vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
First off, I would question why do you need a LI policy?  While you may be single are you supporting anyone?  If not, and you have some money saved to cover a funeral; or, your next of kin would be able to pay for final expenses then you probably don't have a need.   In, general, LI is a bad investment vehicle.  I do not know hardly anything about the Indian personal finance picture, but here in the US, agents tout LI as a wonderful investment.  This can be translated as they make large commissions on such products. Here in the US one is far better off buying a term product, and investing money elsewhere.  I image it is similar in India. Next time if you want to help a friend, listen to his sales presentation, give some feedback, and hand him some cash.  It is a lot cheaper in the long run.
I would check to see what the fee schedule is on your previous employer's 401k. Depending on how it was setup, the quarterly/annual maintenance fee may be lower/higher than your current employer. Another reason to rollover/not-rollover is that selection of funds available is better than the other plan. And of course always consider rolling over your old plan into a standard custodial rollover IRA where the management company gives you a selection of investment options. At least look at the fees and expense ratios of your prior employer's plan and see if anything reaches a threshold of what you consider actionable and worth your time. Note: removed reference to self directed IRA as vehicle is more complicated account type allowing for more than just stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. Not for your typical retail investor.
Beware of surrender charges also Surrender Charges Many annuities   will impose a surrender charge if the annuity is cashed in before a   specific period of time. That period may run anywhere from 1 to 12   years. A typical surrender charge is one that starts at 7% in the   first year of the contract, and declines by 1% per year thereafter   until it reaches zero. The charge is made against the value of the   investment when the annuity is surrendered, and its purpose (other   than simply to make money for the insurance company) is to discourage   a short-term investment by the purchaser. For that reason, an annuity   should always be considered a long-term investment. In the typical   fixed annuity, though, this charge will not apply provided no more   than 10% of the investment is withdrawn per year. source: http://www.fool.com/retirement/annuities/annuities02.htm If you've held it for 10 years as you claim, you may not owe any or much in surrender charges, but you definitely want to know what the situation is before you make a move.
Sell the house, in the scenario you describe he is using the property as an investment with a $250 per month buy-in. This investment doesn't make a return right now and when you add in the cost of dealing with the tenant (even if he doesn't have those cost now, he will when they move out)he is out of more than $250 a month and he has no direct knowledge that the value will definitely increase. He would be better spent selling the house and putting the funds into an investment, even a risky investment. It will have less maintenance cost associated with the risky investment than the rental property.  Besides sitting on the property for 10-15 years would cost him 30-45k plus the cost of re-renting the house when empty.Not to mention the inevitable increases in taxes over that time which will either increase his deficit or eat up the rent increase he is able to charge. Don't take the loss on the sale, just short sale it and take the money and invest! One last thought... An alternative is to creatively finance a sale (take payments from a buyer until they can buy outright) that will cover the FULL mortgage and get him the price he needs. You can look up owner financing to find out more on how to do this. Hope this helps!
Our two rentals have yielded 8.5% over the past two years (averaged). That is net, after taxes, maintenance, management, vacancy, insurance, interest. I am only interested in cash flow - expenses / original investment. If you aren't achieving at least 4.5-5% net on your original investment you probably could invest elsewhere and earn a better return on a similar risk profile.
"Out of your seven recommendations one is up 14%, one up 6%, four are either even or down slightly and one is down a whopping 40%. This reminds me of a recommendation earlier in the year provided by The Motley Fool to buy XRO.AX when it was around the $40 mark. I had a quick look at it and thought ""gee there is no way I am buying those shares"". Now they are just below $15. See the chart below:  You have just learnt a valuable lesson by testing these recommendations without your real money - never trust investment recommendations from analysts (or anyone else). Get yourself educated so you understand what analysts are talking about and you can make a decision for yourself. Better still learn about technical analysis so you can decide for yourself whether it is the right time to buy or sell."
The best strategy? Skip the loan. Find a way to invest for a low starting amount via a retirement account (such as a 401K or IRA in the United States) or non-retirement account. Use this money to buy individual stocks or funds. Every month put money from your regular income into this investment account. Then buy more stocks or sell if the conditions change based on what the market is doing, not to meet a loan payment. This helps you because if the price fluctuates you will buy more shares if the price is down; and you will buy fewer shares when the price is up. It also allows you to skip worrying about how to repay the loan. It also means that you not have to pull more money out of savings to make the final loan payments if it doesn't make as much money as you plan. Regarding your math. This is a better understanding of the money flow than the earlier question.
If you're sinking 1k/year into it, and the value is rising by $100k in 15 years, or $6k/year, you have a fine investment. Ignore the wife, she just wants something even better.
What's funny to me is that the sales tax isn't what gives Amazon better prices.  It's that stores have to include their costs on the price that's shown on the shelf.  Amazon gets to tell you later that there's a shipping fee, Amazon isn't paying a store staff and rental on store front property.  In short Amazon can show the customer a price that is making a decent profit, and still be lower than a retail outlet.
&gt; The jobs in the economy is (generally) fixed  That’s not really true.  Industries are developed and killed off all the time.  &gt; At the end of the day we will still need dishwashers and security guards.   A small capital investment could be used as a replacement for most of the labor.  A better dishwasher, a better security system both allow each unit of labor to become more productive.  It was true with the cotton gin and it will be true with future innovations.
Sorry, this post is horribly misguided. First of all, any boat or yacht is a terrible investment. The depreciation is horrendous. Secondly saying you lease as otherwise you’re tying up capital stupidly is incorrect. It depends on what your marginal cost of capital vs that of companies leasing. When you lease you also compensate the lessor for its cost of capital. If your cost of capital is less than that of the lessor then you would be stupid to get the lease. You would be better off paying the 250mln out of pocket and borrowing it from the market yourself.
If your annual income is less than $45000 or so (and you expect this to change for the better in the future), it's not worthwhile to put that in an RRSP -- save your contribution room for the future years where you will gain more of a tax deduction.  There's no real downside in investing in a TFSA (what you withdraw this year can be put back in next year), so any surplus funds that you do not anticipate needing this year can be put in a TFSA to earn a bit more than the equivalent investment outside of a shelter.
"What do you think is a reasonable rate of return? A reasonable rate really breaks down into three things: opportunity cost, what you need, and risk appetite. Opportunity cost comes into play because whatever returns you make should at least exceed, after expenses, the next best option. Typically the ""next best option"" is the risk free return you can get somewhere else, which is typically a savings account or some other (safe) investment vehicle (e.g. a guaranteed investment certificate/GIC, bonds, etc). But, this opportunity cost could also be an alternative investment (e.g. an index ETF), which is not necessarily risk free (but it may represent the next best option). Risk appetite comes down to the amount of risk you are willing to take on any investment, and is completely subjective. This is typically ""how much can you sleep with losing"" amount. What you need is the most subjective element. All things being equal (e.g. identical risk profiles, access to same next-best-thing to invest in), if your cost of living expenses are only expected to go up 2% per year, but mine are expected to go up 3% per year, then my reasonable rate of return must exceed 3%, but yours must only exceed 2%. That said, an appropriate return is whatever works for you, period. Nobody can tell you otherwise. For your own investing, what you can do is measure yourself against a benchmark. E.g. if your benchmark is the S&P 500, then the S&P 500 SPDR ETF is your opportunity cost (e.g. what you would have made if you didn't do your own investing). In that way, you are guaranteed the market return (caveat: the market return is not guaranteed to be positive). As an aside.. Don't ever, ever, ever let someone else handle your money, unless you want somebody else have your money. There is nothing wrong with letting someone else handle your money, provided you can live with the triple constraint above. Investing takes time and effort, and time and effort equals opportunity. If you can do something better with the time and effort you would spend to do your own investing, then by all means, do it.
(I live in the UK and along with my wife we both drive Volkswagen cars.) A few factors: VW is widely acknowledged as having some of the best diesel car engines.  -Now lot of people are questioning if diesel car will be outlawed. VM management has just said they don’t know what their workers are doing! The USA has made it clear they will create pollution law in a way that benefit their own car makers.   (E.g. they don’t care about CO2.) If not diesel cars, then it needs hybrid or electric cars to get good MPG – VM is not seen as a leader in these. Hybrid cars tend to be gas as diesel engines cost too much. VW is no longer looking like a nice safe investment!   I think VW will recover, but it may get worse for them before it gets better - trying to call the bottom of a stock is high risk.
From a mathematical point of view the stats do not change depending on past performance. Just because a fund is lucky one year doesn't mean that it will be unlucky the next. Consider tossing a coin, the chance of heads is 50%. If you have just thrown 3 heads, the chance of heads is still 50%. It doesn't go down.  If you throw 10 heads in a row the chance of a heads is still 50%, in fact you many suspect there is something odd about the coin, if it was an unfair coin then the chance of a heads would be higher than 50%. It could be the fund is better run, but there could be other reasons, including random chance. Some funds will randomly do better and some will randomly do worse What you do know is that if they did better than average other funds have done worse, at least for last year.
cost of carry is a confusing term to use but this is what i was given to work with   then again, once you factor in interest rate risk and default risk (if you do), what is a better term?  it's not just cost of capital at that pt
Like keshlam mentioned Insurance and Investment should not generally be mixed. Term Insurance is the best and cheapest insurance. This would work out better than Money Back Option you have. i.e. Take a Term Insurance for the same amount, invest the difference between the Premium of Term Insurance and Money Back option. Even if you invest this difference in Bank FD's the return is much more than what your Money Back policy gives. Pension Plans are not advisable. Although IRDA has in recent times streamlined quite a bit of it, there is still some amount that goes into commission, plus the returns from Annuity providers [the yearly payment you get after retirement] is less than what you get from FD's. i.e. currently the Annuity rates are in the range of 5-6% and one year FD's are in the range of 7-8%. The only reason one need to go with Pension plan or Money Bank plan would be if one is not financially disciplined or can't  reconcile to the fact that Term Insurance in-spite of not giving any returns is much better.
This is complete horseshit... it depends on what type of degree you get. If you get your bachelors in engineering, nursing, respiratory therapy, radiology technology, medicine, pharmacy etc... (shit where you become skilled/certified) it is the best investment you can make. But if you get a degree in sociology, English lit, history, and other bullshit that is not practical in today's economy, then yes... Its a god awful investment.
Inflation follows the money, chases the money. All the money in the past few years has been directed into the banking system, and so we have an inflation in banking investments -- an investment bubble.  The Fed makes a big mistake putting all the money into these investment banks. Better to put it into the population directly than let these buggering bankers control it. But then, the Fed *is* the buggering bankers, just wearing a different hat.  It's Wyle E. Coyote time yet again as we wait to see how long it takes these bastards to realize there isn't anything substantial under their feet and it's a long way down to the canyon floor. Again.
Technically, the difference between dividends and growth ought to be that dividends can be reinvested in stocks other than the one that paid them, which is a definite advantage if you actually have a strategy.  Dividend -paying stocks used to be preferred for exactly that reason, back in the days when fewer people were directly playing in the market and more knew what they were doing. Unfortunately,  getting a periodic dividend from a stock whose price is relatively steady isn't as exciting a game as watching your stock's value bounce around and (hopefully)  creep upward on a second-by-second basis. Those who are thinking in gambling terms rather than investment terms -- or who think they can beat the pros at high frequency trading, comment withheld -- want the latter, and have been putting a lot of pressure on companies to operate in the latter mode. That doesn't make it better -- certainly not for the longer-term investors -- just more fashionable. And fashion often means getting stuck with something impractical because everyone else is doing it. On this, I second Scrooge:  Humbug!
"Platinum use is pretty heavily overweight in industrial areas; according to the linked Wikipedia article, 239 tonnes of platinum was sold in 2006, of which 130 tonnes went to vehicles emissions control devices and another 13.3 tonnes to electronics. Gold sees substantial use as an investment as well as to hedge against economical decline and inflation, with comparatively little industrial (""real world"", as some put it) use. That is their principal difference from an investment point of view. According to Wikipedia's article on platinum, ... during periods of economic uncertainty, the price of platinum tends to decrease due to reduced industrial demand, falling below the price of gold. Gold prices are more stable in slow economic times, as gold is considered a safe haven and gold demand is not driven by industrial uses. If your investment scenario is a tanking world economy, for reason of its large industrial usage, I for one would not count on platinum to not fall in price. Of course gold may fall in price as well, but since it is not primarily an industrial use commodity, I would personally expect gold to do better in such a scenario."
Buying the underlying asset will not completely hedge you, only what lies above 155 dollars (strike + price of option) - you still have the risk of losing everything but 5. You have a maximum earnings-potential of 55 dollars (strike of 150 - investment of 100 + option of 5) but you have a risk of losing 95$ (investment of 100 - option of 5). Say chance of winning everything or losing everything is 50-50, your expected outcome is 0.5 x -95 + 0.5 x 55 = -20$. Is this a great investment? Sure you don't know your odds - otherwise it would be a sure thing. You shouldn't sell the call option if you do not expect prices to go up - but in that case - why not just buy the underlying alone? Speculating in options is a dangerous game with infinite earnings-potential but also infinite loss potential. (Consider selling a call option and not buying the underlying and the price goes from 100 to 1.000.000.000).
For example, Betterment’s Tax Impact Preview feature allows users to view the tax hit of a withdrawal or allocation change before a decision is made. Currently, Betterment is the only automated investment service to offer this capability. This function allows you to see a detailed estimate of the expected gains or losses broken down by short- and long-term, making it possible for investors to make better decisions about whether short-term gains should be deferred to the long-term. Now, for the sake of comparison, let’s assume that we have an even more sophisticated investor (Investor B), who understands the pitfalls of the behavior gap and is somehow able to avoid it. Betterment is still a better tool for Investor B because it offers a suite of tax-efficient features, including tax loss harvesting, smarter cost-basis accounting, municipal bonds, smart dividend reinvesting, and more. Each of these strategies can be automatically deployed inside the portfolio—Investor B need not do a thing. Each of these strategies can boost returns by lowering tax exposure. To return to your initial question—why not simply invest in the S&P 500? Investing is a long-term proposition, particularly when saving for retirement or other goals with a time horizon of several decades. To be a successful long-term investor means employing the core principles of diversification, tax management, and behavior management. While the S&P might look like a ‘hot’ investment one year, there are always reversals of fortune. The goal with long-term passive investing—the kind of investing that Betterment offers—is to help you reach your investing goals as efficiently as possible. Lastly, Betterment offers best-in-industry advice about where to save and how much to save for no fee.
I think this is a bit of fallacy. Capital is not a fix thing. If there is value to be realized, business can find the money. The issue really is that the job is hard and the company views it as a cost, not an investment.
Relative Strength Indicators are also trailing indicators.  They are based on the number of recent upticks or downticks in an investment's price.  (The size of a tick is quantized, and related to the investment's price.)  By the time enough upticks have accumulated to generate a buy signal, the investment has already increased in price significantly.  Similarly, by the time enough downticks have accumulated a to generate a sell signal, the investment has already dropped in price significantly. The theory of Relative Strength Indicators is based on the hope that moves found by these indicators are likely to continue after the signal is generated.  But even if this is the case, someone who relies on these indicators will miss out on the first part of the move. Dorsey-Wright offers investment research based on the theory of Relative Strength Indicators.  They offer investment vehicles based on this research.  They also work with local investment advisors to develop custom back-tested strategies.  They have published a white-paper, with references to others' research.
From a moral perspective, this would be so great. From a marketing perspective, all it would take is to 'leak' more videos that show how industrial meat production actually looks like to turn a large number of consumers to something that's ethically better (and probably can also be argued to be healthier).   Excited to see this, less from an investment perspective, but because this could really change how humans interact with animals in a significant way.
Say what you want about their prices but I still go there twice a month because:  * The marbling on their beef is significantly better than what I can get at Safeway  * Their cheese selection is far better in variety and quality, and their employees are much more knowledgeable than Safeway  * They actually have a cured meats section. I love me calabrese salami with a nice malbec.  95% of my grocery shopping is done at Safeway (can't beat $2/lb chicken), but the 5% when I'm feeling fancy it's pretty hard to beat Whole Foods.
To start with gold has value because it is scarce, durable, attractive and can be made into jewellery. But that does not explain its current value. In the current economic climate, it is difficult for many investors to get a positive return on conventional investments such as equities or bonds. I theorise that, in such conditions, investors decide to park their money in gold simply because there are few other good options. This in itself drives the price of gold up, making it a better investment and causing a speculative boom. As you will see here, here, and here the gold price is negatively correlated with stock market indices.
GENIX was started by Joel Greenblatt back in 2013, so it is a real life test of the strategy. GENIX got off to a great start in 2013 and 2014 (probably because investors were pumping money into the fund) but had a terrible 2015, and lagging in 2016. Since inception it has under-performed an S&P 500 index fund by about 1.90% per year. The expense ratio of the fund is 2.15%, so before expenses GENIX still has a slight edge, but Greenbatt is doing much better the fund's investors. I think GENIX could be an OK investment if the expense ratio were reduced from 2.15% to around 0.50%, but I doubt the fund will ever do that.
"What do you mean by ""interfering"" ? It sounds like you are making a negative judgement on gov controls. *Unbridled* capitalism is toxic - this is why America is a mess. Go read Adam Smith.  Other western countries have tight controls over healthcare .. and they get a better quality product at an affordable price."
This is the 21st century.. What do people expect? The Mongolians to attack? How is a dumb wall gonna help. He could pay for the stupid wall himself if he wants to make a statement. Or maybe his supporters should donate money for it and volunteer their time to build the worthless thing. Border wall is one of his dumbest campaign promises. We have so much better technology to do so much more for border security than a stupid wall. Put the money to better use.