It would be foolish to think whatever acumen you may have will out perform and consistently perform as well as a well managed fund.
Several things to note here. First, a "well managed fund" is not HFT. HFT is a very specialized category of trading.
Second, even a well managed fund has the primary goal of maximizing the profits of the managers of the fund. This is a fundamental conflict of interest which inevitably costs the investor to some degree. They are a middle man with overhead, sometimes enough overhead to make them a poorer choice than buying blindly on the stock market. The practice of "thrashing" or generating trade volume at the expense of the investor just to increase management revenue is another such problem.
Third, just figuring out which fund is "well managed" brings in pretty much the same effort that one would need to evaluate stocks by themselves. It's particularly difficult since you really only find out a fund was any good in hindsight. And the tricks that they use to make profit (many which you just don't know about), just might not work any more in a change of economic (particularly transitioning from a growing economy to one in crisis).
So it may well be worth your while to put your money in a well managed fund rather than invest it yourself, but it's not as clear cut as you claim.
Dark matter and dark energy have to be made of something.
Dark energy isn't made of anything. It's the shape of space. Although it is worth noting that curvature isn't one of those things treated by the Standard Model.
As to dark matter, it's always possible that dark matter is some sort of particle we already have, maybe, for example, a huge number of extremely low energy neutrinos.
Unfortunately, that it is incomplete is about all the hell we've got at this point. The LHC has basically been ruling proposed SUSY models out unceasingly, and if we're unlucky and New Physics lies past 14TeV, it will likely be a damn long time until we discover it because the LHC took up the theoretical physics budgets of nearly every nation that does theoretical physics for the better part of a decade to build, and they already had the tunnel. To make significant advances with a successor hadron accelerator we'd be talking about building something at least several times larger and the obstacles are enormous... Staggering costs, the irradiation of the inner detectors, data processing, construction times stretching into multiple decades. Not to mention that the LHC consumed most of the world's supply of helium for years on end.
I guess we'll just have to figure out how to do the next generation collider cheaper then.
It's worth noting here that it is mostly a fed problem not an investor problem. I've read a number of discussions on Intrade. They are concerned to a degree about such things as insider trading and whether Intrade will be around to return their money, they aren't concerned at all about whether Intrade is heavily regulated by the federal government.
When I talk about a family saving an average $150 each month, that's net income.
When I talk about that $150 each month and entertainment and all that other nonessential expenses, I'm speaking of net income. Else you are mixing the costs of running a family with other costs.
An established company may issue dividends to shareholders
Which doesn't count against net income.
Thinking about what HP paid is the whole point of this thread!
And maybe you ought to start doing it then.
Quite the opposite. Regardless of what HP paid, fraud is still fraud, and that it succeeded means somebody wasn't doing their due diligence properly. That's why it's a big deal. Autonomy's actual financial problems aren't currently "an issue", but the attempts to hide the problems from HP are. Similarly, 3PAR is losing money, but it's not an issue because they aren't hiding that fact.
"Quite the opposite"? Something needs to be opposite in order for that phrase to have any meaning. Not doing due diligence on a big purchase is a big sign that a business is doing repeatable mistakes, especially when it happens several times.
There is a saying in astronomy that you cannot compare ground-observatory project costs to space-observatory project costs (every grad student ever has pointed out "for the cost of HST, imagine the huge telescope we could have built on the ground!" only to be rebuked with "space dollars are not the same as ground dollars). Similarly, military dollars are not the same as space dollars are not the same as ground dollars. Otherwise, one could naively say "for just the cost of one F22, we could have paid for XYZ science program by now."
And that's one reason why I divide the cost of a NASA project by ten to get a better idea of how much the project actually costs. Because one really could get a lot for the cost of a F22 ($150 million), but not from NASA.
Detecting CFCs applies well if you imagine that aliens are human-like.
Well, in what way are they "human-like"? CFCs can work over a wide temperature range. And their chemical stability means that they would be relatively non-toxic.
. CFCs are entirely artificial, with no known natural process capable of creating them in atmospheres.
Odds are good we'll find at least trace amounts of CFCs in the lunar crust. Any volcanism with high concentrations of chlorine, fluorine, and carbon can create CFCs.
How is it morally right to limit the compensation for someone who has been wronged?
How is it morally right to compensate people who haven't been wronged? Keep in mind that liability, particularly in the US, has gone well out of control with vast costs imposed on mundane technologies such as ladders or fire extinguishers simply because stupid people are allowed to pass the cost of their stupidity onto groups with bigger pockets.
I'm just wondering why the hell simply having money to invest is rewarded more than actually doing work.
Not only does it apply in the real world, it also applies in the gaming world. Passive income is always superior to grind income. I believe it's because it's more challenging to make money with money than it is just to work and get paid. There's somewhere around six billion people playing the grind game in the real world. There aren't so many people playing the money game (and succeeding at it).
Ignoring US law isn't illegal where Intrade resides. Ireland != United States.
Detecting, policing and prosecuting fraud is by no means an easy job. Prosecuting Intrade only makes their job easier in allowing them go after the traders, and it should be their priority as they are the corporation perpetrating mass fraud not the traders.
This is libel since there is no evidence supporting fraud on the part of Intrade or even accusations of fraud by Intrade. It's just something you made up.
My view on this as a former Intrade trader (who still has a small amount of money in the market simply because I haven't bothered to remove it) is that this is a vast and unconstitutional overreach of the US government. The simple solution is simply to remove the US government's ability to prohibit such markets.
If your workforce is more productive it offsets taxes and cheaper, less productive labor.
Well, what makes US labor more productive? It's not the massive costs and regulations that the US has put on employing people. Fair taxation and less inequity doesn't do it either.
I was alive before the EPA was established, you can't believe how toxic the air was back then.
Or how much the US economy grew before the days of the EPA?
Let India and China have the industries run by unpatriotic sociopaths that don't mind killing people.
In other words, let India and China have the future.
It took about a millennium for most of the regions that made up the former Roman empire to reach the sort of achievements that Romans took for granted such as public sanitation.
But governments aren't individuals. There is no inherent goodness to ensuring its continued existence (especially if you buy into the extreme libertarian position that government is evil and can do no good). Being attached to particular governments is nationalism and patriotism. It's petty irrational emotional attachment.
It's not being stupid. Government like anything else is infrastructure. If the infrastructure has negative value, say because the government is oriented towards enslaving and killing you, then sure, ending the government has net benefit. But deliberately accumulating debt and dissolving a government in order to avoid paying that debt is just a rather destructive form of default and already fits into the "personal household debt" model in the case where the person burns the house down in a murder-suicide.
One doesn't need "irrational emotional attachment" to avoid patently stupid and self-destructive behavior.
No, the end result is not the same. If a private household (individual) collapses, there's no replacement.
Sure, there is. Bankruptcy is the way.
Sticks and stones man. History backs Keynes up. All the great empires, empires that accomplish things worth writing about, tried to keep growth high. Climb over a mountain of corpses if you have to (Empires often did). Even if the mountain collapses and you come crashing down after, the important thing is to aim higher and higher.
Well, then start naming examples. As I see it, Keynesian economics is just a fad of the 1930s that continues to be political useful because it rationalizes unsupervised public spending. And for the record, I already consider the empires that collapsed by "aiming higher and higher" to be counterexamples to your lofty, but fatuous idealism.
Businesses should operate the same way. Just replace "growth" with "profit". There is no such thing as not enough profit. Always push for more. Push and push until you cannot push no more. If the business collapses, close it down and start again. Likewise, if government collapses, just start a new government.
Business should "operate" the same way even if that means considerable loss of profit? I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
No, there is tremendous long term benefit. Again, governments come and go. Austerity is driven by an emotional attachment to keeping one particular government (or set of political parties - the Ds and Rs in this case), prolonging it instead of letting it fail gracefully so a new - and better - government can replace it.
I get the impression you think that getting a new government is like peeling a few more sheets off a roll of toilet paper. When one changes a government, there is squandering of infrastructure, wealth, and often lives. How does that advance your economy? At the very least, all that debt is defaulted on and the lenders get screwed. There is no "graceful failure".
From a Keynesian perspective ideally you have one team that improves roads and a second team that hits holes into the road.
In other words, a deeply flawed perspective that ignores a large opportunity cost. Why should we take "war Keynesianism" seriously?
War keynesians is high public investment in the armed forces and the production of war. That stimulates the economy.
That tactic simulates to some degree the part of the economy that produces war gear. It doesn't simulate parts of the economy that don't. It's also worth noting that the war part of that particular activity helped kill millions of people and turn Europe and the Far East into rubble.
That would explain why nobody has actually observed it in exhaust in the last century plus that people have been looking at such things with spectroscopy, which is why this entire discussion is so incredibly stupid.
Such as who? You're the only person here making that assertion. I think it more likely that you just messed up your measurement in some way, such as not seeing uranium because you weren't looking for it.
Why not write something useful about the topic instead of just some insults and a ludicrously incorrect calculation for the banana dose. How did you botch it so badly? Ore mined for uranium has less than the number you came up with.
Show what was wrong with the calculation. Some vague whining that it doesn't match with your vague impression of what reality should be like, isn't a useful criticism.
Or what? The sky will fall in and the US will go bankrupt? Civilisation will cease?
Yes. Not instantly, of course. Rome didn't die in a day.
You've been fed the biggest, most damaging lie of the last four years, which is government debt works the same as personal household debt. It doesn't.
And I see you've swallowed the bigger and more damaging error that government debt works sufficiently differently that an analogy doesn't work. Instead, we find that the analogy is fairly sound. If government does massively borrow, it does have options not available to a household. But in practice, these methods turn out to be equivalent to what a private household does. The end result is the same. Either debt stabilizes at some level or the borrower defaults though there is more nuance to how governments can choose to default on debt (for example, inflating the currency which their debt is valued in).
Deficits aren't the issue here. They go up, they go down
Only if one ignores the relative size of the "go up" and "go down" portions. For example, publicly held debt owed by the US federal government has increased to just over 100% of the GDP of the US. Of this, about half happened in the last 5 years with the real estate crisis and subsequent spending surge.
Keynes taught us that deficits are structural, and more or less look after themselves. The key is to keep growth as high as possible.
Well, Keynes was a duplicitous idiot and who has been keeping growth as "high" as possible? Certainly, not the current administration which has been following the Keynesian playbook as much as it can, given the considerable incompetence of the administration.
The US is recovering a shedload faster than the Eurozone and the UK because so far it hasn't bought into the austerity argument.
What recovery? Economic activity on paper has increased. But it will go away the moment that spending does. The federal government needs to spend by about one trillion dollars more than revenue just to keep the US economic activity at current levels. There's no long term benefit just an ongoing drain on society that only goes away when one embraces "austerity".
(*) in fact is demonstrates the lack of cohesion and ethnic union in US society that makes difficult to build the solidarity to support universal healthcare protection.
Ever wonder how that lack of cohesion came about? I'd say it was created through policies such as the current health care changes, which pits groups against each other. You can't have unity in games where defection and non-cooperation is rewarded more than cooperation.
Slashdot Mirror
You've got to show the calculations first
I did, Here and here. Where's your sources?
It would be foolish to think whatever acumen you may have will out perform and consistently perform as well as a well managed fund.
Several things to note here. First, a "well managed fund" is not HFT. HFT is a very specialized category of trading.
Second, even a well managed fund has the primary goal of maximizing the profits of the managers of the fund. This is a fundamental conflict of interest which inevitably costs the investor to some degree. They are a middle man with overhead, sometimes enough overhead to make them a poorer choice than buying blindly on the stock market. The practice of "thrashing" or generating trade volume at the expense of the investor just to increase management revenue is another such problem.
Third, just figuring out which fund is "well managed" brings in pretty much the same effort that one would need to evaluate stocks by themselves. It's particularly difficult since you really only find out a fund was any good in hindsight. And the tricks that they use to make profit (many which you just don't know about), just might not work any more in a change of economic (particularly transitioning from a growing economy to one in crisis).
So it may well be worth your while to put your money in a well managed fund rather than invest it yourself, but it's not as clear cut as you claim.
Dark matter and dark energy have to be made of something.
Dark energy isn't made of anything. It's the shape of space. Although it is worth noting that curvature isn't one of those things treated by the Standard Model.
As to dark matter, it's always possible that dark matter is some sort of particle we already have, maybe, for example, a huge number of extremely low energy neutrinos.
Unfortunately, that it is incomplete is about all the hell we've got at this point. The LHC has basically been ruling proposed SUSY models out unceasingly, and if we're unlucky and New Physics lies past 14TeV, it will likely be a damn long time until we discover it because the LHC took up the theoretical physics budgets of nearly every nation that does theoretical physics for the better part of a decade to build, and they already had the tunnel. To make significant advances with a successor hadron accelerator we'd be talking about building something at least several times larger and the obstacles are enormous... Staggering costs, the irradiation of the inner detectors, data processing, construction times stretching into multiple decades. Not to mention that the LHC consumed most of the world's supply of helium for years on end.
I guess we'll just have to figure out how to do the next generation collider cheaper then.
and steel wheels on steel rail are hard to beat.
Float the cargo.
HFT is not magic trade. There's plenty of room for traders who don't compete with it directly.
It's worth noting here that it is mostly a fed problem not an investor problem. I've read a number of discussions on Intrade. They are concerned to a degree about such things as insider trading and whether Intrade will be around to return their money, they aren't concerned at all about whether Intrade is heavily regulated by the federal government.
2005 is before 2010. What's the CFTC's basis for their accusation now?
This not a matter of prohibition but regulation.
Prohibition is a variation of regulation.
If you cannot detect the potential issues at stake you do not deserve to trade.
Then don't trade. Leave that to knowledgeable traders and get out of the way.
When I talk about a family saving an average $150 each month, that's net income.
When I talk about that $150 each month and entertainment and all that other nonessential expenses, I'm speaking of net income. Else you are mixing the costs of running a family with other costs.
An established company may issue dividends to shareholders
Which doesn't count against net income.
Thinking about what HP paid is the whole point of this thread!
And maybe you ought to start doing it then.
Quite the opposite. Regardless of what HP paid, fraud is still fraud, and that it succeeded means somebody wasn't doing their due diligence properly. That's why it's a big deal. Autonomy's actual financial problems aren't currently "an issue", but the attempts to hide the problems from HP are. Similarly, 3PAR is losing money, but it's not an issue because they aren't hiding that fact.
"Quite the opposite"? Something needs to be opposite in order for that phrase to have any meaning. Not doing due diligence on a big purchase is a big sign that a business is doing repeatable mistakes, especially when it happens several times.
Would a gyro chamber(spins around enough to simulate slight gravity) for sleeping work?
My understanding is that this has been tried and it does help a little. I don't have a citation for it however.
Am I the only one who thinks there is something simply "wrong" with all this?
Obviously not, but it is worth noting that those spy satellites provide more value for the money spent to the US than NASA's space-related activities.
There is a saying in astronomy that you cannot compare ground-observatory project costs to space-observatory project costs (every grad student ever has pointed out "for the cost of HST, imagine the huge telescope we could have built on the ground!" only to be rebuked with "space dollars are not the same as ground dollars). Similarly, military dollars are not the same as space dollars are not the same as ground dollars. Otherwise, one could naively say "for just the cost of one F22, we could have paid for XYZ science program by now."
And that's one reason why I divide the cost of a NASA project by ten to get a better idea of how much the project actually costs. Because one really could get a lot for the cost of a F22 ($150 million), but not from NASA.
Detecting CFCs applies well if you imagine that aliens are human-like.
Well, in what way are they "human-like"? CFCs can work over a wide temperature range. And their chemical stability means that they would be relatively non-toxic.
. CFCs are entirely artificial, with no known natural process capable of creating them in atmospheres.
Odds are good we'll find at least trace amounts of CFCs in the lunar crust. Any volcanism with high concentrations of chlorine, fluorine, and carbon can create CFCs.
How is it morally right to limit the compensation for someone who has been wronged?
How is it morally right to compensate people who haven't been wronged? Keep in mind that liability, particularly in the US, has gone well out of control with vast costs imposed on mundane technologies such as ladders or fire extinguishers simply because stupid people are allowed to pass the cost of their stupidity onto groups with bigger pockets.
I'm just wondering why the hell simply having money to invest is rewarded more than actually doing work.
Not only does it apply in the real world, it also applies in the gaming world. Passive income is always superior to grind income. I believe it's because it's more challenging to make money with money than it is just to work and get paid. There's somewhere around six billion people playing the grind game in the real world. There aren't so many people playing the money game (and succeeding at it).
Detecting, policing and prosecuting fraud is by no means an easy job. Prosecuting Intrade only makes their job easier in allowing them go after the traders, and it should be their priority as they are the corporation perpetrating mass fraud not the traders.
This is libel since there is no evidence supporting fraud on the part of Intrade or even accusations of fraud by Intrade. It's just something you made up.
My view on this as a former Intrade trader (who still has a small amount of money in the market simply because I haven't bothered to remove it) is that this is a vast and unconstitutional overreach of the US government. The simple solution is simply to remove the US government's ability to prohibit such markets.
If your workforce is more productive it offsets taxes and cheaper, less productive labor.
Well, what makes US labor more productive? It's not the massive costs and regulations that the US has put on employing people. Fair taxation and less inequity doesn't do it either.
I was alive before the EPA was established, you can't believe how toxic the air was back then.
Or how much the US economy grew before the days of the EPA?
Let India and China have the industries run by unpatriotic sociopaths that don't mind killing people.
In other words, let India and China have the future.
Rome died, but civilization didn't.
It took about a millennium for most of the regions that made up the former Roman empire to reach the sort of achievements that Romans took for granted such as public sanitation.
But governments aren't individuals. There is no inherent goodness to ensuring its continued existence (especially if you buy into the extreme libertarian position that government is evil and can do no good). Being attached to particular governments is nationalism and patriotism. It's petty irrational emotional attachment.
It's not being stupid. Government like anything else is infrastructure. If the infrastructure has negative value, say because the government is oriented towards enslaving and killing you, then sure, ending the government has net benefit. But deliberately accumulating debt and dissolving a government in order to avoid paying that debt is just a rather destructive form of default and already fits into the "personal household debt" model in the case where the person burns the house down in a murder-suicide.
One doesn't need "irrational emotional attachment" to avoid patently stupid and self-destructive behavior.
No, the end result is not the same. If a private household (individual) collapses, there's no replacement.
Sure, there is. Bankruptcy is the way.
Sticks and stones man. History backs Keynes up. All the great empires, empires that accomplish things worth writing about, tried to keep growth high. Climb over a mountain of corpses if you have to (Empires often did). Even if the mountain collapses and you come crashing down after, the important thing is to aim higher and higher.
Well, then start naming examples. As I see it, Keynesian economics is just a fad of the 1930s that continues to be political useful because it rationalizes unsupervised public spending. And for the record, I already consider the empires that collapsed by "aiming higher and higher" to be counterexamples to your lofty, but fatuous idealism.
Businesses should operate the same way. Just replace "growth" with "profit". There is no such thing as not enough profit. Always push for more. Push and push until you cannot push no more. If the business collapses, close it down and start again. Likewise, if government collapses, just start a new government.
Business should "operate" the same way even if that means considerable loss of profit? I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
No, there is tremendous long term benefit. Again, governments come and go. Austerity is driven by an emotional attachment to keeping one particular government (or set of political parties - the Ds and Rs in this case), prolonging it instead of letting it fail gracefully so a new - and better - government can replace it.
I get the impression you think that getting a new government is like peeling a few more sheets off a roll of toilet paper. When one changes a government, there is squandering of infrastructure, wealth, and often lives. How does that advance your economy? At the very least, all that debt is defaulted on and the lenders get screwed. There is no "graceful failure".
It is difficult to socially engineer a "demos".
And why try when it's not in your interests to do so?
From a Keynesian perspective ideally you have one team that improves roads and a second team that hits holes into the road.
In other words, a deeply flawed perspective that ignores a large opportunity cost. Why should we take "war Keynesianism" seriously?
War keynesians is high public investment in the armed forces and the production of war. That stimulates the economy.
That tactic simulates to some degree the part of the economy that produces war gear. It doesn't simulate parts of the economy that don't. It's also worth noting that the war part of that particular activity helped kill millions of people and turn Europe and the Far East into rubble.
The secret of medical insurance is to sell it to people who don't actually use it.
Health care != health insurance.
That would explain why nobody has actually observed it in exhaust in the last century plus that people have been looking at such things with spectroscopy, which is why this entire discussion is so incredibly stupid.
Such as who? You're the only person here making that assertion. I think it more likely that you just messed up your measurement in some way, such as not seeing uranium because you weren't looking for it.
Why not write something useful about the topic instead of just some insults and a ludicrously incorrect calculation for the banana dose. How did you botch it so badly? Ore mined for uranium has less than the number you came up with.
Show what was wrong with the calculation. Some vague whining that it doesn't match with your vague impression of what reality should be like, isn't a useful criticism.
Or what? The sky will fall in and the US will go bankrupt? Civilisation will cease?
Yes. Not instantly, of course. Rome didn't die in a day.
You've been fed the biggest, most damaging lie of the last four years, which is government debt works the same as personal household debt. It doesn't.
And I see you've swallowed the bigger and more damaging error that government debt works sufficiently differently that an analogy doesn't work. Instead, we find that the analogy is fairly sound. If government does massively borrow, it does have options not available to a household. But in practice, these methods turn out to be equivalent to what a private household does. The end result is the same. Either debt stabilizes at some level or the borrower defaults though there is more nuance to how governments can choose to default on debt (for example, inflating the currency which their debt is valued in).
Deficits aren't the issue here. They go up, they go down
Only if one ignores the relative size of the "go up" and "go down" portions. For example, publicly held debt owed by the US federal government has increased to just over 100% of the GDP of the US. Of this, about half happened in the last 5 years with the real estate crisis and subsequent spending surge.
Keynes taught us that deficits are structural, and more or less look after themselves. The key is to keep growth as high as possible.
Well, Keynes was a duplicitous idiot and who has been keeping growth as "high" as possible? Certainly, not the current administration which has been following the Keynesian playbook as much as it can, given the considerable incompetence of the administration.
The US is recovering a shedload faster than the Eurozone and the UK because so far it hasn't bought into the austerity argument.
What recovery? Economic activity on paper has increased. But it will go away the moment that spending does. The federal government needs to spend by about one trillion dollars more than revenue just to keep the US economic activity at current levels. There's no long term benefit just an ongoing drain on society that only goes away when one embraces "austerity".
(*) in fact is demonstrates the lack of cohesion and ethnic union in US society that makes difficult to build the solidarity to support universal healthcare protection.
Ever wonder how that lack of cohesion came about? I'd say it was created through policies such as the current health care changes, which pits groups against each other. You can't have unity in games where defection and non-cooperation is rewarded more than cooperation.