konne88

You can usually aggregate all your trades into a single line on your tax form.

"You can aggregate all short-term and all long-term covered transactions and report them as single-line entries directly on Schedule D. A covered transaction is one where your broker provided a 1099-B Form to the IRS that: 1) Show acquisition date and basis and 2) Don’t require any adjustments or codes"

https://www.hrblock.com/tax-center/income/investments/report...

I think there are two reason why you should care how your bank invests money. 1) For society, because the government has to bailout your bank if they take risky bets. 2) As a customers, because you don't have any choice about how much risk/returns you get (which might be fine, if low risk/low reward is what you are after).

I completely agree that we don't want to end up being the next Robinhood. One interesting technical aspect there is that our customers don't manually trade securities, instead they provide us with a strategy that we then execute when we need to automatically buy/sell their investment. I think this will implicitly guide our users toward choosing a long term investment strategy (like mutual funds) instead of doing day trading.

Let's use concrete numbers just to make it easier. Say you have $10K in your account. You would be withdrawing $5K which we would allow. If you did this withdraw while the markets were close, and the value of your portfolio is only $8K when the markets are open, you would have $3K left in your account.

Great point!

Yes, you are completely right, this is an investment account with the money management and instant cash access features of a checking account. It is not FDIC insured and you can lose money.

We are buying and selling the stock in such a manner that you get instant access to cash (e.g. at the ATM), which would be impossible or very tedious if you did this manually :-)

With today's existing banking products, it is indeed basically impossible to keep 0% in cash, because you then couldn't pay your rent etc.

On the question of how much money you should keep in cash, I think it really depends on how much savings you have. Most experts recommend a rainy day/emergency fund worth 3-6 months of normal expenses. If you invest that rainy day/emergency funds in a Financial Choice account, it is important to choose an investment strategy with an appropriate risk/reward profile, and adjust the savings target to account for the additional risk from the investments. Betterment has a pretty good writeup on this idea https://www.betterment.com/resources/safety-net-funds-why-tr....

Good point about the "checking account" phrasing. I agree we should be more careful here. In my mind, traditional checking accounts are characterized by two orthogonal features. 1) They offer money management features (debit cards, ATM, bill pay, check writing, scanning checks etc), and 2) they provide low volatility investing. Financial Choice offers 1) but gives you more choices with 2).

We currently don't try to avoid wash sales, so they can happen indeed. That's not the end of the world though (wash sales are completely legal), it just means you can't do as much tax loss harvesting as you might like.

Long term, you could imagine that our automation could buy and sell securities that are slightly different, so that you would get the full tax loss harvesting benefits.

Every year you will receive the necessary paperwork from us to file your taxes. While there will be many trades, you can usually combine them into just one line on your tax return that sums them all up.

That's correct, because your money is invested, this is not FDIC insured.

I completely agree that our product could be used the wrong way, and we want to make sure we guide our customers to the investments that will have the best risk profile for them. In particular, we are currently seeking to become a registered investment adviser, so we can make suggestions based on our customers' individual situation (e.g. so we can recommend that people without significant savings invest in lower risk securities like US Treasuries and Bonds).

Thanks for highlighting that the investments can lose significant money, and that this is something to watch out for! Completely agree here. I do think that there is subtly around risky investments not belonging in a checking account. I agree that if you are in a situation where you live paycheck to paycheck you would only want to invest in very low risk assets (say US treasuries). That said, if you have some money saved up, you can invest your checking account balance more aggressively and still stay liquid even in really bad downturns.

Wouldn't Google have a very long history of business to business from their advertising platform?

My prediction was that the article would talk about: abstraction, application, and variables.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus

Such bullshit. With Soylent you can code while you eat :)

What we really need is a hardware extension for ARM/Intel that traps on under/overflow: http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1154

So this has over 1000 upvotes because it's good art, not because it's an interesting algorithm?

Why do people find this interesting? Is there more to it than the insight that one can define a function that maps image-dimensions to an image?

I'd take a cheaper processor over a "conflict free" one every day.

Why not just call the post: "Which Programming Languages are Pure?". What's the point of redefining Functional Programming in a way that is at best controversial?

> Default methods cannot be accessed from within lambda expressions.

Why is that?

I would have expected "Coq" to fail.