bolu

9 ms·

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Help middle-class families secure their financial future (FutureAdvisor S10)
1 points by bolu 12y ago
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FutureAdvisor (YC S10): Help middle-class families secure their financial future
1 points by bolu 12y ago
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FutureAdvisor (YC S10): Help middle-class families secure their financial future
1 points by bolu 12y ago
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by bolu 13y ago
This reminds me of YC's "Apply without an idea" experiment. Both experiments seem to arise from a innovator's insight that a whole class of otherwise highly qualified candidates self select out because of a self percepti
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Printable Investing Checklist (FutureAdvisor(S2010) via LifeHacker)(lifehacker.com)
4 points by bolu 13y ago|0 comments
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Your employer may cost you $100k in retirement savings – FutureAdvisor (YC S10)(money.cnn.com)
15 points by bolu 13y ago|2 comments
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Head up inbound marketing at FutureAdvisor (YC S10)
1 points by bolu 14y ago
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Full-stack engineer at FutureAdvisor: reduce Wall Street's take of our savings
1 points by bolu 14y ago
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by bolu 15y ago
Active investors of all kinds definitely try, but again as a whole they've failed. I'll try to dig up the data and put it into an article sometime, but the fallacy that you should just pick a hedge fund and it'll outperform via market timin
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by bolu 15y ago
Thats true, but we must remember that for folks who _did_ try to time the market many will have actually had negative returns because of failing timing attempts. For example, there was a massive outflow of funds from Equities after the most
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by bolu 15y ago
Your point about the single month as the timing period is definitely valid - in hindsight the article would have benefitted from having that be maybe 6 months or 12 months instead. The premise isn't as clear-cut as what you laid out, in my
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by bolu 15y ago
You've pointed out the exact nature of the problem. They made a killing that day, and they probably will continue to make a killing as long as naive investors believe they can beat the market (whether with timing, or security selection, or
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by bolu 15y ago
They're both part of the same story: that individual investors are bad at this, and professional managers aren't any good at it either. Fair point though, that was definitely a conceptual leap of some distance there between the two. The ski
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by bolu 15y ago
Good question. The inflow/outflow data is from the ICI (Investment Company Institute - a consortium of fund companies) and is dollars in/out which is independent of asset performance.
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by bolu 15y ago
Indeed - yet individual investors try anyway, and the futility of this is all we're trying to point out.
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by bolu 15y ago
You're right that the article should have been more clear - it's looking at retail investors specifically (in your example; Person2), which is the audience that FutureAdvisor focuses on. It's not focused on other actors in the market such a
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by bolu 15y ago
Because we used the inflows & outflows of a couple large retail mutual funds as proxy for investor demand, you're right that the story actually is "retail investors are bad at timing the market". There's a whole other set of data to div
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by bolu 15y ago
Good data for the performance of hedge funds as an asset class that account for survivorship bias is somewhat hard to find. Off hand, Swensen in "Unconventional Success" recounts that for a single decade period that he was looking at, third
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by bolu 15y ago
Well, just like the average retail investor buys last year's hot mutual fund in the hopes that (usually lucky) outperformance persists, institutional investors also got sold the "look how well my fund did last year" spiel. But before we thi
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by bolu 15y ago
The Emperor of All Maladies - spectacular journey into the history of the disease. Filled with great human stories of discovery, and also taught me a ton about the currently understood biology of cancer.
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Retire young or retire rich(er)?(research.futureadvisor.com)
12 points by bolu 15y ago|0 comments
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by bolu 16y ago
You're absolutely right, and I agree with your advice. Also contributing to your 401(k) - assuming your options aren't terrible - is in the same realm of advice. We should have been more clear - this particular post is all about security se
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by bolu 16y ago
Great feedback. On the brokers front: we're working diligently on that, and should have many more brokerages supported soon. We'll post something on our blog, or if you'd like I can drop you a note personally (just let me know your email: b
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by bolu 16y ago
You probably won't need it, unless you're doing something significantly more complex than the fundamental buy-and-hold index investing strategy. I'd just use market orders all the time except I'm a little freaked out about momentary (on the
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by bolu 16y ago
It's because the fees charged don't appear as a line item on your statement. It's probably the only thing most American families spend more than a $1000 a year on (I did the math), for which they get no documentation... not even a receipt.
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by bolu 16y ago
Sigh... so true. I only wish the economics were different. If, like Fidelity, you extract a ton in fees it allows you to swamp the airwaves with marketing dollars. And the folks who just keep their heads down and do their jobs, well, don't
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by bolu 16y ago
They're good - gotta watch out for your effective expense ratio, which is the amount of commission you pay for the trade (depends on your brokerage house and the ETF) divided by the years you plan to own it, added to the ETF's own existing
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by bolu 16y ago
Makes sense, though it's probably a correlation to the root source of outperformance, which is being an index fund. Cheaper funds tend to be index funds, index funds tend to outperform, thus cheaper funds end up outperforming more expensive
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by bolu 16y ago
I am better versed in the investment area than in the personal debt area, so I will let others speak to that. But a couple of thoughts on the investments front: 1. In many ways it is about time horizon. If you are sure that you will not n