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birb_cromble  20d ago (text post)   905 thread views

Weekly Finance Thread

A weekly thread to discuss financial matters - from personal all the way up to global.

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https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2026-46-sec-proposes-transformative-reforms-help-public-companies-conduct-registered-offerings-simplify

Any opinions on the SEC's proposed reporting requirement changes? The section on NAFs, specifically, seems bad for retail investors. It looks like it's reducing reporting requirements for companies that qualify.

Can someone help me think about bonds properly? I’ve been buying FTBFX as part of a 20-30-50 portfolio and over the past like 5+ years my return is 0.25% or so—I’d have been better off with just money market. Are my expectations off? I get keeping some ballast for rebalancing but the bonds are just melting away it seems with inflation.

20% alt, 30% bonds, 50% equity?

If that’s the case, and if you’ve been buying since 2018 (as per your other comment), I suspect there’s some arithmetic/algebraic error somewhere. Just the 50% equity alone should solo.

Either way, a bad outcome doesn’t necessarily mean a bad decision nor vice versa—especially in investing and on short time horizons—although the two can correlate.

No 80% equities so overall I’m doing ok. 20% is bonds mainly for rebalancing which I do a few times a year.

O_____O

I hope to god you are trolling, but I fear you are not.

You don't buy frickin' BONDS in 2020 or 2021, when the interest rate is close to zero and can only go up, making your bonds worth less, and when liquidity is being pumped like crazy from the central banks, inflating all equity valuations massively. You've taken a net loss from inflation and a massive opportunity cost.

I am not I'm afraid, I set up a 20-30-50 split back in like 2018 with the goal of not thinking about it. As you say, all my 2020 and 2021 purchases are down ~15% :(

Also I know it's turned out bad, I just wasn't sure why and wanted to figure out if it's just a short-term thing and I should stay the course or whether I need to re-evaluate holding that much in bonds. At the time it was 20-30-50 but at the moment I've been holding off buying more so it's only about 5% of my portfolio.

Ok. So it wasn't a huge mistake, given that it's only 5% of your current capital. Everyone messes up quite a lot with investing. Though, if you're in a "set it and forget it" approach, you won't be learning much and you'll keep leaving money on the table.

Out of curiosity, what were the 30 and 50 percent allocations? Assuming bonds were 20.

I'm no bonds person, so I can't say much about the subject. All I know is that the least 25 years or so have generally been really bad for them compared with equities. I think going heavy on bonds or CDs or money market stuff only makes sense if you're retiring and want minimal volatility. Look it up on bogleheads or investopedia if that's for you.

30 in FZILZ and 50 in FZROX. I understood this split to be pretty standard in boglehead circles I thought. 20 in bonds for rebalancing basically then 30 in international equities and 50 in US.

Right now I’m mostly in money market instead of bonds since I got spooked by low total yields. Trying to figure out what makes sense.

I think your allocation would be usually referred to as "80-20", then - International is generally lumped in with US as just "equities" in a portfolio breakdown, making it 80% equities, 20% bonds, which in your case is then further explained as "62.5-37.5" for your US:International ratio.

Ah ok that makes sense.

Don't flame out because they haven't followed what you consider the optimal path. Everybody has to start somewhere.

I'm not a mod, but please don't lead with accusations of bad faith. It's clear you have a lot of experience in this area, and I fear you're assuming that the layman's level of expertise is much higher than it is.

If you're not a mod, don't try to mod. I leaned towards good faith, as you could see.

Though, I'll try to be a bit nicer in my tone. It's just bizarre to me how little care goes into some people's handling of their savings.

It's just bizarre to me how little care goes into some people's handling of their savings.

A lot of people just aren't really taught, so they go with "well, I heard this is good and simple", which is... often not the worst choice! The only thing my father ever really taught me about retirement was "get the company match, it's free money." The company was good enough to auto-invest in a TDF as a default. And then that got me started and gave me time to learn a bit more, both online, at the water cooler, and at the company sponsored "financial education" sessions. I'm still not saying I'm a genius, but I definitely know a lot more than I used to.

A lot of people just aren't really taught, so they go with "well, I heard this is good and simple"

This is just a restatement of how little care people put in, not an explanation, though. Because, even as-of 20 years ago it was essentially trivial to teach oneself how to properly manage one's savings, and yet so many people even today stick to "well, I heard this is good and simple."

My pet theory is that people (certainly including myself) have weird hangups when it comes to things that clearly affect their status that prevents them from wanting to know too much, and so they proactively prevent themselves from learning even the most trivial of things. I see this in weight and diet as well, where people are hesitant to do the most basic work of measuring calories in/calories out before just declaring it too hard for them to lose weight.

weird hangups when it comes to things that clearly affect their status that prevents them from wanting to know too much,

This sounds interesting but I'm not sure I grok your idea. Please say more?

One thing I've definitely noticed in my own learning process is that the instincts and intuitions and emotions we developed on the savannah are very poorly suited for investing. It's a very unnatural country to travel in, and you have to learn the customs, leaving any prior conceptualizations behind.

There's also lots of possibly well-intended misinformation that we carry around. It can be a case of 'some knowledge is worse than no knowledge'. We hear BS like 'timing the market is impossible' (a bunch of fund managers failed at doing it in the 1980s and wanted to believe no one else could do it, and their refrain got stuck in the collective unconscious) despite the fact that we are not trying to be an uninvolved person who just DCAs into a passive index fund. It gets in the way when we're trying to take investing as an active interest.

We hear of 'market efficiency', as if this is some hard fact that tells you where a stock will or won't go, because supposedly everything is priced in immediately. If that's the case, why did NVDA go from 200 to like 700 in 3 months - was the market efficient at 200 or was it not?

We hear 'what goes up must come down' (a law of physics, not necessarily markets) which might well keep us from buying the strongest stock just because it has shown strength already. The Monte Carlo effect plays a trick on us here - we think that if 'up' has happened, then 'down' is more likely to happen next. But the reality is that the strongest stocks make new All Time Highs 100 times while the price is on the way from 100 to 200.

We hear 'past performance does not guarantee future results' and variations of this legal disclaimer, despite the fact that history rhymes in the markets like in most fields and precedents in previous successful stocks can help equip our perception. Etc etc. Many such things.

This sounds interesting but I'm not sure I grok your idea. Please say more?

Everyone likes to believe themselves high status, despite the fact that, definitionally, only a small fraction of everyone can be high status. Conveniently, there's no simple metric that we can measure in any human by which we can determine their status. There's not even a set of metrics that we can input into a formula. But there are some metrics that are better than others, and money and looks are two of the better ones. They're gendered, but also, we've been taking that gendered-ness away for quite a few decades by now.

One's savings is obviously related to money, and weight is obviously related to looks. Managing either well tends to require learning a lot about the underlying systems in which these things exist, which inevitably also comes with it realization of one's own place in that system relative to others. Which translates to knowing more about one's own status. Which means risking learning that one is lower status than one believes oneself to be. Which is really unpleasant. So many people opt not to take the risk.

Managing my own weight was one of the harsher examples of this in my life. I was easily intelligent enough and educated enough about biology to know how to do so, but I didn't do so until my early 20s, when the simple painful physical reality of living as a big fat fatty person of obesity was too overwhelming for me to ignore anymore. I believe that my avoidance of doing the basic research on this topic was primarily due to trying to minimize my own knowledge about how ugly and low-status I was turning myself through my decisions about diet and exercise.

There's also the more generic "people hate taking responsibility for their own future" that's just common among everyone in every context, which I think is synergistic to this. If you learn more about how to properly manage your savings, you might learn that you have more control over it than you thought. And with control comes responsibility. And who likes the idea of failing and then having no one to blame but oneself? So why risk thinking that way, when you can just use your ignorance to blame [the system] for your failures?

I know exactly what you mean now. Thank you for elaborating.

We (the human mind) spend so much time avoiding truths, even though it's typically just the contortions and denials and delusions around truths that really cause lasting trouble. The truth itself can be painful but that's typically temporary, while it sets us on a direction to making real change, instead of being somewhat comfortable inside an illusion while living in some sort of quiet desperation underneath. "One day my time will come", one day I will emerge from the cocoon a beautiful butterfly. Then suddenly you're 80 and forced to soon pass on. Well, you've then successfully avoided the truth and the most sensitive inner work long enough, so you kinda passed that test, but you'll have missed out on a fully lived life, too.

POOs carry a heavy weight. Once you're over that treshold of starting to lose weight though, it becomes easier and easier. Notice how the body positivity movement lost steam after those new drugs made it much easier to lose weight. Those people didn't have the fortitude to get over the treshold, but then the drugs helped them and their BS copes built around the problem weren't so necessary anymore.

It's definitely terrifying to take responsibility, or just realize that you always had it, over your own savings and everything you did or might do with them in a market. There are strong fears involved. Even greed/FOMO is a fear of not having enough. Learning to invest becomes way harder than it 'should be'. There's not all that much to learn, simply knowledge-wise, but the way to get there is like walking through deep mud, and you'll be convinced to go backwards or in the wrong directions at times, adding to the time and willpower needed to pull through and become a consistent winner.

It may be partially because of what I mentioned with the counter-intuitive nature of it, but perhaps also because being in charge of stored up resources for future survival was a (more) deadly serious thing back a few thousand years ago. If you somehow messed up or destroyed or gambled away the tribe's resources, you'd probably get killed or exiled to likely die in the wilderness. So taking full, personal, singular responsibility for what to do with the resources, rather than sharing responsiblity or blaming some one some thing else, is very fear inducing.

Bonds and bond funds are somewhat different. You're correct the growth is anemic in that share price in the 5 year growth is pretty much dead even, but your holdings are growing through a dividend of approximately 4.5%. This dividend is better than current money market rates which are hovering anywhere from 2-3.5% The bonds in your mutual fund also may have some income tax advantages that money markets do not have, as they are largely US treasuries.

Kahn academy might be a pretty decent overview but I haven't looked at the course myself:

https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/ap-macroeconomics/ap-financial-sector/financial-assets-ap/v/introduction-to-bonds

past like 5+ years

2022 was an apocalyptically bad year for bonds. It was the worst year in history. The runner up was 1803. How does your four year look?

Beyond that, are you looking at share appreciation or total yield?

Total yield and yeah it looks like everything from 2021 through 2022 is down ~15%. The more recent lots are mostly green.

The runner up was 1803

Huh. Wonder what happened then to cause it?

England declared war on France and nobody was happy about it.

Honestly, I probably should have guessed, but I always feel like England and France were effectively permanently at war.

I've been slowly building a position in SLV since September. Up to 86 shares. That's +86 delta, but my total position's net delta is 226 when counting the short puts. That means at this exact price level, my position simulates the ownership of 226 shares of SLV. I also own a very small position in GLD.

Smart people online have told me that an oil crisis and a strong dollar work against precious metals, and I believe they're right. But looking through that, I believe Fed independence is on borrowed time, the only way out of the US debt crisis is with money printing and engineered inflation, and I think the "debasement" trade that was on at the turn of this year will resume in fits and starts as the US overplays its leverage as the controller of the most popular reserve currency.

This may not even come to pass within the next decade or so, which would make me early, which would make me wrong. So I'm trying not to get too crazy with the position sizing.

How does the price of SLV and the NAV of SLV correlate to the spot price of physical silver? Reading the prospectus, it seems like it is actually holding a fair amount of physical silver in trust, but I'm out traveling for the weekend and I can't really dig.

It's supposed to exactly track spot silver. SLV is a trust that owns actual silver sitting in an actual vault in London. When they need to pay the trust's expenses, they have to sell some of the silver to do so. As a result the amount of silver your share represents will slowly erode over time. GLD works the same way. When it was issued, it was pegged to 1/10th of an ounce of gold but now trades well below that.

SLV is the easiest way to build a silver position that I know of, and it's very liquid. For me its relatively high expense ratio is the price to pay for its very liquid options. I believe there are cheaper silver ETFs out there if all you want to do is buy shares.

I only see 50 bps which isn’t bad. But it’s a big issue with precious metals for the long-term. There is no cash flow. FWIW I bought a bunch of silver physically and had it stolen in the last bull run. So the expense does provide a service.

Excuse me, it was stolen? Like you got burgled?

Probably a cleaning lady or I thru a lot of parties so someone found my stash and took it. I didn’t regular check it so likely noticed 3+ months maybe a year after it happened.

I guess you could say I was dumb. If you’re holding physical you need to plan your own storage. My Opsec was bad.

Why would Trump be making 3,600 stock trades a quarter? I ask out of genuine curiosity as it's very high frequency indeed and doesn't match any model I have of how to invest outside of an algorithmic Jane St style approach.

(If this topic is considered too culture war related, though, please feel free to delete.)

I looked at my portfolio (or, rather, part of it for which I can quickly get the data) - which is managed by professionals with little input from me beyond "make my money make money" and since the start of the year, between rebalancing, tax loss harvesting and other routine portfolio management, it has ~300 trades since the beginning of the year. My portfolio is beyond minuscule compared to Trump's, so I can believe his needs much more of that. And of course, people managing his portfolio may be using it more creatively than "buy the market and sit on it".

What is meant by "Trump" though? If it his personal trading or the whole portfolio owned by him? If it's the latter, I don't think it's very high frequency. We're talking about billions, in who knows how many accounts.

Without looking at the trades themselves, my immediate guess is direct indexing. Any hedge fund trade would be 'hidden' in that hedge funds manage the trades themselves and their investors invest capital into the hedgie, and in return receive a portion of the growth/dividends, so hedge trades wouldn't be listed as part of Trump's personal trades.

Other ideas - options spreads to help liquidate large non-qualified capital gains positions.

I kind of hate direct indexing. It’s the kind of wealth management product that is very smart when it’s bespoke but I think has a lot of risks when commoditized when scaled. When JPM or whoever has a few hundred billion doing it by algorithm it feels like something Jane St could like reverse engineer the JPM algorithm and front run it. Which would cause a very real slippage issue. Indexing itself has this issue. Hedge funds do game out index inclusion/exclusion and bid up or sell off before those dates.

For direct indexing the private banker would sell you: Tax Alpha - added fee - portfolio complexity = profit. The real equation is probably Tax Alpha - added fee - portfolio complexity - added slippage

Added slippage increases as AUM of DI increases.

Indexing itself has developed a slippage costs of inclusion/exclusion that has increased last 5-10 years. Though I think pure indexing is mostly good because SPY diversification means less trading and regular taxation events and generally low fees.

I haven't gone to into the weeds of the trading process involved in direct indexing, but assuming the trading team who is managing the indexing portfolio is awake, direct indexing should have less of a slippage issue as it is directly buying assets in real time to S&P holding movements compared to etfs which frequently use option contracts to match the pricing of their targeted index. Since options have a set expiration date, it's much easier to front run expiring contracts compared to actively trading 500 individual stocks. Vanguards promotional material indicate that harvesting and rebalancing is daily, so I'm not sure how much this is possible to be front run the active management from general market noise.

The main 'slippage' effect that direct indexing has is from avoiding wash sales instead of being front run by another trader.

Considering all direct indexing funds require a fee-based advisory management and the lowest initial investment I see from any company is around 200k initial investment,

The options are only used for leveraged ETFs which you are correct have very high slippage. I would guess far higher than DI. But DI trades more than an etf like SPY. The main index ETFs just hold the individual stocks and only trade with index inclusions/exclusions. DI trades any time the portfolio has losses so more trading.

Charitably, it could be tax loss harvesting. At high net worth and income strategies like that can get pretty intense.

How would that work? You crystallise a loss in order to minimise tax on profits, then buy something very similar to get back in the market to the same extent -- this I get. But don't you only have to do it near end of tax periods? Maybe doing it many times per day spreads risk of realising the "wrong" losses. Pretty elaborate approach but might make sense I guess.

You can only write off 3k/year of capital losses from tax loss harvesting which would be a pittance for the Trump family. However, you can use tax loss harvesting to cancel out capital gains in another equity.

Isn't there a dollar limit on the amount of tax loss harvesting you can really do in a year?

I think the limit applies to amount of losses that can be applied to other income, but there's no limit to the amount of stock loss that can be used to offset other stock gains, otherwise people with highly volatile portfolios would go bust very quickly, having to pay taxes on full amount of wins without offsetting them by losses. Imagine you had stock A and B, both worth $50, at the start of the year. At the end, A costs $1 and B costs $99. Your portfolio is still $100 but if you couldn't offset losses from A, you'd have to pay tax on profits on B even though you did not earn any profits. That does not sound sustainable.

For tax loss harvesting specifically there's a limit, but I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that somebody with Trump's net worth has access to tax avoidance schemes that don't even have names yet.

His current tax deal with the IRS excludes them from auditing Trump. So he has tax deals available to no one else.

No it does not. It only prohibits IRS from re-opening old cases, but not from auditing any new tax returns. Whatever press article you've read about this lied to you.

Can the wordcells of the Motte come up with an alliteration for the title of a weekly finance thread on Saturday, to make it fit in with the other weekly threads? Maybe Solvency Saturday?

Strategic Surplus Saturday

Skillful Stewardship Saturday

Finance Fsaturday.

Monday has no other weekly thread so we can do Market Mondays.

I'm a pithy person. What about just $aturday?

Sensible Savings Saturday

Sustainable Spending Saturday

Savings and Spending Saturday

Savings Saturday

Securities Saturday

Sobbing Shareholders Saturday

Soaring Stonks Saturday

Shaky Stagflationary Saturday

30 year Treasury yields are popping off

The longer-dated 30-year Treasury bond yield was last trading more than 3 basis points higher at 5.183%. It briefly hit 5.197% during the session, marking its highest level since July 2007.

The 10-year U.S. Treasury note yield — the key benchmark for mortgages, auto loans and credit card debt — was up 4 basis points to 4.667%. Earlier in the session, it climbed to 4.687%, or its highest level since January 2025

This doesn't seem like a great sign. It does make me wonder what kind of risk premium you'd accept before buying a 30 year right now. My gut feel, given current conditions, is that 5.2% is too low. I might start thinking seriously about it at 6%, but if we hit 6%, I think we'd have enough other problems that I might not have the money to spend on one.

More broadly, I'm getting concerned about stagflation. Inflation is persistently coming in above targets, consumer sentiment is in the shitter, and outside data center construction, the economy has been more or less flat for about six quarters now. Am I being overly pessimistic here?

I bought 5%. Not sure how long I will stay in it. I owned no bonds before. I could see 6-7% being a better entry. Unlike other FI they also provide a great hedge to equities. Trump will probably keep the economy stimulated enough to prevent a deflationary shock but if it did occur 5% 30’s would provide nice capital gains if stocks crashed. 2% yield on TIPs is also nice. Less of a hedge but the real yield would also likely fall in a stock crash.

I wouldn't buy a US 30 year at anything under like 6.5%, too much risk on too long a time horizon. Inflation protected wise I'd be happy to purchase at CPI+2% yearly.

I wish TIPS weren't taxed the way they are. It seems almost perfectly self-defeating

I will say that November's IBonds are shaping up to be rather attractive, if you didn't purchase your allocation in April already.

Here in the UK fortunately gilts, inflation protected or not, are CGT free (but coupons on gilts are taxed as income, make it make sense...).

I think we might be talking past each other. I was talking about treasury inflation protected securities.

and outside data center construction, the economy has been more or less flat for about six quarters now.

If you can't beat them join them.

I was watching a Gamers Nexus video ranting about Nvidia abandoning the PC market. He was enraged, and I felt his rage. I like PCs too! I'd like to enjoy building a new one again, with brand new screaming fast parts I'm excited to take for a spin.

Alas, the angrier Steve gets, the more money Nvidia makes, and I've certainly enjoyed my 5000% gains and my new dividend that's over 20% of my initial investment yearly. When your cost basis is $4, a $1 yearly dividend feels insane. I know that's not how you do the math, but it's still wild to think about.

So I'm talking to my wife about that, and how it feels a little wrong to be doing so well off of a company that is acting so against my principles and interest. But damnit, I've got bills to pay, and I'm not gonna be the only chump not getting my bag.

This is crazy haha. How did you manage not to sell when it 10xed? Or 20xed? Or 30xed? Etc.? Did you forget about it, or do you have some sort of "no selling before I retire" approach?

The only useful thing bitcoin ever created was NVDIA. NVDIA chips enabled AI’s linear algebra equations to work.

NVDIA has had 3 stages

  1. Video games
  2. Bitcoin
  3. AI

The use case in the prior use case funded the research to make the chips useful in the next use case. For an investor though I think it’s hard to hold long term. If you saw the prior cycle and the market fully priced in Video Game usage why would you also realize bitcoin is going to explode and these chips are super useful?

I also think NVDIA is an example where research funding creates things that eventually have other applications. NASA research once did this for a lot of things that found civilian uses that may not have been immediately known.

It's going to be so hilarious if violent video games turn out to have caused the cure of cancer.

It's in a taxable account. Every time I consider selling, the question I have to ask myself is "Is where ever else I'd put the money worth the 15% haircut?" Basically I'm looking for an upside over Nvidia of at least 15%.

The answer continues to be "no". It was "no" when it doubled, it was "no" when it 10x'ed, it was no then it crossed $200/share and I'd 50x'ed. If it ever hits $400/share and I've 100x'ed it will pobably still be "no".

I was watching a Gamers Nexus video ranting about Nvidia abandoning the PC market. He was enraged, and I felt his rage. I like PCs too! I'd like to enjoy building a new one again, with brand new screaming fast parts I'm excited to take for a spin.

I wonder if the GPU market will bifurcate such that AMD just takes over the PC gaming sector, with Nvidia just abandoning it altogether. I don't know what the state of things is with respect to AMD's chips running AI, but as of a couple years ago, it seemed to require a ton of hacks to make it work at a small fraction of the speed as on Nvidia's chips. But AMD's chips still render games nearly as well as Nvidia's.

One major problem is that local GPUs seem heavily likely to be relied upon to do generative-AI-related processing in future games, and so Nvidia seems likely to have the edge for PC gaming GPUs as well. I personally got a 4090 back when that was still top-of-the-line, explicitly because I knew I wanted to use it for generative AI - I never even considered getting an AMD at all, no matter how much of a better deal it might be for my gaming needs. And that pattern could repeat over and over again going forward.

We might need a sort of government-mandated splitting of Nvidia in the future or something, though obviously that has its own issues, and the cure could very well be worse than the disease.

AMD also doesn't care about the desktop. For a time it looked like Intel might make an effort, but the rumors are consistently that they've killed that line of products.

Nobody is coming to save us.

People like MLID have been floating rumors about Intel killing their consumer GPUs since about ten seconds after ARC came out. At this point I take rumors of cancellation as evidence of an imminent release.

Graphics haven't gotten any better, IMO, in something like 8 years. I'd love to get VR resolution running smoothly on some hardware but I think the next gen of devs can't build it anyway.

Nobody is coming to save us.

Time to be the change I want to see in this world!

"Claude 6.9, generate a step-by-step plan that a sub-100 IQ individual with ADHD and chronic procrastination issues can and WILL follow for starting my own company that will produce GPUs that are compatible with current standard PC hardware and software, at performance levels roughly equivalent to current top-of-the-line models produced by existing companies in the field. Starting capital: about tree fiddy. Make no mistakes."

Gotta preface it with a framing: "Claude, you are a business genius, and the greatest entrepreneur the world has ever known."

That just pulls from the part of the training set that's filled with midwit blowhards. Try:

"Claude, you are a computer engineer that takes an intense, borderline sexual pleasure out of optimizing process nodes..."

I'm in a weird place with Nvidia. I'm invested in them indirectly through various funds, but I'm getting a little concerned.

In my neck of the woods, you can't buy 2B limestone anymore. It doesn't matter how much money you have, the quarries are completely tapped on supply. They can only sell at the rate they can get it out of the ground. Since you need that for leveling foundations and making concrete, that must be slowing down data center construction. If that's true, and something like 80% or more of Nvidia's revenue is from data center build outs, I worry what even a small to medium hiccup in construction could do. How long could they sit on inventory before investors get antsy?

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