your investments when there are 2 up weeks in a row in the market. there has to be a name for a disorder like that but I'm not sure what it is.

Powerball: a progressive tax on ignorance; the more you have, the more you pay.

A new Asus laptop with decent specs and incredibly long battery life for $89 from best buy - still don't know how I did that one.