tinkerrr

It obviously won't have 'no effect' on grandma, but generally speaking, grandma's pension fund, if managed competently, will only invest a small percentage of portfolio in venture firms. The effect is therefore limited to a small amount of the portfolio.

Why cherry-pick 5 years? Just look at their performance since inception. It is clearly laid out in their 13F. The company has trounced the S&P over such a long-term it is pretty incredible actually.

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/2015ar/2015ar.pdf

1964-2015, the S&P500 returned 11,355% and BRK returned 1,598,284%.

p.s. not downvoting you, just disagreeing.

You're right, I shouldn't have used an absolute language. There is also the issue of voter apathy so yes, a 51% attack might be worthy of a try for a wealthy enough adversary.

In terms of the split, if the community broadly agrees that there is an attack, then I don't see it having a long-term detriment. However, as you said, if it is more 'stealthy' then it would be harder to detect and correct.

All that being said, I think there is a theoretical safety mechanism in place. Whether that will work in real life or not, we'll wait and see. I am sure some good lessons will come out of this in either case and the next generation of applications can improve upon some shortcomings.

Is there any stock or asset that would beat the S&P500 on an absolute basis for all time periods? No. Therefore you can play this game with every single asset class, without exception. It doesn't mean anything, and that is why your comment is misleading. Just looking at a selected time-range and finding underperformance doesn't tell you anything at all about the historic performance of an asset.

Anyone can 'split' the DAO at any point of time, which renders the 51% attack moot. A 51% attack works only when the attacker can get more than what he puts in.

Consider this obvious attack vector: Let's say today is the last crowdfunding day, and the DAO has raised $150 million so far. A wealthy attacker can immediately put another $150 million, effectively controlling 50% of the voting for the DAO, and then vote to send all the money to his own Ethereum address. This is perfectly possible, since this is all written in Ethereum contracts anyway.

To avoid this, the rest of the people can 'fork' the DAO, effectively leaving the attacker with 100% control over his share of 50%. The attacker gains nothing. The other 'fork' can now continue on.

This forking described above is also going to be used (I think) when it comes to funding new projects. I am sure some people will disagree with some proposal, and they would fork the DAO away to not invest in that proposal even though the majority agreed they would. They are free to do so.

This is correct. When the Decentralized Autonomous Organization/Corporation is a term that has undergone quite a few changes, and Ethereum projects definitely use it very loosely. As you pointed out, not much is autonomous at all. The DAO in this case appoints one company per project who is responsible for the entire project and its management. They are free to be as competent or incompetent, until voted out.

Closer to the US, don't forget the debt default by Puerto Rico: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36184250

True, but remember that JP Morgan doesn't run a hedge fund, and neither do other banks like HSBC that have been caught laundering money for drug cartels and got away with a few basis points of revenue in fines.

If it was a level playing field then what you said is true, i.e. provide better services in the asset management space. However, the reality is more complicated.

Firstly, financial education. How many asset managers like pension funds want to put part of their portfolios in hedge funds even when their returns are sub-par. The industry is very opaque in terms of disclosing returns, and many indices are biased upward due to survivorship bias.

Secondly, the lobbying to keep the taxes at a low, and other tax loopholes, onshore and offshore, mean that the profits made by the industry are taxed lower than what would be made by a manufacturing firm.

The industry as a whole will never be truly free-market due to many regulations and laws, so your point about having a universal solution for everyone to invest across borders is probably not going to be realized in the next several decades at least.

Did you have more than $250,000 in your account? If so, then you would have lost access to part of your money, or gotten if after a bankruptcy court hearing. Deposits are not the highest priority item on a bank's liability side of the balance sheet, and as a depositor, you'll likely not get paid in full.

Your prejudice against "Bitcoin community" is quite telling, given the fact that it took the Bitcoin community less than 2 hours to disprove the supposed proof and very few in the "Bitcoin community" would consider Wright one of their own.

This is great but ... rudimentary. The same advice on 'create a 6-month emergency fund' no matter the financial situation, without regard to the cost of such a plan (in lost returns) and taking into consideration that depending on your financial situation, getting that amount in credit isn't that difficult.

Similar thing with life insurance. Sure, it is great for some. But when I entered that I am single and have no kids, it still recommends life insurance. Why exactly? It is known to be bad from an investment point of view - insurance should be bought for insurance reasons anyway.

Similar situation with renters insurance - without knowing what my belongings are worth, how can you recommend that I need renters insurance up to $500 per year?

p.s. the app doesn't work if you have ublock origin installed. Just an FYI.

Dividends are paid from company earnings (profits), not stock, and as such, stock price doesn't affect the ability of the firm to pay dividends. They could both have the same underlying cause though - which is, a deteriorating business condition that reduces earnings. Otherwise, e.g. if Coke's stock price falls by 50% in a recession, doesn't mean it will cut its dividend.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444941

399 points | 4 days ago | 350 comments

Picking the initial stocks? A company like Berkshire Hathaway run by Warren Buffet has a very low churn over the years, especially in their larger positions. The company has been sitting on 400,000,000 shares of Coca-Cola since the late 80s, never selling a single share.

That Youtube link is blocked in the UK

Correlation-causation. How do you know this is because Trump may become president?

This is based on after-hours trading, where Alphabet is up 9%+ after an earnings beat. The marketcap that you see in Google Finance is calculated based on the price at the end of the trading day, not after-hours trading.

That important metric actually understates their sales due to the strength of the US Dollar this last year. On a constant-currency basis, it is about 15% higher. Just goes to show the 'real' results are even more impressive.

There was a discussion a couple of years ago around how ACH works. ACH is the dominant system of money transfer in the US and takes 2-5 business days on average for a transfer, compared to the real-time systems in many other countries.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7636066

ProShares provides a convenient way to get short exposure to large Chinese stocks that trade in Hong Kong (you buy the ETF to get short exposure): http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=YXI

So you're saying a stagnant company in a stagnant industry that almost died should remain stagnant and not try anything risky at all?

It's not wild speculation for GM. They most likely have ways to work together. It's unlikely a completely passive investment.

Money? These drugs and the companies don't come cheap.

Take Gilead for example, which created Harvoni/Sovaldi for treating Hep-C. It's currently valued at about $150B. Before the release, it was a quarter of the price, so the value of Gilead's Hep-C franchise is in the order of $70-$80B at the very least. That's about the entire net worth of Bill Gates.

Do you have a good source for this, or should be take every anonymous Quora answer with literally zero references as the authoritative source on a topic as complex as the economy?

The comment is obviously flawed since it's trying to equate the GDP to industrial production. In the US, for instance, the annualized industrial production has been -1.8% [1] but the GDP growth has been +3.4% annualized [2]. This is a difference of 4.2 percentage points, similar to India's per the comment. Also, India's export growth is around 1% - not exceptional, but definitely not -10% as stated in the Quora comment [3].

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+industrial+productio...

[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+gdp+growth

[3] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=india+export+growth

To answer your question simply, yes, investors believe it will be hugely profitable in the future. That's the only reason to invest in any company that doesn't make a profit today.

It is not as unreasonable as you might think. Look at how fast Facebook's earnings are growing in the last 2-3 years. Investors hope Twitter can replicate this, even if it is at a smaller scale. Whether they are right or not is obviously up for debate, and you can take part in this debate by buying/selling/shorting Twitter in the stock market.

> In the third quarter of 2012, we signed an agreement to process credit and debit card payment transactions for all Starbucks-owned stores in the United States. The agreement was amended in August 2015 to eliminate the exclusivity provision in order to permit Starbucks to begin transitioning to another payment processor starting October 1, 2015. Under the amendment, Starbucks also agreed to pay increased processing rates to us for as long as they continue to process transactions with us. We anticipate that Starbucks will transition to another payment processor and will cease using our payment processing services prior to the scheduled expiration of the agreement in the third quarter of 2016, and, in any event, we do not intend to renew it when it expires.

In addition to the $150 million loss in 2014, looks like the revenue side doesn't look too good either. From their operating data,

Total revenue = $707.8 million

Starbucks revenue = $123 million

So they would likely lose > 17% revenue very soon.

The best practice is for founders to vest at the same schedule as employees, so founder shares also vest at the same rate over 4 years. This is recommended by YC and many others, and most startups follow this. Founder shares do not vest outright in most cases.

>Historically, to the 1930s, stocks and bonds were inversely correlated

Not true. In 1927, the correlation was around 0.18. The correlation was close to 0 in 1928 and it was 0.4 in 1929.

>Only recently has that behavior not held true (around 2008, according to the very PIMCO paper you cited).

Again, not true. From 1965 to 1995, there were only a handful of years when stocks and bonds were negatively correlated. See figure 1 in the research report from PIMCO if you want to find this.

I am sorry, I provided a research report in the link. I think it makes more sense to follow that rather than a person's word who traded commodities, commenting on bonds-stocks correlation for a decade without empirical data.

The bottom line is, there are many periods of time when stocks and bonds are inversely correlated and many times when there is a positive correlation. That's the whole point.

> It used to be the case that stocks, bonds and other commodities like gold has inverse correlations

Where are you getting this information, on which the whole comment is based? It has always been very volatile and stocks and bonds have almost never been "uncorrelated assets". They change sign very frequently. Here's a research report from PIMCO [1] that shows the change in sign of the correlation to be 29 times in the past 90-odd years.

https://media.pimco.com/Documents/PIMCO_Quantitative_Researc...