vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
Right, but compared to the crimes of the monopoly (government), who threatens us with enslavement (prison) if we don't give them collectively $Trillions to waste in wars we don't want, and welfare checks to stupid people (rather than the actual circumstantial-needy, those who would get our sympathy help in the absence of govt welfare).  Any and all criticism towards business is dwarfed by the fact that we have much, much, much less control over the government than we do over a company we voluntary give our money to. Did you know that since 1955, 89% of companies that were on the Forbes 400 are no longer on that list?
What?  YOUR reasoning is exactly what you are projecting on me!  You want to give the few people with all the money control over anything they can buy!  &gt;At the very least, the private sector is policed by the government according to the rule of law. Who polices the government when the people no longer have any authority or power over it?  You JUST told me you can’t trust the government to police properly!  Now you want to rely on them policing others?  Doesn’t that logic sound ridiculous?  What I said was: The government’s job is policing.  If they are doing their job wrong, you replace them.  What you are saying is:  I don’t trust the government to police anyone.  So let’s give more power to the financial sector which we already know is immoral and greedy, because the government is policing them.  WTF?!
Okay, so you give the subsidy to the person buying the solar panel, who would then give that subsidy to the company selling the solar panel.  Isn't that effectively exactly the same as giving the subsidy directly to the company selling the solar panel?  Both would result in exactly the same cost for the consumer, and same profit for the company.
The point of buying an index fund is that you don't have to pick winners. As long as the winners are included in the index fund (which can include far more than 500 stocks), you benefit on average because of overall upward historical market performance. Picking only the top 50 capitalized stocks in the S&P 500 does not guarantee you will successfully track the S&P 500 index because the stocks in the tail can account for an outsized amount of overall growth; the top 50 stocks by market capitalization change over time, and these stocks are not necessarily the stocks that perform better.  As direct example, the 10 year average annual return for the S&P top 50 is 4.52%, while the 10 year average annual return for the S&P 500 is 5.10%. Issues of trading and balancing to maintain these aside, these indices are not the same.
Sorry brother, that line works well on city-dwellers, but I live on a farm.  I produce eggs and beef that are consumed locally.  It still costs me every time we fill a tractor with diesel, and for my running around with my pest control company.  Sure, I could take the bus...but I'd imagine that folks would give me strange looks...a guy with hazardous chemicals and a bag of dead rodents.  The plus side is, I'd have a few seats to myself.
"That's just your bias. You'll get over it.   Back in the 80s when cruise control was really taking off, people were scared of letting the car do that one task. ""What if it doesn't let go and keeps the gas pedal down?"" ""What if it decides to floor it and drive me off into a ditch?"" Today, almost every car has cruise control and you don't think twice about turning it on. It's proven itself with a safe track history, so you trust it. There are absolutely instances of cruise control failing, but statistically, those outliers don't matter. Full automatic driving will be the same way. You'll learn to trust it, even if it doesn't have a perfect record."
I think your best course of action depends on the likely outcome of the divorce proceedings. The alimony/child support payments are controlled externally. I don't like to plan around things that I have no control over. In your shoes, I would probably avoid buying until things are settled down.
Oh, I see what you mean. It depends which side you look at it from: the company, or the individual investor.  For the individual investor, I guess it doesn't matter. As you said, you only buy the amount of stocks you can afford. What matters afterwards is whether the price of your stocks goes up or down. That's when the company valuation comes into play. If a company is overvalued, the stock prices are going to go down until they reach the [equilibrium point](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_equilibrium). Or, rephrasing, stocks go down when more people will want to sell than buy, creating an excess supply, so sellers will be willing to offer lower prices so you buy from them. Stocks go up when the opposite happens, more people will want to buy than sell, so buyers will have to offer more money to convince sellers to sell.  In essence, Facebook was overvalued, and not enough people were buying their shares, creating excess supply, so, sellers had to offer lower prices. Had Facebook been properly valued, people would've felt the stocks were a good price, everyone would've rushed to purchase, and stock prices would've gone up.
"That's fortunately a lie that government public schools taught us. There's no factual basis to it.  [Myth of the robber barons](http://mises.org/daily/2317)  Rockefeller had nearly 90% of market share in oil while over a 20 year period Standard Oil lowered the price of oil from 58c/gal to just 8c. You see, in a market, you can only gain a ""monopoly"" by giving the customers the most value. Government is a monopoly who uses coercive theft (taxation) to finance its services and sees taxpayers as an unlimited ATM.  Correct, the risk of *other governments* is what makes us think we need our own government. However, the huge losses of production from diverting resources to a military that spends more than the next **25 countries combined**, as ours does, prevent the development of competing security and paramilitary groups, such as Blackwater. Military and police, afterall, are just individuals being paid to protect someone's property.  We have MUCH, MUCH less control over the govt than we do corporations. Notice you have 100% control over which company you buy from? You have 0% control over whether the govt takes money from you. Having a 1 in x,000,000 vote is basically 0.00000x% say in your own spending of the tax money. When you buy a product from a company, you have 100% say in your own spending.  The contrast is day and night. You have complete control over a corporation. If AT&amp;T gained the power to tax you to force you to buy their product, and only let you vote every few years on which one of 2 CEOs they have to spend the 30% of your money they take from you, you might start to see my point here."
"Just to really drive home how wrong you are, let's review both:  **Government** - you get 1 single binary choice every 2, 4 or 6 years not on an actual decision but for another PERSON to make the choices for you, without your input from then on, without any liability. If they lie to win their election, there's nothing you can do. There was no contract. You get no refund. They have control over the 1/3 of your income that taxation gives them. The most control you get is to wait those 730-2,191 days and get an *exchange* in the person who then gets to control your money and your choices. Voting in this system doesn't give you any control, it merely gives another person 1,000,000s of times as much control as everyone else. They are lawyers who won basically a popularity contest to gain control of $Trillions of our money.  **""Horrible"" corporation** - the only provider of a service, sets the prices they want. You want the service, there's no doubt about it, but you want to pay less and get better quality. They'd *love* to be able to force you to pay for their service even if you don't want it, but they cannot. Soon enough, because of the high profits of the corporation, a new competitor arises, such as Verizon, Time Warner,  or Google fiber and prices start dropping and quality goes up.  All companies wish they were governments, where they could just force people with guns and threats of imprisonment to make them pay for their bloated services. Notice how the closer a company appears like a monopoly, the more it resembles the largest monopoly? Compare how similar the long lines at Walmart resemble the long lines at the post office or DMV?"
"It's not a ""fig leaf"" at all.  Comcast would have no control over the company and would derive no benefit from it.  Comcast's shareholders would receive shares because they owned the company that is giving up its customers to form this new company.  Take away the merger and think of it as a company splitting in half.  Wouldn't the shareholders of the original company deserve to own proportional shares of the split companies?"
I think you are mixing up forward looking statements with the actual results. The funds objective   The fund invests primarily in stocks that tend to offer current dividends. It focuses on high-quality companies that have prospects for long-term total returns as a result of their ability to grow earnings and their willingness to increase dividends over time Obviously in 1993 quite a few companies paid the dividends and hence VDIGX was able to give dividends. Over the period of years in some years its given more and in some years less. For example the Year 2000 it gave $ 1.26, 1999 it gave $ 1.71 and in 1998 it gave $ 1.87 The current economic conditions are such that companies are not making huge profts and the one's that are making prefer not to distribute dividends and hold on to cash as it would help survive the current economic conditions. So just to clarify this particular funds objective is to invest in companies that would give dividends which is then passed on to fund holders. This fund does not sell appreciated stocks to convert it into dividends.
"&gt; in a market, you can only gain a ""monopoly"" by giving the customers the most value  You get a monopoly by destroying your competition. Microsoft is a good example of how a company with market dominance can squeeze out competition. This isn't some old-timey problem that's fed to us in some grand conspiracy by the public schools.   If I choose not to buy from Comcast, how does that give me power over them? They're the only player in town, so everyone else pays them regardless of what I do.  I think you're just disappointed in the people who are elected. But individuals have much more power over elected officials than they do corporations."
Your ROI on this stock is $1, in whatever time period the reporting happens (typically quarterly, giving this stock a roughly 4% APY). This is a totally valid way to value stocks and to shop for them; it's very similar to how commodities, for instance gold, are bought and sold. Gold never pays you dividends. Doesn't give you voting rights either. Its value at any given time is solely what someone else will pay to have it. That's just fine with a lot of people right now; gold's currently trading at around $1,700 an ounce, and it's been the biggest moneymaker in our economy since the bottom fell out of the housing market (if you'd bought gold in 2008, you would have more than doubled your money in 4 years; I challenge you to find anything else that's done nearly as well over the same time). In reality, a combination of both of these valuation methods are used to value stocks. If a stock pays dividends, then each person gets money now, but because there's less retained earnings and thus less change in the total asset value of the company, the actual share price doesn't move (much). If a stock doesn't pay dividends, then people only get money when they cash out the actual stock, but if the company is profitable (Apple, BH, etc) then one share should grow in value as the value of that small fraction of the company continues to grow. Both of these are sources of ROI, and both are seen in a company that will both retain some earnings and pay out dividends on the rest."
The Idiot in chief has actually stepped over the edge of sanity and dragging the entire country over with him.  The damage he is doing is going to be unrecoverable, he has given over the entire economy and control of the White house over to Israeli actors and is losing democratic control to the Generals.  He is fermenting civil war and racist violence.  We might soon get a taste of martial law.
"a lot of companies will ""class"" their shares and the founders will hold on to the A class shares so that they can distribute more than 50% but still retain the majority of control over company decisions. A lot of this stuff is set out in the underwriting."
Metals and Mining is an interesting special case for stocks.  It's relationship to U.S. equity (SPX) is particularly weak (~0.3 correlation) compared to most stocks so it doesn't behave like equity.  However, it is still stock and not a commodities index so it's relation to major metals (Gold for instance) is not that strong either (-0.6 correlation). Metals and Mining stocks have certainly underperformed the stock market in general over the past 25years 3% vs 9.8% (annualized) so this doesn't look particularly promising.  It did have a spectacularly good 8 year period ('99-'07) though 66% (annualized).  It's worth remembering that it is still stock.  If the market did not think it could make a reasonable profit on the stock the price would decrease until the market thought it could make the same profit as other equity (adjusted slightly for the risk).  So is it reasonable to expect that it would give the same return as other stock on average?  Yes.. -ish.  Though as has been shown in the past 25 years your actual result could vary wildly both positive and negative. (All numbers are from monthly over the last 25 years using VGPMX as a M&M proxy)
What should also be clear to you, is that the taliban control over 50% of Afghanistan and you don't even control Kabul  What should be even clearer to you, is that the Taliban don't need to go anywhere when they control of 50% of Afghanistan and you don't even control Kabul  What should painfully clear to you is that the Taliban control over 50% of Afghanistan and you don't even control Kabul, there fore you got your ass kicked by 2 Goats and a sheep turd  Resign you incompetent asshole
(Finance Buff blog makes a case for a financial advisor, in case you like that more than my balanced fund suggestion: http://thefinancebuff.com/the-average-investor-should-use-an-investment-advisor-how-to-find-one.html) Like rebalancing, value averaging makes you buy more when you're depressed about the market and less when it's exciting. It's hard. (Dollar cost averaging is easily done by setting up automatic investment, of course, so you don't have to do it manually in the way you would with value averaging.) If you read the usual canonical books on index funds and efficient markets it's easy to remember the takeaway that nobody knows whether the market will go up or down, and yes you won't successfully time the market. But what you can do successfully is use an investment discipline with risk control: assume that the market will fluctuate, that both up and down are likely and possible, and optimize for predictability in light of that. Most importantly, optimize to take your emotions and behavior out of the picture. Some disciplines for example are: there are dozens out there, many of them snake oil, I think these I mentioned are valid. Anyway, you need some form of risk control, and putting all your money in stocks at once doesn't give you a lot of risk control. There's no real need to get creative. A balanced fund that uses index funds for equity and bond portions is a great choice."
"I'd refer you to Is it true that 90% of investors lose their money? The answer there is ""no, not true,"" and much of the discussion applies to this question.  The stock market rises over time. Even after adjusting for inflation, a positive return. Those who try to beat the market, choosing individual stocks, on average, lag the market quite a bit. Even in a year of great returns, as is this year ('13 is up nearly 25% as measured by the S&P) there are stocks that are up, and stocks that are down. Simply look at a dozen stock funds and see the variety of returns. I don't even look anymore, because I'm sure that of 12, 2 or three will be ahead, 3-4 well behind, and the rest clustered near 25.  Still, if you wish to embark on individual stock purchases, I recommend starting when you can invest in 20 different stocks, spread over different industries, and be willing to commit time to follow them, so each year you might be selling 3-5 and replacing with stocks you prefer. It's the ETF I recommend for most, along with a buy and hold strategy, buying in over time will show decent returns over the long run, and the ETF strategy will keep costs low."
CEOs are compensated with stocks and options on top of their salary. Most is in the form of stocks and options. You may see them with a fancy car, but they don't necessarily possess the car, house, etc. They merely control it, which is nearly as good. You may lease it, or time share it. It might be owned by the company and provided as a perk.  To earn a million, there are 4 ways: a job, self-employed, own a business, and invest. The fastest way is to own a business. The slowest way is a job or self-employed. Investing is medium. To learn more, read Rich Dad's Cashflow Quadrants.
Indices such as SP500 are typically including dividends - the payment of dividends doesn't impact the value of the index. Where can I find data on these dividends?  I found data on dividend yields, but these give me access only to the sum of dividends over the last year. This in turn can change either because there are new dividends being paid, or because you stop counting last year's dividends...
&gt; Wal-Mart will hire desperate people, because those desperate people are less likely to complain or have pro-Union sentiments.  correction. walmart hires them because they have a low marginal utility undeserving of a higher wage. if they could get a higher wage somewhere else, they would. how many people do you employ? do you give money to millions of people? didn't think so. don't complain about other people offering jobs.   &gt; Wal-Mart is transferring the cost of labor onto the taxpayers. This should make you upset.  i'm mad at the government for giving them aid. i don't think i should have control over a private business. but im supposed to have control over my government.
"The most common way to handle this in the US is with a UTMA account. UTMA is the Uniform Transfers / Gifts to Minors Act (""UTMA"" or ""UGMA"") which is a standard model law that most states have passed for special kinds of accounts. Once you open an account, anyone can contribute. Usually parents and grandparents will contribute $13,000 or less per year to make it a tax free transfer, but you can transfer more. The account itself would just be a standard brokerage account of any sort, but the title of the account would include your son's name, the applicable law depending on your state, and the name of the custodian who would control the account until your son turned 18. When your son does turn 18, the money is his. Until then, the money is his, but you control how it's invested. I'm a huge fan of Vanguard for UTMA/UGMAs. You may prefer to diversify a bit away from one company by selling the GE shares and buying an index mutual fund so that your child's education is not jeopardized by a rogue trader bringing down General Electric sometime in the next decade..."
Geely owns the Volvo car corporation, which used to belong to the Volvo company. The Volvo car corporation was a relatively small part of the greater Volvo group, which Geely has absolutely no control over whatsoever. I know it's easy to look at Volvo and imagine a car, but it was really the least profitable part of the company for a long time. Volvo is involved in trucks, aircraft, boats, construction, owns a chunk of Renault and outright owns Mack trucks. It's a big company with some 90 000+ employees.
"people are willing to pay higher premiums for options when stocks go down. Obviously the time value and intrinsic value and interests rates of the option doesn't change because of this so the miscalculation remainder is priced into the implied volatility part of the formula.  Basically, anything that suggests the stock price will get volatile (sharp moves in either direction) will increase the implied volatility of the option. For instance, around earnings reports, the IV in both calls and puts in the nearest expiration dates are very high. When stocks go down sharply, the volatility is high because some people are buying puts for protection and others are buying calls because they think there will be a rebound move in the other direction. People (the ""sleep-at-night"" investors, not the derivatives traders ;) )  tend to be calm when stocks are going up, and fearful when they are going down. The psychology is important to understand and observe and profit from, not to quantitatively prove. The first paragraph should be your qualitative answer"
They US does not give Israel aid, they take what they want, They control the government and the economy. That is why the Head of the Fed is always a Jew and why every US politician spreads his butt cheeks for a complete anal check in front of AIPAC. The Jews make up less the 1% of the US voter base, yet every decision that America has to make has a Jew up its ass including Ivanka.   It is simply the Truth
Dollar cost averaging works if the stuff you're buying goes up within your time horizon.  It won't protect you from losing money if it doesn't. Also consider that the person (or company, or industry) that suggests dollar-cost averaging might want you to start up a regular investment program and put it on auto-pilot, which subsequently increases the chance that you won't give due attention to the fact that you're sending them money every paycheck to buy an investment that make them money regardless of whether you make money or not.
"The setting of interest rates (or ""repurchase rates"") varies from country to country, as well as with the independence of the central bank. There are a number of measurements and indices that central bankers can take into account: This is a limited overview but should give an indication of just how complex tracking inflation is, let alone attempting to control it.  House prices are in the mix but which house or which price? The choice of what to measure faces the difficulty of attempting to find a symmetrical basket which really affects the majority regularly (and not everyone is buying several new houses a year so the majority are ring-fenced from fluctuations in prices at the capital end, but not from the interest-rate end). And this is only when the various agencies (Statistics, Central Bank, Labour, etc.) are independent.  In countries like Venezuela or Argentina, government has taken over release of such data and it is frequently at odds with individual experience. Links for the US: And, for Australia:"
The straight math might favor leaving it, but I'd personally prefer to have it in my control in an IRA. My own employer offered a buyout on the pension program, and the choice between a nice lump sum vs some fixed number 20 years hence was a simple one for me. Both my wife and I (same company) took the lump sum, and never regretted it.
To me, any program which has its algorithm change based on input. Air control traffic systems would not satisfy this because although they adjust their path choices based on input, nothing changes about the algorithm. The algorithm was designed to adjust path choices based on input, and the way the algorithm approaches that does not change based on input.