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Motronic posted:If it's in a plan that allows you to bail out at any time (cash refund), guarantees the deposits and gives a 15% discount and you can sell immediately........you can't lose whether the stock is going up or down unless it's in absolute free fall on plan maturity. Take the free money. You're talking more like ESPP, which is different from stock options.
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Aug 24, 2019 05:22
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SpelledBackwards posted:You're talking more like ESPP, which is different from stock options. You're right. I was thinking ESPP. For options I just sell on vest. Waiting for LTCG treatment be damned.
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Aug 24, 2019 18:29
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I haven't seen an ESPP yet that will allow selling immediately. There's generally a 1-2 day lag for the shares to arrive in your account. The risk is minimal if the discount is 5% or more, but there is some.
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Aug 24, 2019 20:36
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asur posted:I haven't seen an ESPP yet that will allow selling immediately. There's generally a 1-2 day lag for the shares to arrive in your account. The risk is minimal if the discount is 5% or more, but there is some. A few days is fine, mine is 6 months which is obnoxious.
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Aug 24, 2019 21:00
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My current job is privately owned so there's no stock poo poo, but my last job, baby, that ESPP was 0% discount.
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Aug 24, 2019 22:06
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asur posted:I haven't seen an ESPP yet that will allow selling immediately. There's generally a 1-2 day lag for the shares to arrive in your account. The risk is minimal if the discount is 5% or more, but there is some. Mine is like that. Every 6 months at the end of February and August, my ESPP buys shares the last day of the month at 15% discount, I put in the sell order immediately (I think I can even do it day of purchase) and then immediately sell the next morning in Fidelity. I max my ESPP as much as I can, which is 10% of salary.
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Aug 25, 2019 00:44
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asur posted:I haven't seen an ESPP yet that will allow selling immediately. There's generally a 1-2 day lag for the shares to arrive in your account. The risk is minimal if the discount is 5% or more, but there is some. My shares are purchased and bought at the close of the trading day on the last day of the period and are in my account by the opening of the market the next morning. Period ends ALWAYS happen during an open trading window. I get this is pretty much a best case scenario. But this is the same company that did a follow on offering during our initial IPO lockup and swung it so the employees could participate. That's basically unheard of.
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Aug 25, 2019 01:41
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Given how low interest rates are and the very good offers on credit cards, what's to stop me from doing the following? 1) Open a cashback credit card 2) Buy as many very stable bonds as my credit limit will allow 3) Pay off credit card with 0% balance transfer card 4) Sell bonds 5) Pay off balance transfer card 6) Pocket difference 7) Repeat ad nauseum It seems like a terrible idea but I can't quite put my finger on why. Even assuming you don't get cashback for a year, you could consistently rinse (say) Amex for 1% - transaction fees using this method. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Aug 28, 2019 |
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Aug 28, 2019 00:11
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Where would you buy bonds with a credit card?
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Aug 28, 2019 00:28
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Purple Prince posted:Given how low interest rates are and the very good offers on credit cards, what's to stop me from doing the following?
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Aug 28, 2019 01:15
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Purple Prince posted:Given how low interest rates are and the very good offers on credit cards, what's to stop me from doing the following? Good luck finding a brokerage that accepts credit cards. Even if you found one, it would be treated as a cash advance and subject to the 25+% APR without a grace period.
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Aug 28, 2019 01:30
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If you get a good balance transfer promo and they approve it, you can just get a check sent to you. Capital One had a 2% balance transfer fee for 12 months of 0% APR. Sure, you pay the 2% up front and have to pay monthly payments then a lump sum at the end, but maybe that money can grow and/or you could pay a debt with a higher rate instead.
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Aug 28, 2019 02:01
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Credit card arbitrage is a thing that exists, yes, but you need to be super duper careful about everything or you're hosed.
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Aug 28, 2019 03:49
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To a bank it also looks a lot like money laundering/a potential bustout, so be prepared to tell the truth.
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Aug 28, 2019 04:54
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zmcnulty posted:Credit card arbitrage is a thing that exists, yes, but you need to be super duper careful about everything or you're hosed. Consensus on other sites seems to be that it's not worth the time, effort, or risk. My main interest in it is the same reason for my interest in Dutch books in gambling: it's an interesting way of making free money. What if you could automate it? I've tried automating Dutch books but typically gambling sites have fairly strong protections against scraping their odds (for this exact reason). I can only imagine automating credit card schemes like this would be even harder.
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Aug 28, 2019 07:47
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I guess it would need to be pretty low-touch to be worthwhile, i.e. applications, contract/term scraping, approval monitoring, liquidating the credit line, orders/execution of your securities, debt repayment... If you can automate all that, the more lucrative move would be to get a job where you automate things.
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Aug 28, 2019 09:34
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Purple Prince posted:I've tried automating Dutch books but typically gambling sites have fairly strong protections against scraping their odds (for this exact reason). I can only imagine automating credit card schemes like this would be even harder. I'd be interested in hearing about your experience with this. I'm curious how big the arbitrage opportunities are and what kind of technical issues you run into.
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Aug 28, 2019 18:45
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Eyes Only posted:I'd be interested in hearing about your experience with this. I'm curious how big the arbitrage opportunities are and what kind of technical issues you run into. Typically arbitrage on sports betting (aka running a Dutch book) will make 3-8% of principal on each transaction, but at times that number can be as high as 20% according to RebelBetting. Some bookmakers provide live odds via an API, but typically there's a fairly high subscription cost associated with this and it's definitely not the norm. Typically these are betting exchanges rather than the source providers as well. Protections vary by site. Small local bookmakers are less protected than national chains, and often publish their odds in HTML: but that's still a bit of a pain to scrape because you have to associate the odds or 'odd-like' objects in a page (a regexp will pick up numerous false positives) with the specific game and outcome (win/lose/draw for soccer, which is one of the simplest sports to Dutch bet on). Larger bookmakers will have more advanced protections against scraping; commonly they turn their odds from plain text into images, which means (1) you need to be running a headless browser like Chromium and (2) you need a machine vision algorithm to identify the numbers from the odds. Other bookmakers will use JavaScript or (lol) Flash so that they can detect and bounce curl/wget attempts. Any individual one of these protections would be okay to break, but to run a Dutch book effectively you'd need a system which could try multiple strategies to get odds, or write bespoke integrations for each site you're scraping, which takes forever. Possibly you could run some sort of heuristics with an ML algorithm to identify a strategy for attacking a website, but that would require you being / having an AI specialist with you. The real kicker would be automating placing bets as typically you have to pass a captcha or similar to place a bet on a gambling site. Then you have all the usual concerns about about getting banned from sites or having your account limit cut, which can devastate arbitrage attempts. Basically, with the development costs and complexities, it's not worth it unless you could identify and target small bookmakers exclusively; and for me ruining a load of small businesses didn't sound like a very fun side hustle. E: I guess if you could plug a machine vision algorithm and a controller into gambling sites you could simulate a human, but again that's probably something fairly specialised and the technical solution would be quite taxing. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 09:06 on Aug 29, 2019 |
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Aug 29, 2019 08:59
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What's the gooncensus on Nassim Taleb's books? He keeps coming up as I search and try to learn, and honestly an epistemological approach to finance and risk sounds interesting to me.
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Aug 29, 2019 12:45
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Magnetic North posted:What's the gooncensus on Nassim Taleb's books? He keeps coming up as I search and try to learn, and honestly an epistemological approach to finance and risk sounds interesting to me.
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Aug 29, 2019 14:57
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Iirc Taleb has also used his prominence to make all sorts of claims (valid and absurd) in basically every hotbutton area under the sun; he’s worse than even other public intellectuals in his tendency to assert absolute knowledge of fields he knows absolutely nothing about, including a lot of pseudoscience. As a result, he gets into a lot of pointless public feuds with both legitimate and fringe figures. This is a part of how he promotes his personal brand. Although I’m not generally a fan of it, Rational wiki has a good summary of what a nut he can be. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
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Aug 30, 2019 15:11
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Magnetic North posted:What's the gooncensus on Nassim Taleb's books? He keeps coming up as I search and try to learn, and honestly an epistemological approach to finance and risk sounds interesting to me. He's about 10% substance and about 90% trash. Fooled by Randomness was okay, if you can stomach the smell of garbage any time he starts to talk.
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Aug 30, 2019 18:22
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Discendo Vox posted:Iirc Taleb has also used his prominence to make all sorts of claims (valid and absurd) in basically every hotbutton area under the sun; he’s worse than even other public intellectuals in his tendency to assert absolute knowledge of fields he knows absolutely nothing about, including a lot of pseudoscience. As a result, he gets into a lot of pointless public feuds with both legitimate and fringe figures. This is a part of how he promotes his personal brand. Although I’m not generally a fan of it, Rational wiki has a good summary of what a nut he can be. This was actually sort of the impression I was getting from him. At first I was afraid I stumbled on a chud, but some of what he said about CEOs didn't jive with that, so I figured he was either a polemic or a contrarian rather than a troll. Thank you all. I guess I should be reading Bogle's Mutal Funds book assigned by If I Can instead anyway.
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Aug 30, 2019 21:34
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Magnetic North posted:Thank you all. I guess I should be reading Bogle's Mutal Funds book assigned by If I Can instead anyway.
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Aug 31, 2019 00:54
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happy anticommunist labor day fellow working men and women
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Sep 2, 2019 15:30
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:happy anticommunist labor day fellow working men and women M'comrade *tips guillotine*
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Sep 2, 2019 15:39
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Didn't really see a thread for questions like this, not sure what the course of action is here. I just got an email (that wasn't flagged as spam and appears to be legit) on my main email address (firstname.lastname@gmail) that "my recently-submitted Liberty National Life (insurance) application has been approved", containing policy numbers and coverage types for cancer and hospital coverage. According to the mail, I can apparently register on their website with the policy information they sent me, in order to "manage my policy online", requiring only my policy number (in the mail), name and date of birth. Needless to say, I didn't sign up for a Liberty National insurance policy. I don't even live in the United States anymore and haven't for nearly a decade. I have an uncommon surname and a hyper-common first name, so there are also several others in the US who have the same firstname lastname as me. Is there any kind of guide or tips on what I should do in this situation? Should I try to register with my birthdate, and if it works then I know I've had my identity stolen? Could it just be a case of one of the other Firstname Lastnames putting in their email address incorrectly or something when signing up for a legitimate insurance policy? Everything about the mail seems legitimate, and even going via the main Liberty National insurance site takes me to the same signup page. Or should I just ignore it?
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Sep 5, 2019 08:03
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Drone posted:Didn't really see a thread for questions like this, not sure what the course of action is here. You should not click the link in the email but Google their main site directly. Then call the number on the screen and say you received a sign up email which you believe to be identity theft as you do not live in the USA. Work from there. Insurance scams from identity theft are uncommon but not the least common. Someone seeks care under your name and leaves you with the bill. It's a pain in the rear end to correct. It could be as simple as an agent typed in an email address wrong and your similarly named person is annoyed they haven't gotten their email, but I would start with the other direction as fraud is going to get you to interested people much faster. Pull your USA credit reports from the three reporting companies as well. I believe it's annual credit report dot com but Google it. It's free.
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Sep 5, 2019 10:13
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H110Hawk posted:Pull your USA credit reports from the three reporting companies as well. I believe it's annual credit report dot com but Google it. It's free. I had my credit frozen with all three agencies a few years ago (when I learned that such a thing was even possible), so at least I'm not so much worried about that front. I'll give them a call using the contact info on the insurance company's website as soon as the call center opens today.
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Sep 5, 2019 10:51
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How do you all deal with the urge to spend money on food? Sometimes at work I just crave some iced tea or a donut or a flat white or something, and looking at my budget I can see that it ends up costing £50-100 month, but it's super hard to break this habit since it's viscerally attractive to grab food when I feel like it.
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Sep 5, 2019 12:55
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Purple Prince posted:How do you all deal with the urge to spend money on food? Sometimes at work I just crave some iced tea or a donut or a flat white or something, and looking at my budget I can see that it ends up costing £50-100 month, but it's super hard to break this habit since it's viscerally attractive to grab food when I feel like it. You either need to build some will power, or plan around it. Bring a snack or some coffee from home that you can prepare when you’re feeling the urge to munch.
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Sep 5, 2019 13:00
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Purple Prince posted:How do you all deal with the urge to spend money on food? Sometimes at work I just crave some iced tea or a donut or a flat white or something, and looking at my budget I can see that it ends up costing £50-100 month, but it's super hard to break this habit since it's viscerally attractive to grab food when I feel like it. I try to plan my splurges where feasible, plus willpower and packing snacks. I find it a lot easier to say no to things if I know that on Friday I'm going to get ice cream after dinner sort of thing.
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Sep 5, 2019 13:10
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I have a bunch of snack bars, almonds, coffee, water additives, etc at work. Also try downing a glass of water. It stops the hunger (you were actually thirsty) sometimes.
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Sep 5, 2019 13:40
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is this chat thread because i bought a car but it was really heavily discounted, has a long warranty, and 1.9% financing for 60 mos so i'm claiming GWM status
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Sep 5, 2019 13:44
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Drone posted:Didn't really see a thread for questions like this, not sure what the course of action is here. Bit of a follow-up: I just called the insurance company using the number on their website (not a link from the email) and spoke with their customer service. Explained the situation, gave her the policy numbers from the mail, and she confirmed that the last four digits of my SSN don't match what's on the policy, and neither does the given birthyear. It's also a policy taken out by an employer (whose name she gave me, how hosed up is that) for an employee who shares my name and not by the other Firstname Lastname himself. So I guess I'm in the clear there. Even looked the guy up (because, again, it's insane that the insurance company actually gave out the name of this dude's employer without me even asking) and he appears to be a real person.
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Sep 5, 2019 13:51
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Purple Prince posted:How do you all deal with the urge to spend money on food? Sometimes at work I just crave some iced tea or a donut or a flat white or something, and looking at my budget I can see that it ends up costing £50-100 month, but it's super hard to break this habit since it's viscerally attractive to grab food when I feel like it. Two things, and I hope at least one of them is feasible for you: 1) I bring bread, cold cut turkey, salad mix, and Swiss cheese to work, and put them in the office fridge. My job has free mustard & mayo for some reason, but I would bring those too if I had to. My laziness prevails over my urge to leave the office to get a fast food lunch. 2) I calculate what I usually spend on breakfast & lunch (generally, ~$6 for DD medium iced coffee & a wake-up wrap, and ~$8 for food truck stuff), then I put it in my fast food budget & take it out of my grocery budget. This one might be better for you since you like donuts & flat whites and you can't generally just keep those around. As far as iced tea goes though, I see Snapple iced tea sales at Stop & Shop all the time that are like $6 for a 12-pack, so if you're craving iced tea you could (assuming your cost of living hovers around mine) drink it for $.50 instead of $1.50 or $2.
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Sep 5, 2019 15:33
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Purple Prince posted:How do you all deal with the urge to spend money on food? Sometimes at work I just crave some iced tea or a donut or a flat white or something, and looking at my budget I can see that it ends up costing £50-100 month, but it's super hard to break this habit since it's viscerally attractive to grab food when I feel like it. Figure out an amount that works for your budget, or just use your discretionary spending  ?
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Sep 5, 2019 17:11
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I have a category called "spending money" for trash food (and formerly, alcohol) reminding me that this money added up but wasn't what we were budgeting for real groceries or special restaurant meals.
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Sep 5, 2019 17:19
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Nocheez posted:Figure out an amount that works for your budget, or just use your discretionary spending The main point is I want to get the number as close to zero as possible so I can rely on my budget for things like going on dates and buying video games. The suggestions to keep a rolling supply of snacks on hand seem good as I can just budget for that. I might also separate my lunch / snacks budget from my main grocery budget as it will allow for times when I buy street food / tesco lunches without too much guilt or messing around reallocating funds in YNAB and feeling guilty. E: My lunchboxes cost around £2.5 a day, Tesco costs maybe £4.50, street food is £5, Pret is £7+ Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Sep 5, 2019 |
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Sep 5, 2019 17:37
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Purple Prince posted:The main point is I want to get the number as close to zero as possible so I can rely on my budget for things like going on dates and buying video games. There's a great chapter about this in "The Power of Habit" which I'm sure is available for lend from your local library. Buying a snack is a habit, and the cue and reward don't necessarily demand you to fulfill the habit in a way that forces you to spend money.
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Sep 5, 2019 18:00
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