vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
"For anyone who'd like to know a little more:  Basically, I'm curious about ""newer"" styles of portfolio optimization. We all know and love the classic Markowitz Mean-Variance optimization model. Gather your assets, optimize weights based on minimizing variance and maximizing return, plot your capital allocation line, find your Sharpe Ratio portfolio.  [(In case anyone doesn't know what I'm talking about, check this out, it is a very common technique still used quite widely today)](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/efficientfrontier.asp)  However, the Markowitz model makes a couple of huge assumptions, one of them being that asset returns roughly follow a normal distribution. Since this is not always the case, new models for risk management and optimization have emerged, starting with Value at Risk, and more recently, [Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR).](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/conditional_value_at_risk.asp)  You can also draw an efficient frontier for CVaR portfolios [using fairly complicated linear programming techniques, as first outlined in this very influential paper.](http://www.ise.ufl.edu/uryasev/files/2011/11/CVaR1_JOR.pdf) Fortunately, these days, the techniques are widely available in Python and Matlab packages.   For further discussion, what are your thoughts on the Markowitz model? Do you have a preferred portfolio optimization method?"
"Wow, this analysis really surprised me. Very complete and useful, but i think my teacher request was easier. He just said: ""Try to build a diversified portfolio. Then try to add a commodity (like silver or gold) and understand how the risk vary introducing an asset like this."" So, i'm basically making a stocks portfolio and i'm calculating its expected return and risk. (for example 40%FB, 10%JNJ, 20%GS, 10%F and 20%MCD) then i'm adding GLD (so now i have something like 20%FB, 10%JNJ, 10%GS, 10%F and 20%MCD 30%GLD) and i'm actually making an excel spreadsheet where i calculate all the: -Expected returns -St Deviation -Covariance  At the end i compare the returns and the risks on the 2 different portfolios."
Exactly the point I'm trying to make though. Everyone's downvoting this guy for making valid points about why HE is choosing not to buy Tesla. Sure if someone disagreed because they, like you said, preferred an optimistic long term analysis of Tesla because of a number of things like Elons track record or Tesla growth and position etc. then they shouldn't have *downvoted* him so it wasn't seen just because they disagreed. They should have argued their reasons why Tesla valuation makes sense.   Instead, peoples are stifling real discussion that helps everyone learn and participate. I am apart of these subreddits to learn more about business and also the world of finance and I think we can all agree that valid discussion about different strategies or preference and their success is one of the best ways to learn. I don't come view the comments of these posts for one viewpoint throughout the whole thread.   Anyway, I think I made my point. Thanks
I would love a citation. I explicitly stated the one I used, which is the most common. I noticed you dodged the second portion though, and went from 50 chemicals to 30. I suspect a few more replies and it will be down to like 5, counting preservatives also in frozen burgers.
"Yes sir, I'm working on compiling your ""precise evidence,"" and I'll have it printed and bound for you on the double.  In the meantime, you can look here as a starting point and try to find the part where the Fed has allowed interest rates to adjust freely, and maybe you can learn why rates are artificial:    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_responses_to_the_subprime_crisis  As for ""cahoots"" and independent banks and whatever other off-topic nonsense you're babbling about, there was nothing said about cahoots or independent banks.  The interest rates paid for and to US banks are affected by the monetary policy of the Fed.  There is no collusion, or ""cahoots,"" required for them to follow a common policy of artificially-low interest rates, which was the point of the earlier post."
I would agree, my arguments have been from the extreme, because my OP in this thread was a reply to an extreme statement:    &gt; Tax evaders are heroes.   &gt; I don't think taxes should be abolished. But since it is someone else's income, it needs to be used sparingly and efficiently. Subsidizing internet and electric cars aren't something you should be spending millions of people's money in.  Okay, now we are getting to some common ground. Specifics are where the real meat lies. You started with internet and electric cars. Sweat, lets start there. I infer from this that you enjoy / support the internet and gas powered cars, and are against government intervention when it comes to the dissemination of the internet and investment in electric cars?   What if I told you that the prevalence and success of both of those inventions were spurred by government investment?
"I went through the process so I'll add my experience for posterity. On the morning of the day I was ready to pay, I went to my mortgage company's web site and got an instant payoff statement dated for the same day. This had the final payoff amount as well as addresses to send checks and information about wiring. I printed this statement out and took it to my bank the same day and told them that I wanted to wire money. They referred to the printout and sent the money to the mortgage company. The next day, the mortgage company web site indicated that the loan was paid in full. Although sending a check (and the payoff statement indicated that cashier's checks were ""preferred""), wiring the money was an easy process and helped me to overcome my concerns about  situations that  might arise if mail had been used (i.e. I did not want to deal with the complexity of day-late/day-early fees/credits, and I did not want to worry about the complexity of potentially losing a cashier's check in the mail)."
I can't speak authoritavely about enforceability. I've done some work on arbitration clauses for a client and worked on a major litigation case where we were trying to invalidate some arbitration clauses and arguing duress (but we ended up settling before it went to court). I believe common some law concepts would work (they are contracts after all), but the FAA is usually read to preempt some typical defenses.  I also know in some jurisdictions the enforceability of an arbitration cause is put to arbitration itself, which is a barrier to getting some sort of collective action going and effectively cools a lot of litigation.  It may very well be that Uber's arbitration agreements are unenforceable, but there is a lot of rage on Reddit over Uber's use of arbitration clauses, and I only wanted to bring up the fact that companies use them all the time
Funny how stealing becomes OK after you hit a certain limit of how much you steal and who you steal it from, isn't it?  People seem more and more to have some sense of entitlement and selfishness.  I read the article and got the sense that it said the corporations should not be allowed to go bankrupt so easily, where a lot of people here read it that common people should be allowed to be as dishonest as the corporations.  Hopefully, there are more people like you and me in the world, and less like the greedy ones.
This is a good point and where I think we should start the conversation.  We have three coins: the penny, nickel, and dime, which have so little value that people question whether it's even worth the time to handle them.  I think we should consider just getting rid of all three and start pricing everything in multiples of 1/4 dollars.  There are some things, like gas, stocks, etc... that may still need to be sold in smaller increments, but do those things really make the costs and effort of minting and handling pennies, nickels, and dimes, worth it?
"Most comments here seem to be folks who didn't read the article, haven't been to a Taco Bel in awhile, or don't know what fast food ""healthy"" options are. If you go during breakfast, or build a meal in their app in later hours you can make a pretty damn balanced meal.  I'll commonly order a wrap with rice, black beans, guacamole and grilled chicken. I'm not aware of anything near that balanced at mcdonalds, and it would likely be more expensive.  My biggest complaint is that when they debuted their new app there were new coupons every week or so, but after a couple months there's hardly ever new offers, sometimes none at all. :-(  Funny thing, the common offer I get is a discount off something like a $12 purchase...  but no one in the office wants Taco Bell, would rather get a Five Guys burger ""than eat something gross"". It seems Taco Bell has a lot to live down, I think they should advertise their fresco and vegatarian stuff more often and better."
Since the POS machines are tied into the register it would be rather difficult to overcharge with an attentive patron.  They would have to add an additional item onto the purchase in order to increase the total before running the card (very few system allow cashback to be requested from the teller side), and most machines have audible cues every time an item is added.  If you are paying attention to the teller and not talking/playing on your phone (or other distracting things) then I would say the feasibility is probably very low. Except for rare exceptions while traveling I only shop at locations where I can see the total on the register, and make sure it looks correct before handing my card over.
If eToro failed, you do not actually own any stocks, you only own swap contracts which are going to be worthless if eToro ceased to exist. CFDs also have an ongoing cost to maintain the open position. This makes them less suitable for buy and hold strategies as those ongoing costs will eat into your returns. It's also not clear whether you would receive any dividends paid by the stock, which make up a significant proportion of returns for buy and hold investors. eToro's website is fairly non-committal: eToro intends to offer a financial compensation representing the dividends which will be allocated on stocks, to the extent such dividends shall be available to eToro. All of these points expose what CFDs are really for - speculating on the stock market, or as I like to call it: gambling. If you want to invest in stocks for the long term, CFDs are a bad idea - they have high ongoing costs and the counterparty risk becomes significant. Wait until you have enough money and then buy the real thing. Alternatively, consider mutual funds which will allow you to purchase partial shares and will ensure your investment is better diversified across a large number of stocks. If however, you want to gamble and only keep your position open for a short time, these issues may not be of concern to you. There's nothing wrong with gambling, it can be fun, many people gamble in casinos or on football matches - but bear in mind that's what CFDs are for. CFDs were in fact originally created for the UK market as a way to avoid paying capital gains tax when making short term speculative trades. However, if you are going to gamble, make sure you're not putting any more than 1% of your net worth at risk (0.1% may be a better target). There are a few other ways to take a position on stocks using less money than the share price: Fortunately, eToro do not allow leveraged purchase of stocks so you're reasonably safe on this point. They claim this is because of their 'responsible trading policy', although I find that somewhat questionable coming from a broker that offers 400:1 leverage on FX pairs. One final word on eToro's ""social trading"" feature. A few years ago I was in a casino playing Blackjack.
The only issue I can see is that the stranger is looking to undervalue their purchase to save money on taxes/registration (if applicable in your state). Buying items with cash such as cars, boats, etc in the used market isn't all that uncommon* - I've done it several times (though not at the 10k mark, more along about half of that). As to the counterfeit issue, there are a couple avenues you can pursue to verify the money is real: *it's the preferred means of payment advocated by some prominent personal financial folks, including Dave Ramsey
That's what I'm saying.  But apparently people are doing it.  It woulnd't be going up otherwise would it?  And isn't that the only way bitcoin or stocks can go up above their last record?  If everyone followed that rule.  Nothing would ever rise right?  I'm sure I don't understand it fully.    Stocks and bitcoin's(cryptocurrencies in general) all seem crazy to me.
"I realize I'm drudging up a somewhat old post here (apologies), but I've found myself in a similar situation recently and thought I would chime in. I was considering buying a car where the loan amount would be right around 25k. I tried justifying this by saying it's ridiculously fast (I'm young and stupid, this is appealing), has AWD (nice for Colorado), and a hatchback with plenty of room for snowboards and whatnot in back. This is in comparison to my Civic which has high mileage, can hardly make it up hills due to the high altitude, sucks in snow, and has little room for anything. You have your reasons, I have mine. The thing is, our reasons are just us trying to rationalize an unwise purchase - just admit it, you know it's true. Just so you can see I'm in a similar financial situation, I'm 22, just graduated, and started a job making well over 80k with salary and signing bonus, plus 20k in RSUs on the side. After budgeting I can still put away over 2k/month after I've factored in a car payment, insurance, rent, etc etc. Yes, I could ""afford"" this car... it's just dumb though dude. Don't do it. There are better things we can do with our money. And guess what, I've been drooling over this car since middle school too."
"There are some tools that might help you. For example, I have an ""Expense It"" application on my iPhone, where I can type in a purchase while still at the cashier, the idea is to track expenses on a trip, but the implementation will suit your needs perfectly. Keeping slips is a way to go too, but I personally don't like that because I'm a messy person and after a couple of days all the receipts are gone. If you can keep track of tons of slips - you can just do that."
Sometimes, but it was more common for the 'presentation' leg of the project to use Excel as the last step before passing the data on to the next team or pushing things into a powerpoint. For new projects, those were much more likely to be R end to end and yes, I often used an organization like you mention, extract and transform -&gt; Fit Model and export predictions -&gt; produce visuals and explanatory data.   I did have a few examples where I used R to build on top of excel models, e.g. passing data that was already being calculated into a regression or producing a plot that excel couldn't easily do. In my case we had 10+ people who were good with excel and only 1 or 2 being proficient with R. If the majority of people were strong R users, I'm sure it would have had more predominance in our work.
Of course. The fact that it's such a generic concern should be taken for granted - that's why I think the article focuses on it too much. Everybody knows that losing a lot of executives is bad news, even if there was no line in the 10-K at all. So I'd have preferred to see less about that and more information on what it could mean for this company specifically.
So how often do investors really lose money? The short answer is, every day. Let's first examine your assumptions: If the price of the share gets lower, the investor can just wait until   it gets higher. What are the chances that it won't forever, or for   years? There are many stocks whose price goes down and then down further and then to zero. The most apparent example is, of course, Enron. The stock went from about $90 per share to zero in about 18 months. For it to have been sold at $90, obviously, someone had to buy it. Almost no matter where they sold it, they lost money. If they didn't sell it, when the stock was worthless, they lost money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron#/media/File:EnronStockPriceAugust2000toJanuary2001.svg There are more modern examples of companies that are declining in a rapidly changing market. For example, Sears Holdings is getting beat down by Amazon and many other on-line retailers. I suspect that if you buy it today and wait for it to go higher, you will be disappointed. https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ASHLD&ei=E8_fWIjWGsSGmAGx7b_IAw The more common way to lose money is to either not have a plan or not stick to the plan. Disciplined investors typically plan to buy quality stocks at a fair price and hold them long enough for increasing sales and profits to bring the stock price up. If, later, he hears a bit of bad news about his stock and decides to sell out of panic or fear and become a trader instead of keeping to the plan to remain a disciplined investor, he is likely to lose money. He will lose because no-one can predict accurately that a stock is going down and will never recover; nor can he predict accurately when a stock is going up and will never falter. The chance of bankruptcy (especially for huge companies like Apple) is   really low, as I see it, but I may be wrong. Thousands of people lost billions of dollars thinking that about Enron, too. I too believe Apple is a fine stock with excellent prospects, but technology changes and markets change. Twenty or thirty years from now, it may be a different case.
How to win friends &amp; influence people is even more so just common knowledge and common courtesy than Art of War, but sometimes seeing that stuff written or presented a certain way can be very impactful. I know it was for me, with both books.
Well put and, honestly, seemingly unavoidable. It will be crazy if it truly does come to fruition if they (Fed/Treasury/Gummit) realize that they cannot inflate their way out of this by printing more money and all of the nay-sayers of massive deflation get proven wrong.   So, the better question is this: we believe/know it's coming, so how do we prepare and strategically place ourselves to survive/profit/prosper from the coming collapse?  As I see it, RE is a crap investment for the foreseeable future as oversupply and oversize are not absorbed. People have to live, so rentals will be key; but, they have already bloomed quite a bit.   Stocks will likely trade sideways for awhile before likely tanking as the forced/willing withdrawals start happening from the Boomers. So, keeping it in stocks doesn't sound overly positive, unless a fairly aggressive put strategy is enforced.   Bonds are paying crap and, after taxes, barely pacing inflation.   For me personally and selfishly, I have 20 years minimum for retirement, so I'm fine qith the market trending sideways or down. It means that I'm getting more bang for my DCA buck and, 20+ years from now, I will be well positioned when the market eventually cycles back up.   But, for now, where do we put our investments to protect and, hopefully, grow them as the mid term passes?
"I love John's answer, but I just can't help myself from adding my 2 cents, even though it's over 5 years later. I sold cars for a while in the late 90s, and I mostly agree with John's answer. Where I disagree though, is that where I worked, the salesperson did not have ANY authority to make a sale. A sales manager was required to sign off on every sale. That doesn't mean that the manager had to interact with the buyer, that could all be handled behind the scenes, but the pricing and even much of the negotiating strategies were dictated by the sales managers. Some of the seasoned salespeople would estimate numbers on their own, but occasionally you'd hear the managers still chew them out with ""I wish you wouldn't have said that"". Of course, every dealership is different. Additional purchase advice: There is a strategy that can work well for the buyer, but only in scenarios where the salesperson is trying to prevent you from leaving. They may start interrupting you as you are packing up, or blocking your path to the door, or even begging. If this happens, they are obviously desperate for whatever reason. In this case, if you came prepared with research on a good price that you are comfortable with, then shoot lower and hold firm to the point of near exhaustion. Not so low that that they realize you're too far away- they will let you leave at that point. It needs to be within a reasonable amount, perhaps at most 1-2% of the purchase price. Once you detect the salesperson is desperate, you finally move up to your goal number or possibly a little lower. Typically the salesperson will be so happy to have gotten you to move at all that they'll accept. And if the managers are fed up too (like 45 minutes after close), they'll accept too. I saw this happen multiple times in a high pressure scenario. I also used it once myself as a buyer. If you are planning to purchase options that can be added at the dealer rather than from the factory, keep them up your sleeve at first. Get your negotiations down to where you are a little further apart than the invoice price of the option, then make your move.
"You are at the point that many millions of people are at (and where I used to be) - you have no idea where your money is going. You just spend, spend, spend until there's nothing left, and/or you borrow more to keep going. There are general rules of thumb on how much house and car you can afford, but there is a great deal of personal variation. Housing and utility costs vary greatly from location to location. City-dwellers can use public transit instead of buying and maintaining a car. How much other debt do you have that you need to pay off? Do you have expenses that are not common (e.g. medical bills)? A more personal approach would be to figure out your own budget. The first step is creating a written budget. Figure out how much you can spend in total (i.e. your take-home pay) and the start allocating that money to expenses until you run out. I started by looking backwards. Look back at how much you spent on each category each month. List them in order of priority (e.g. food, health, housing, utilities, transportation, entertainment, everything else). If the money runs out you either stop spending or reduce spending in another category (e.g. can you cook a few extra meals at home instead of going out? Can you take lunch to work instead of a drive-through?) The amount you have left over now indicates how much more house and car you can afford. Once you get to a point where you can budget comfortably then you can start looking at saving for retirement and other long-term goals. This worked for me (and highlighted some areas where I overspent) because I had good categorized records (ironically because I used credit cards incessantly, which I mostly stopped once I created a budget). If you don't have good records, then you have to estimate. How much do you think you spend on food, gas, etc. each month? Then set aside that much and once it's gone don't spend anymore.