vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
Financial Literacy is about learning about finance and money and how to use and manage them to give you better outcomes in life. Just like the more books you read and the more writing you do will improve your literacy, the more financial books you read, the more questions you ask and the more you participate in this forum and others like it, the more you will improve your financial literacy.  The more financial literate you are the more you will be able to make informed decisions regarding your finances and the more you will be able to avoid financial scams.
"I apologize for not investigating the skeezy world of finance more than I have to, but the major banks invented derivatives that allow them to essentially make a ""bet"" on whether a company will perform well or poorly.  This then allows them to make a shitload of cash by manipulating the market in their favor unfairly and that is wrong.  That is my argument, if you want to get caught up in the semantics of acronyms be my guest but my argument is very real and shared by many so the real question is why are you so blind to the chicanery of major financial institutions?"
The term self-directed generally refers to RRSP accounts where the account holder has not only the ability to determine a basic investment asset mix (such as can be accomplished even with a limited selection of mutual funds) but, more specifically, the self-directed account holder has a much wider choice of financial instruments beyond mutual funds, GICs, and/or cash savings. A self-directed RRSP generally permits the account holder to also invest or trade directly in financial instruments such as: Those kinds of instruments are not typically available in a non-self-directed mutual fund or bank RRSP.  Typical mutual fund or bank RRSPs offer you only their choice of products  – often with higher fees attached. Related resources:
I second all of this. It’s worth noting that not all estates require wealth advice. Unless it’s in the millions of dollars and you have no prior experience, I wouldn’t waste time with wealth advisors.   ML is a broker dealer, not a fiduciary.
There are a lot of certifications/designations you could look into if you're willing to put in the time to study. CFA, FRM, CFP, etc. Most financial companies will recognize these although some carry more weight than others.
"I cannot tell you what is or is not allowed under Islamic law. What I can tell you is that when most investors talk about the ""power of compound interest,"" they are not actually necessarily talking about interest! The idea of the magic of compound interest is that when you receive an interest payment on your investment, you now have a larger investment, earning more interest. Your investment grows exponentially. This doesn't just apply to interest payments, however, but can apply to any type of investment where the profits of the investment cause the investment to get larger.  For example, if you invest in a company's stock, and the value of the stock goes up 10% in a year, after that year your investment is worth more than it was at the beginning. If it goes up another 10% the following year, you have gained more money in the second year than you did in the first. Your gains are compounding, even though interest payments are not involved at all. The same is true if you reinvest dividends or if you use business profit to expand your business, for example.  The term ""power of compound interest"" is so named for historical reasons, but really applies to any type of investment where the investment itself is growing."
The Financial Services Compensation Scheme says: Investments   FSCS provides protection if an authorised investment firm is unable to pay claims against it. For example: for loss arising from bad investment advice, poor investment management or misrepresentation; when an authorised investment firm goes out of business and cannot return investments or money. Investments covered include: stocks and shares; unit trusts; futures and options; personal pension plans and long-term investments such as mortgage endowments. An index-tracking fund provided by an authorised investment firm would seem to qualify in the cases where: The critical points here then are: I can't find anything easily to hand about FSCS on Blackrock's website, so I would imagine that you'd need to consult the documentation on your investment product to be sure.
1: Low fees means: a Total Expense Ratio of less than 0,5%. One detail you may also want to pay attention to whether the fund reinvests returns (Thesaurierender Fonds) which is basically good for investing, but if it's also a foreign-based fund then taxes get complicated, see http://www.finanztip.de/indexfonds-etf/thesaurierende-fonds/
"Hi all, just doing some homework which is evaluating a soccer clubs accounts using ratios. We have to include a paragraph on suggesting ""non financial appraisal"" for the soccer club. Anyone any idea what this could mean? Thanks"
NL7 is most likely right. With the rise of regulatory burden some financial institutions are refusing to do business for which they are at risk of not being compliant (because of complexity) or where being compliant is to onerous. Would suggest you have a look at  Good luck
Because people use financial terms loosely and I wanted to clarify.   Note: You raised the issue only after you saw the response which is a cheesy way to try to prove something.   Translation: When you know how things turned out it’s always easy to say “I knew it all along”.  There is a term for that behavior, it’s called hindsight bias. Look it up at your leisure.  This is my last response.
"Institutional ownership has nearly lost all meaning. It used to mean mutual funds, investment banks, etc. Now, it means pension funds, who hold the rest of the equity assets directly, and insiders. Since the vast majority of investors in equity do not hold it directly, ""institutions"" are approaching 100% ownership on all major equities. Other sites still segment the data."
This is not correct information. The plan sponsor is the fiduciary and potentially any advisor or consultant. The recordkeeper or even the custodian of the assets is a directed trustee, and follows the instructions provided by the plan sponsor. Fidelity or whatever recordkeeper is being used is not in the business of determining if company stock is a prudent investment in the plan. That, again is the job of the plan sponsor and the plans investment committee and possibly an advisor.  The plan sponsor in this case is most certainly eliminating the stock as an option in the plan to pre-empt a stock loss lawsuit brought on by plan participants or plantiffs attorneys.
What's the typical work you do day to day? - financial &amp; laymans terms if you could. Bonus points if you could show me an example (public or personal).   Financial services interest me but I'm new to it and just trying to broaden my knowledge.
"Real target of commisions is providing ""risk shelter"". It is kind of ""insurance"", which is actually last step for external risks to delete all your money. In part it cuts some of risks which you provide, brokers track history of all your actions for you (nobody else does). When brokerage firm fails, all your money is zero. It depends from case to case if whole account goes zero, but I wouldn't count on that."
"I'd argue the two words ought to (in that I see this as a helpful distinction) describe different activities:   ""Investing"":  spending one's money in order to own something of value.  This could be equipment (widgets, as you wrote), shares in a company, antiques, land, etc.  It is fundamentally an act of buying. ""Speculating"":  a mental process in which one attempts to ascertain the future value of some good.  Speculation is fundamentally an act of attempted predicting.   Under this set of definitions, one can invest without speculating (CDs...no need for prediction) and speculate without investing (virtual investing).  In reality, though, the two often go together.  The sorts of investments you describe are speculative, that is, they are done with some prediction in mind of future value.   The degree of ""speculativeness"", then, has to be related to the nature of the attempted predictions.  I've often seen that people say that the ""most speculative"" investments (in my use above, those in which the attempted prediction is most chaotic) have these sorts of properties: And there are probably other ideas that can be included. Corrections/clarifications welcome! P.S. It occurs to me that, actually, maybe High Frequency Trading isn't speculative at all, in that those with the fastest computers and closest to Wall Street can actually guarantee many small returns per hour due to the nature of how it works.  I don't know enough about the mechanics of it to be sure, though."
"Had they made a billion dollars it still wouldn't be arbitrage. The definition of arbitrage is ""the simultaneous purchase and sale of similar commodities in different markets to take advantage of price discrepancy"". What they did was take advantage of a loophole where they took free money to buy more free money. I believe the American government calls that Quantitative Easing. Bazinga."
"If your financial needs aren't complex, and mostly limited to portfolio management, consider looking into the newish thing called robo-advisers (proper term is ""Automated investing services"").  The difference is that robo-advisers use software to manage portfolios on a large scale, generating big economy of scale and therefore offering a much cheaper services than personal advisor would - and unless your financial needs are extremely complex, the state of the art of scaled up portfolio management is at the point that a human advisor really doesn't give you any value-add (and - as other answers noted - human advisor can easily bring in downsides such as conflict of interest and lack of fiduciary responsibility).  disclaimer: I indirectly derive my living from a company which derives a very small part of their income from a robo-adviser, therefore there's a possible small conflict of interest in my answer"
As you haven't specified country, will try and answer more in general ... Whole Life Insurance but it seems to be the first thing any financial adviser is trained to sell ... The commission structure is such that it makes more attractive for a financial adviser to sell Whole Life. Plus for most buyers its easier to sell Whole Life compared to Term. The way Guarantees are worded differ from Policy to Policy, most of them DO NOT give any Guarantee, its the Adviser misquoting. Where there is Guarantee, it would be similar to a Interest on Bank Deposit / Debt fund. Plus there are various terms used in the Policy, the Guarantee may not be on Sum Assured, but on the Policy Value that would be low. In essence, you are right on investing the difference into any save instruments like Bank Deposits, Certain Debit Funds, Government Bonds, Retirement funds etc that would essentially give you more returns than whats promised in the Whole Life Policy.
"The combination of this headline in this subreddit seems to be implying there are financial problems New York financiers are facing wether it's the individual being over leveraged or the bank giving out bad loans.  When this couldn't be further from reality.   It was a Nigerian ""businessman"" who purchased the unit, and financed it through a bank in Luxembourg.   http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4642282/Kolawole-Aluko-foreclosed-Billionaires-Row-penthouse.html"
"This is another semantics question.  Again what matters is how the words are commonly used, as the usage came about long before the technical definitions. In this case, when people say ""mutual fund,"" they are often including both unit investment trusts and closed end funds.  Despite the labels the SEC has given in order to differentiate them, I'd say it's common (typical) practice to think of a closed-end fund as a type of mutual fund, rather than a different category altogether.  That's the way I've seen it used, anyway."
"Your ""money market"" is cash or a ""sweep account"" that your broker is holding for you and on which the broker is paying you interest.  The mutual fund is paying you dividends, not interest, even if it is a money-market mutual fund (often bearing a name such as Prime Reserve Fund) or bond mutual fund that is collecting interest on its investments and passing them on to you."
This is correct. The most rapidly expanding areas in finance resemble computer science more than they resemble traditional finance. The compliance and legal side of things, however, is only getting more and more complicated. At my firm, the compliance personnel outnumber the traders three to one.
"There are some euphemisms that are better known than others. A category of stocks that's suitable for ""widows and orphans"" would be stocks that are low beta, and perhaps high dividend. Safe (being relative) enough to put a window's money into.  The term ""cake and underwear"" appears to me to be a Buffetism. And I'd interpret it to mean,""not tech, not stocks that are either high growth or cyclic, but stocks that make things that have steady demand and that most consumers use."" Google the phrase, only Buffet comes up."
In the case of an investment strategy, if you don't retain custodianship over your funds, or at least determine who is the custodian, then walk away.  You should be able to get accurate account statements from a trustworthy third party at all times.
A perpetuity in the mathematical context is the equation in your link. A perpetuity in the legal sense is a liability that never matures, presumably paying endlessly, except for a banknote that pays nothing.  An example would be UK war bonds during WWII. Real estate can be modeled like a perpetuity for convenience, but it is not a legal obligation to pay forever if one excludes taxes. If one starts with capital and ends with a perpetuity, one has bought a perpetuity.  If one starts out with nothing and ends with capital by way of a perpetuity, one has sold a perpetuity.
"Consumer facing finance is heavily regulated. You are liable for the recommendations you make; if they are based on a black box you risk problems when sued. It is difficult to explain in a court of law why a neural network came to a particular conclusion. It is much easier to provide advice (models) in the ""educated counterparty"" market. Not only do institutional investors in general expect to pay for a quality advice (consumers in general expect to get online advice for free) but the legal implications are different."
"In Canada, for example, they are expected or required to find out. They call it, The “Know Your Client” rule, part of which is knowing your ""Investment knowledge and experience"". They say it is, ""to ensure their advice is suitable for you"". I have always been given that kind of form to fill in, when opening an account."
I am newly applying to finance related jobs, my question is, could someone ELI5 what exactly different sectors within finance are? Like capital markets, derivatives, equity research, wealth management. All of this seems overwhelming coming at it at once.
"You're not alone; there's a quite a few good bloggers out there on the general theme of ""Financial independence, retire early"" (FIRE).  While most of what they blog about is about the technical money side of savings & investments and living sustainably off accumulated wealth, they also all seem to have had to confront the ""OK, so what do I do now?"" side of things too at some point (and admit that the ""FI"" is way more important that the ""RE"").  A few to get you started (think these are all UK based except MMM):"
"For instance he is recommending moving money into HYD which seems to have a higher risk at an average return ( for this asset class )ABHFX seems to have a higher return at a lower risk. Often [his recommendations] are on the lower end of best performing funds in the class. Historical Mutual Fund performance has little to no predictive power for future performance so this shouldn't be an immediate disqualification.  Some good starting questions for you to evaluate a manager:  Does this mean it's a mistake to use UBS (or any bank limited in its fund offerings from other institutions) as the ""wealth management"" institution? All wealth management institutions have restrictions on possible investments.  Obviously, if your relative can't invest in the funds she wants that is an issue. Do these [Morningstar] ratings mean anything at all? This has been studied pretty carefully and the academic consensus appears to be that they have no consistant predictive power.  Kräussl and Sandelowsky wrote a particularly comprehensive paper on the subject."
Layman with a question: the financial world is commonly depicted and regarded as being incsanely hard-driving. High pressure with very challenging work, and absolutely life-consuming. IRL, I've ever heard a few stories second-hand about things like fairly regular 18 hour work days and such. Finance is certainly a broad field with many facets; but generally how true is this? I have to assume it at the least doesn't quite meet popular perception, because people would have nervous breakdowns...
"Classic investing guru Benjamin Graham defines ""An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return."" He contrasts this with speculation which is anything else (no thorough analysis, no safety of principal, or no adequate return). The word ""adequate"" is important, since it contrasts adequate returns with those that are either lower than needed or higher than necessary to reach your goals."
"he is saying that ""QE"" meaning ""quantitative easing"" meaning ""the theory that the government flooded the markets with money, artificially driving up the price of stocks"" meant that hedge funds, which HEDGE, and benefit from an up-and-down market, couldn't win in a market where it just kept going up.  It's basically a conspiracy theory bears have been pushing for years ""QE artificially inflated the market, it's gonna crash!"""
"Monkey,  Big four accounting firms have FRM departments. Maybe you could apply to one of those.  FRM is mostly about Credit Risk (Loans, advances, receivables) and Market Risk (IR, FX).   I'm trying to ""break into"" credit risk myself, but materials are difficult to find. It's about modeling portfolio default probabilities and losses given default. You'll impress with basic programming and advanced prob&amp;stats.  Can you ask your professor to recommend a book on Credit Risk?   For Market Risk, I know that a lot of the work guys do is pricing IR and FX swaps in Bloomberg. Take a class in derivatives, if you can."
It means one has to provide documents to estabilsh the source of funds. This is to detect any money laundering. For example an salaried individual suddenly transacting for 1 Million, the bank would ask for proof of funds.    Its possible that the individual has his own funds because of inheretance or a handsome bonus received etc or a it could be he is helping route some illegal money that is not his. There are regulations that state for what kind of transaction Proof of Funds are required.
Having more money than you know what to do with is a good problem to have. :) Congratulations on your early retirement! I'd say this is a good time to start learning about investing, because nobody will look after your money as well as you will. Fund managers and financial advisers may mean well, but they are just salespeople, paid commissions to promote their employers' products. Not that there's anything wrong with that; it's just that their interests are not aligned with yours. They get paid the same, whether you make or lose money. If you want to live off your investments you must invest in your financial education.
"Sure, and everything you've said here is absolutely true for a fully immunized portfolio.  What the OP suggests is that it's simply impossible to effectively defease future obligations.  He is pitching not so much finance as he is a political philosophy that can be summed up by ""defined benefit plans are impediments to competition.""  In the OP's world, the business of life and casualty insurance would implode within a few years of inception.  Actuarial science would be dismissed as mathematical witchcraft.  We would see company after company laid low by overwhelming future obligations against which they have no defense.  Rather, what we have are instances of *poor financial management.*  As opposed to the fine examples set by insurers, endowments, foundations, etc. (all of which can remain successful ongoing concerns in perpetuity), what we have are businesses who decided that it would be better to cut corners and bet on risk, rather than to take the safer (but more expensive) route and effectively manage their assets in relation to their liabilities.    He then goes on to suggest that, in laying off their problems, business are simply ""doing everybody a favor.""  These business (and their highly educated financial managers) are taking their flaming piles of shit, handing it over to the guy whose expertise most likely involves the repetitive operation of a machine, and saying ""here you go, this is a good deal for you, enjoy managing your future!"""
It's a good sign that you acknowledge your inability and are willing to defer to others. ...and have had a few bad experiences when trying to hire someone to help me Find an AIF, preferably one from a largish investment firm. You don't want to be their most important client. You just want them to treat you with courtesy and give you simple, and sound investment advice. Don't be afraid to shop around a bit. I am interested in options for safe, short ""parking"" of these funds until I figure out what I want to do. Apart from savings accounts, some money market accounts and mutual funds may be appropriate for parking funds before investing elsewhere. They come with their own tradeoffs and are quite likely higher risk than you're willing to take while you're just deciding what to do with the funds. My personal recommendation* for your specific circumstances at this specific time is to put your money in an Aspiration Summit Account purely because it has 1% APY (which is the highest interest rate I'm currently aware of) and is FDIC insured. I am not affiliated with Aspiration. I would then suggest talking to someone at Vanguard or Fidelity about your investment options. Be clear about your expectations and don't be afraid to simply walk away if you don't like the advice you receive. I am not affiliated with Vanguard or Fidelity. * I am not a lawyer, fiduciary, or even a person with a degree in finances. For all you know I'm a dog on the internet."
"I try to think of it as ""present money"" and ""future money.""  Right now there's still plenty of present money(present wealth): crops are growing, there's plenty of rubber steel glass and such being processed, people still need toothpaste, etc.  Stocks go way up when there's expectations in the marketplace for **future** earnings and production (profit).  Debt is issued (read:money is created) when banks and lenders think production and profits will increase in the future.  That future profit is what pays for the debt being issued (money being created) in the present.  They essentially borrow from the future to create money today, in exchange for a chunk of the future profits.    Right now there's so much doom and gloom that everybody thinks future production and future profits will just not be there, so nobody lends, nobody invests, and no money is created, and thus ""money"" just kinda disappears.    At least that's how I think about it.  Present wealth vs expectations of future wealth.  I'm probably wrong though; this stuff gives me a headache."
Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns failed before there ever was such a thing as a Systemically Important Financial Institution (SIFI).  OP's article and the study that it is based on are referring quite specifically to SIFI's, not every bank in American history.