mcarvin

For full disclosure I am a founder of the company but many of the mistakes in math / modeling made in the NYT Tool are corrected at SmartAsset. One example is the tax consequence of ownership - which because of the standard deduction is overestimated for lower value homes (<$250,000).

Practicality aside, this would be the end of "progress". No new discovery, no new exploration, no deeper understanding of how we got here, where we are or why we are here. The problem with 'bliss on tap' is assumption that there would be no problems left to solve... the mortgaging of our future potential for our present satisfaction.

Agreed. I think that is the point the OP is making. As sites like Kayak grow in popularity, the usefulness of a discovery tool (search), diminishes.

The OP is stating a truism that I agree with (true with all truisms). Google is your default search engine for any query where (you believe) Google offers the highest probability of delivering the intended content/ answer.

So any product, in any vertical, that can respond to a query with greater utility than google - and condition it's userbase that that is the case - has the potential to supplant google for those queries. Great example is the drift of search traffic for flight travel on google to direct traffic to sites like kayak and expedia. (another example is the shift of people search).

The challenge of competing against kayak-like companies that offer great products in specific verticals, will only grow. So if you believe search traffic will not naturally decline over time you are effectively arguing that google will be able to outperform the pace at which new products will be built that have kayak (flight search) / linkedin (people search) / coverhound (auto insurance search) - like potential.

And I think Eric Schmidt would agree. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4

Those are profits in absolute terms. I suspect the author is arguing that relative to the size of the company, wage ratios are important. I would argue he is mistaking consequence for cause. Companies with egalitarian wage ratios can afford (read 'need') equitable wage ratios precisely because of the nature of their business (think software firms with barriers to entry, high margins that are dense with human capital vs a company) vs (a chemicals company, that produces a fungible good and can only compete on price - business is characterized by low margins and a greater proportion of unskilled labor - ie more wage equality would put you out of business)

Author states that Silicon Valley corporate structures are more egalitarian when measured against traditional firms. Author attributes this to a more progressive, 'stakeholder' culture in SV.

Question: human capital is disproportionately more important to building value in the tech sector than it is in the broader economy (think mines, manufacturing etc). Isn't it more likely that a more equitable equity split is a pre-requisite for success in SV as opposed to being a consequence of it?

Please help me understand this better?

With a deep understanding of markets and trading I fail to see why you see 'luck' as an explanatory variable is inversely correlated with the frequency of your trades (notwithstanding the effect of trading expenses)?

From what I have gleaned the following seems to be true: 1. Your algorithms worked (made money) 2. Then your algorithms did not work, but you could not figure out why

If you do not know why something stopped working it seems unlikely that you had a full understanding of why it was working in the first place. Without understanding the nature of the predictive value of the algorithm while it was working, its success seems to be good fortune.

Your algorithm could have shown a systematic correlation to any number of factors that could have created strong performance over several months. Performance would then be attributed to accidentally 'timing' a favorable market.

I know you feel differently, what am I missing?

And either way - kudos on the $500k.

1. I cannot get even a remote sense for the nature of his risk exposure from looking at his daily returns. 2. ok. 3. The point here is that a systematic bias in his algorithm will expose his trading strategy to the good graces of market fortune (luck) regardless of whether he trades a million, billion or once a day. The source of the bias is irrelevant. 4. did not see where he said that but that very much confirms 'timing' / which in this case I interpret as luck as being at least a contributing factor.

Very important to understand that making $500k speculatively is not evidence of an 'edge', nor is trading frequency evidence of the absence of luck. From March 2009 through much of 2010, the market was strongly bullish - if his algorithm showed a positive market bias then his returns would primarily be a function of timing (read luck: and there are a million variants on the nature of the bias that could be unwittingly responsible for his returns, despite the frequency of trades).

We cannot even tell if $500k is a good risk adjusted return - we have no information on volatility, nature of the exposure or most importantly how much money he started with?

Not exactly shocked Jim Simons didn't return his email. But completely shocking that he walked away from a successful automated trading strategy... the only thing rarer than a free lunch is a man willing to walk away from one. suspect.

Ian, thanks for the feedback. We do a lot of user testing and the problems you are experiencing are new to us. We pay $30 for a user test session, can you email me at info at smartasset dot com, so we can get something lined up. Thank you.

On the change in your income. When you buy a property there is an opportunity cost associated with the cash that you use to purchase the property (down payment + closing costs). This money would have accrued interest income had you continued to rent, hence the larger value for income in the rent scenario.

We should have thought of this. We will get this incorporated, until then: without funding you simply need to multiply the exit value by your starting % ownership less dilution from employees (good approximation).

signed up and eagerly anticipating release. would drive enormous efficiencies in our business.

thanks for the note. can you email us at info at smartasset dot com with the inputs you used?

Thanks for the heads up. Will see what we can do!

on the back-end we are: > ensuring our users qualify for mortgages based on the zipcode and financial profile > further seeing if they qualify for any government programs > running their taxes on a federal, state and local level to understand if there are any tax benefits to home ownership (almost always overestimated for lower incomes and underestimated for higher incomes) > drawing on local real estate tax data > drawing on local transactional expenses (including any transactional taxes you need to pay, like mortgage recording tax in nyc) > the above, including your financial inputs are then 'modeled'. We actually build several different models for you, and through the comparison of those models we can give advice on a level of accuracy that could not previously be approached.

The result is utility, accuracy and ease of use that we believe is dramatic on improvement on financial calculators. And we are really just scratching the surface on what the modeling engine can do for many different decisions.

Will never get tired of hearing that. Obviously have an enormous amount of work to do but thanks.

Wow, thanks for that. Will definitely look into it.

Our infographic represents the universe of publicly available information, I sincerely do not believe a more factual account of what either candidate has said is possible. The only alternative would be take guesses as to how the candidates intend to augment or complete their plans. Noting that neither approach is perfect, when considering how to approach this problem we considered guessing to be inferior.

Hi, we do actually take into account dependents (towards the top right of the page). Mostly for ease of use, we do make some simplifying assumptions that are noted at the bottom of the page under "methodology". For a more detailed breakdown of your federal, state, local and medicare / social security payments you can try the smartasset decision engine.

Our company's mission is to make more of the data you see helpful. This infographic is an expression of that mission. We are apolitical and simply want you to be able to interact with data that is otherwise available in a format that is easier to consume and, if we are successful, just makes sense.

Understood. As there is no reliable way to guess at who would be affected and how (ie what income levels, with dependents / or without) - we believe the most accurate way to portray the plan is with what Romney has stated publicly and the shortfall that he needs to account for (ie $2.8 trillion over 10 years).

Repeated from below: The key assumption in Obama's infographic is that "Romney eliminates all tax benefits, except those for savings and investment". To the best of our knowledge, Romney has only indicated that he will cut the expanded refundability of the Child-Tax Credit, and the earned income tax credit (EITC) - which our analysis includes. Our analysis is based on the publicly available information on their respective plans. We make no 'assumptions' to fill in gaps.

We note though that the Romney plan does not address how his proposal will be funded and reference the $2.8 Trillion revenue shortfall his plan creates.

Yes. The key assumption in Obama's infographic is that "Romney eliminates all tax benefits, except those for savings and investment". To the best of our knowledge, Romney has only indicated that he will cut the expanded refundability of the Child-Tax Credit, and the earned income tax credit (EITC) - which our analysis includes. Our analysis is based on the publicly available information on their respective plans. We make no 'assumptions' to fill in gaps.

We note though that the Romney plan does not address how his proposal will be funded and reference the $2.8 Trillion revenue shortfall his plan creates.

Awesome work guys.

demo is very cool. love anything that can make pattern recognition in large datasets this much easier.

game changer. will you let vc's work for you after you crowd out their market?

Hi, looks like we need to make our assumptions clearer. We assume an approximate 6% cost on selling a home (changes regionally). You will be able to flex your ROI shortly.

Not sure I understand the point about 4% vs 4.65%. If you see a rate of 4% on our site you can execute at that price. If you have problems with the bank, let us know and we'll go to bat for you but everything on our site is actionable.

Awesome feedback, definitely feels like the direction we're heading (greater user flexibility) is one that resonates with you and others. The only note I'd make is that you can currently change the home value on the buy vs rent tab (it is beneath the other data entry tabs on the left of the page - clicking on that or on the button that says 'change' underneath the home value should get you going).

Hope this helps. When Apple says their 2015 forecast for sales is $200B (made that up) that is not a number that is PV'd (because that is 2015 number). Similarly when we are modeling your income going forward those are not numbers that should be PV'd.

However, when we sum future expenses or cash flows (across years) and present them as a single number, generally in today's money, those values are all PV'd. For example, on our mortgage comparison page the total expenses over the amount of time you plan on holding the mortgage is a number we PV.

we're working on giving users the flexibility to change these assumptions. Obviously viewpoints differ and we want you to be able to make the best decision based on your view. That said, all default or base case values are what we consider to be 'consensus' estimates.