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Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 19, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What kind of stocks are Motte people buying these days? I have a few sheckels I want to throw at something promising.

tech + payment processing mix

Uber, Tesla, MSFT, V, MA, META, etc...

Vanguard Target Retirement Funds

Each fund in this category is entirely composed of passive index funds, but follows the "glide path" appropriate for your expected retirement date (2030, 2035, 2040, etc.). Despite technically being active funds, these funds recently had their fees reduced, so that they cost essentially the same as their underlying passive funds.

If you prefer to keep more control over your money, you can just buy the underlying funds, and manually adjust your holdings to match the appropriate Target Fund on a per-month or per-paycheck basis.

$PBR-A. Trades at an extremely low valuation due to perceived political risk. $PBR-A shares trade at a discount to $PBR, and are first in line to receive dividends, which are mandated by Brazilian law. People are worried about Lula being a socialist, but $PBR stock thrived under his previous presidency. Also the government owns half the company and relies on the dividends to pay for education.

So there are two scenarios.

Base case: Business as usual. A $10 investment in $PBR-A will earn perhaps $3 in dividends per year from now until oil stops being a thing (aka post 2050).

Bear case: Brazil ignores its laws and constitution and penalizes foreign investors somehow, in which case $PBR is probably fairly valued (10% odds)

But yeah, index fund or treasuries paying 5% will be better for most people.

I bought some Nvidia. Doesn't seem like demand for GPUs is going down.

I'm not sure there is anything promising at the moment. I shifted a bunch over to treasuries recently.

The answer is always a low cost index fund, vanguard offers the ones with the lowest fees. Picking stocks (or paying someone to do so for you) is a losing game

I mean yeah, most of my portfolio is in that. But I like to throw a few thousand at some fun stuff every now and then.