imakwana

This might be a specific aspect of Global Macro investing, but if you are interested in Risk Parity strategies (as popularized and adopted by Bridgewater), below two books by Alex Shahidi of Evoke Advisors cover Risk Parity asset allocation in great detail:

1) Risk Parity: How to Invest for All Market Environments

2) Balanced Asset Allocation: How to Profit in Any Economic Climate

Flash Boys by Michael Lewis

+1. It is paramount to pivot the personal career capital/skills to align with the industry trends. I have seen the stagnation take root in my own career currently, working in the same company for 6 years, and it indeed becomes exponentially harder to crack the interviews. The rest of the industry is far ahead of the curve compared to my current employer.

How to get better at technical interviewing, this is a skill that has cost me the most in terms of opportunity cost.

Yes, it is like walking into a coffee shop full of smart people and listening to their conversations. It is inspiring in a subtle and constructive way. The mental models acquired over many years of reading HN are extremely helpful in navigating the tech/career landscape.

An investment analogy can be "Core & Explore" portfolio of skills with pareto distribution (say 80% Core, 20% Explore).

The core skills are those that have stood the test of time over multiple decades (OOP, FP, Operating Systems, Distributed Systems).

The "Explore" portfolio is essentially venture capital like bet on new tools/frameworks/languages. Most of the venture bets will fail, but few of them will have exponential returns where you will get ahead of the rest of the market or discover early that your side-project/prototype is very valuable in the market (e.g. ML, Cloud services, etc).

The Startup of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha. There are lessons in this book which go far beyond conceptual origin of LinkedIn. There are network effects in labor market which can be systematically harnessed to accelerate one's career. It contains lot of those practices which are simple but not easy.

Bogleheads Wiki is the definitive resource, Start from the Getting Started page: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Getting_started

Once you grasp the essentials, you can deep dive further with the recommended reading list: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Books:_recommendations_and_r...

From an asset allocation perspective, rebalancing triggers/alerts would be very useful. There are mainly two types: 1) Time based (monthly, quarterly or annually), 2) based on rebalancing bands such as 5/25 (i.e. 5% absolute deviation or 25% relative deviation).

For deep dive into quantitative analysis of leveraged portfolios, this analysis on Bogleheads Blog by forum member Siamond is very insightful: https://www.bogleheads.org/blog/2020/01/31/leveraged-portfol...

Inside the Machine: An Illustrated Introduction to Microprocessors and Computer Architecture by Jon Stokes.

My understanding, from US based hiring perspective, is that MS degree is purely for getting ahead of existing competition in the job market, to potentially stand out among vast pools of BS grads applying for the same position. Moreover, I also believe going through the formal degree helps later in career for rapidly learning new tools/frameworks/languages that is ever changing in industry. I might be biased though and sample size is very small (looking at Austin, Texas's hiring landscape).

In a similar boat, currently a Design Verification engineer, planning to apply for Georgia Tech Online Masters in Computer Science (OMSCS) to get out of semiconductor industry and move towards to cloud-computing based software companies for future career growth. I am aware of few of my past colleagues who also followed similar path.

The Startup of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha. It helped me in my early career right after graduation and influenced my career trajectory thereafter. I haven't lived up to the ideal that is set out in the book but it has been a guiding light.

> Semiconductor engineering is still a career suicide though, that haven't changed in the last few decades.

This is so true. I am currently a hardware engineer and planning to switch to software. If you are not in Nvidia, Apple or other mega-growth hardware companies, you are suffering atleast 40% paycut compared to software industry and also working about twice as hard, using obsolete tools and flows, and almost no opportunities for technical advancement or significant impact. Meanwhile the annual raises are cost-of-living adjustments. Its truly depressing.

Assuming that in order to preserve wealth you are targeting 4-5% safe withdrawal rate (including inflation adjustments), an all-weather portfolio or risk parity type of portfolios can serve this purpose well and designed to be very resilient and robust to different market environments.

Checkout various implementations of these portfolios:

1) Understanding All-weather portfolio: https://ofdollarsanddata.com/ray-dalio-all-weather-portfolio...

2) The Permanent Portfolio: https://www.bogleheads.org/blog/2014/09/11/harry-brownes-per...

3) Golden butterfly portfolio: https://portfoliocharts.com/2016/04/18/the-theory-behind-the...

4) All-in-one Risk Parity ETF based on an actively managed index: RPAR ETF: https://rparetf.com/rpar

5) Wealthfront risk parity mutual fund WFRPX: https://research.wealthfront.com/whitepapers/risk-parity/

For finance:

1) https://quant.stackexchange.com/ forum is worth following

2) https://quantocracy.com/ for article aggregators but no support for comments

For learning below courses and books are very helpful:

1) Online courses: Computation Structures: Parts 1, 2 and 3 - all course materials available on EdX MIT as well as MIT OCW

2) Books: a) Computer Systems: A Programmers Perspective and b) Computer Organization: Hardware/Software Interface

3) Practice Verilog HDL programming for small/medium complexity building blocks such as FIFOs, RAMs, bridges, etc using free simulators like Xilinx ISIM. Courses such as Coursera's Hardware Description Languages for FPGA Design are a good starting point. Lookup most starred repos on Github in verilog and systemverilog languages.

You have absolutely nailed it. Over the past 7 years, I have observed EDA tooling frustrating to the point that RTL design/verification/structural engineers in my $megacorp company abandoned this entire industry and move to software jobs. System-on-chip design industry desperately needs to adopt an open source EDA tool chain from architecture to synthesis and layout. Fortunately we have some amazing developments in this areas over the past year, specifically BlueSpec compiler becoming open sourced, SoC design and simulation framework such as ChipYard based on Chisel and Verilator. Lets hope this open source movement gains momentum and allows rapid innovation in this space.

Highly recommend these references:

1) Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface by David Patterson and John Hennessy

2) Computation Structures course and associated course material from MIT OCW, checkout links [1], [2] and [3]

[1] https://computationstructures.org/

[2] OCW MIT 6.004 : https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...

[3] EdX MIT 6.004 - 3 part course on computation structures: https://www.edx.org/course/computation-structures-part-1-dig...

Not exactly stocks but for wide ranging topics in terms of Asset Allocation this forum is highly recommended: Bogleheads sub-forum Investing Theory, News and General : https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=10

Second this recommendation of the works of William Bernstein, all of his books are excellent and highly pragmatic for individual investors.

Vanguard also offers "Tax-managed" funds which have significantly less yield/distributions compared to corresponding index funds [1].

[1] https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Tax-managed_fund_comparison

+1. Bogleheads has an amazing community maintained wiki. I would add that their recommended reading list of books is also excellent: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Books:_recommendations_and_r...

Compounding of continuous improvement in daily life, similar to compounding of an equity portfolio. In other words, focusing on "Aggregation of Marginal Gains" in all aspects of life [1]. [1] https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains

+1. Bogleheads Wiki is a goldmine of sound investing principles and personal finance. Also highly recommend their books reading list: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Books:_recommendations_and_r...

Stumbling upon "Latticework of Mental Models" concept of Charlie Munger [1] really helped me over the years to develop mental clarity, ignore noise and focus on fundamentals in many aspects of life.

[1] https://fs.blog/intellectual-giants/charlie-munger/

Thanks for mentioning this. Bogleheads Wiki [1] is a goldmine of index investing and asset allocation insights for every stage of an individual investor's lifecycle. Highly recommended.

[1] https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page

Perhaps trend-line based approach that you described is similar to the strategy called "Value Averaging" which is a valuation based approach to averaging (instead of dollar cost averaging), where CAPE ratio or expected return is used to estimate long term trend. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_averaging

Federal Reserve publishes weekly mortgage rates for conventional mortgages

Conventional 15 year fixed : https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE15US

Conventional 30 year fixed : https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US