vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
"Every one of those articles correctly point out that $3.7 trillion is **the size of a bond market**. Not one calls them a **""business worth $3.7 trillion.""**  The size of a market is not not the value of a business.  I guess even after all this you're still unable to grasp that.  His quote: ""The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, **a business worth $3.7 trillion**"".   Are you really too dumb to understand the difference between ""a business worth $3.7 trillion"" and the value of an entire market? The derivatives market is ""worth"" on the order of hundreds of trillions. Which businesses exactly are worth that much?  This is the type of ignorance that Taibbi articles relies upon to make them work. I'm done here since you see two numbers that are the same and conclude they mean the same thing."
"This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/california-once-compared-to-greece-now-trading-better-than-aaa) reduced by 65%. (I'm a bot) ***** &gt; Seven years ago, California was &amp;quot;The next Greece.&amp;quot; Today, the state&amp;#039;s bonds are trading better than AAA. As the Golden State benefits from record-breaking stock prices, Silicon Valley&amp;#039;s boom and a resurgent real estate market, demand for tax-exempt debt in the state with the highest top income tax rate in the U.S. is &amp;quot;Insatiable,&amp;quot; said Nicholos Venditti, a portfolio manager for Thornburg Investment Management.  &gt; An investor Tuesday bought about $1.1 million of state general obligation bonds maturing in six years at a yield of 1.33 percent, or 4.3 basis points below AAA rated bonds with the same maturity.  &gt; If the market turns and spreads widen, investors holding California bonds may be &amp;quot;Hit disproportionately hard,&amp;quot; Venditti said.   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/6swqdv/california_once_compared_to_greece_is_now_trading/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~188113 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **bond**^#1 **California**^#2 **Venditti**^#3 **State**^#4 **investor**^#5"
This means that the banks can get money from the Fed and from other banks very cheaply, which means they don't have to offer high interest rates on savings to entice individual depositors to save their money with the bank. Second is ""quantitative easing"", which just means the Fed buys government bonds and pays for them with ""new"" money. This happens all the time; remember those interest charges on bank loans? To keep the money supply stable, the Fed must buy T-debt at least in the amount of the interest being charged, otherwise the money leaves the economy and is not available to circulate. The Fed usually buys a little more than it collects in order to gradually increase the money supply, which allows the economy to grow while controlling inflation (having ""too much money"" and so making money worth less than what it can buy). What's new is that the Fed is increasing the money supply by a very large amount, by buying bonds far in excess of the (low) rates it's charging, and at fixed prices determined by the yield the Fed wants to induce in the markets. In the first place, with the Fed buying so many, there are fewer for institutions and other investors to buy. This increases the demand, driving down yields as investors besides the Fed are willing to pay a similar price, and remember that T-debt is one of the main things banks are allowed to invest your deposits in. Inflation isn't a concern right now despite the large amount of new money being injected, because the current economy is so lackluster right now that the new cash is just being sat upon by corporations and being used by consumers to pay down debt, instead of what the Fed and Government want us to do (hire, update equipment, buy houses and American cars, etc). In addition, the ""spot market price"" for a T-bond, or any investment security, is generally what the last guy paid. By buying Treasury debt gradually at a fixed price, the Fed can smooth out ""jitters"" in the spot price that speculators may try to induce by making low ""buy offers"" on T-debt to increase yields.
Your approach sounds solid to me.  Alternatively, if (as appears to be the case) then you might want to consider devoting your tax-advantaged accounts to tax-inefficient investments, such as REITs and high-yield bond funds.  That way your investments that generate non-capital-gain (i.e. tax-expensive) income are safe from the IRS until retirement (or forever).  And your investments that generate only capital gains income are safe until you sell them (and then they're tax-cheap anyway). Of course, since there aren't really that many tax-expensive investment vehicles (especially not for a young person), you may still have room in your retirement accounts after allocating all the money you feel comfortable putting into REITs and junk bonds.  In that case, the article I linked above ranks investment types by tax-efficiency so you can figure out the next best thing to put into your IRA, then the next, etc.
Disclaimer: I am not Canadian and have no experience with their laws and regulations. There really aren't any safe short term investment options at the moment (with interest rates being close to zero). So, just put the money aside you will need for the car and the computer, maybe on a callable savings account to make at least a few Dollars. Do not take out any loans, it is very unlikely you will earn more than the cost of the loan. You didn't say how much will be left but, unfortunately, it really is not much to go on anyway. Considering that you seem to have enough income to cover your expenses, you could transfer the rest to your RRSP, invest and just forget about it. I suggest to follow this rule of thumb: the growth portion of your portfolio, which for you means equities, should be directly related to the number of years you won't need to touch these funds. 1 year, 0 equity. 2 years, 10%, 3 years, 20%, and so on. What's not in equities, you could put in short term bonds, meaning an average duration of about 3 years. Needless to say, single stocks/bonds are out of question, ideally you can find 2 ETFs, one for stocks and one for bonds, respectively. However, if there is any possibility you did not mention that you could suddenly depend on this money, you have to keep your equity exposure, and thus your potential earnings, low. Just a humble thought: i really don't know your specific situation, my apologies if I'm out of line. Often disability means that you are not capable of doing one particular thing anymore, i.e. work physically. Just maybe you would still be capable to do some other type of work, maybe even from the comfort of your home, that would allow you to generate a certain income (and also keep you busy).  I hope this helps. Good luck.
A strategy of rebalancing assumes that the business cycle will continue, that all bull and bear markets end eventually.  Imagine that you maintained a 50% split between a US Treasury bond mutual fund (VUSTX) and an S&P 500 stock mutual fund (VFINX) beginning with a $10,000 investment in each on January 1, 2008, then on the first of each year you rebalanced your portfolio on the first of January (we can pretend the markets are open that day). The following table illustrates the values in each of those funds with the rebalancing transactions: This second table shows what that same money would look like without any rebalancing over those years: Obviously this is cherry-picking for the biggest drop we've recently experienced, but even if you skipped 2008 and 2009, the increase for a rebalanced portfolio from 2010-2017 is 85% verses 54% for the portfolio that is not being rebalanced in the same period. This is also a plenty conservative portfolio. You can see that a 100% stock portfolio dropped 40% in 2008, but the combined portfolio only dropped 18%. A 100% stock portfolio has gained 175% since 2009, compared to 105% for the balanced portfolio, but it's common to trade gains for safety as you get closer to retirement. You didn't ask about a 100% stock portfolio in your initial question. These results would be repeated in many other portfolio allocations because some asset classes outperform others one year, then underperform the next. You sell after the years it outperforms, then you buy after years that it underperforms.
Not for the tax break, no; as others have said that still costs you money. However, with rates being low right now and brought a bit lower by the tax break, this is an opportunity for the safest form of leveraged investing you will ever find. If you invest that money, the returns on investment will probably be better than the mortgage rate, and that leaves you with a net profit. There is some risk if the market collapses, but it's less risk than any other form of borrowing to invest. That also leave you with more flexibility if you need cash in a hurry; you can draw down the investments rather than taking another loan. If the risk bothers you, you can do what I did and split the difference. I put 50% down and financed the rest. I sometimes regret not having pushed it harder, since it has worked out well for me ... but that was the level of risk I was comfortable with.
Books are a great place to start, Jason Kelly's The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing will give you a broad foundation of the stock & bond market.
ULIP insurance plan ULIP is Unit Linked Insurance Plan. The premium you pay, a small part goes towards covering life insurance. The Balance is invested into Stock Markets. Most ULIP would give you an option to choose from Debt Funds [100% safe buy low returns 5-7%] or Equity [High Risks, Returns can be around 15%]. Or a mix of both. ULIP are not a good way to save money. There are quite a few hidden fees that actually reduce the return. So notionally even if returns shown are great, in effect it is quite less. For example the premium you pay in first year, say Rs 10,000/- Rs 2,500/- goes towards commission. And say Rs 100 goes towards insurance. Balance Rs 7,400/- units are purchased in your account. Even if these grow by 20%, you are still in loss. Ofcousre, the commissions go down year after year and stop at 5%. Then there is fund management fees that you don't get to see. There is maintenance fee that is deduced from your balance.  Thus the entire method of charging is not transparent. Life insurance from LIC There are broadly 2 types of Life Insurance plans Money Back / Endowment Plan. The concept here is again same, you pay a premium and part of it goes toward Insurance. The balance LIC invests in safe bonds. Every year a bonus is declared; generally less than Bank rate. At the end of the plan you get more than what you paid in premium. However if you had kept the same in Bank FD, you would have got more money back. So if you die, your nominee would get Insurance plus bonus. If you survive you get all the accumulated bonus. Pure Term Plan. Here the premium is quite less for the sum insured. Here if you die, your nominee would get insurance. If you survive you don't get anything.
"Taking examples from this loosely Googled page: http://www.fundlibrary.com/features/columns/page.asp?id=14406 If you find, or calculate, the standard deviation (volatility) of the returns from your various investment classes you will find they range from low-risk (low volatility), such as Cash, to high-risk (high volatility), such as Strategic Growth.  The risk rating (volatility) is a good indicator of how reactive to market conditions your investment is likely to be.  As you can see below, from mid-2010 to mid-2011 the High Risk index performed really well, but it was also most reactive when the market subsequently turned down.  The medium risk indices performed the best over the chart period, 2010 to 2013, but it could have turned out different.  Generally, you choose your investment according to your ""risk appetite"" - how much you're willing to risk.  You might play safe with, say, 30% cash, 60% medium risk, 10% high risk.  (Then again, are you paying someone to manage cash, which you might be able to do for free in a bank?) Assuming, for a moment, European (3.) and Intnl Equity Tracker (9.) had the same medium risk profile, then holding 50% & 50% would also add some currency diversification, which is usually advisable.  However, the main choice is down to risk appetite. To address your specific question: ""my main interest for now is between Stockmarket Growth and Strategic Growth"", first thing to do is check their volatilities. For a further level of sophistication you can check how they are correlated against each other.  If they are inversely correlated, i.e. one goes up when the other goes down, then holding some of each could be a good diversification. FYI: An Introduction to Investment Theory The historical returns are important too, but the investment classes your pension fund is offering will probably be reasonably aligned on a risk-return basis.  You should check though.  I.e. do they line up on a plot of 3 year Return vs Volatility? e.g. the line through SA Cash - SA Bonds - Vol Target 20 - SA Equity.  Source"
"There are raters of stock and bond funds of which Morningstar's is the best. Standard and Poor's and Value line offer reports that aren't quite as good. If you are able to read and understand these reports yourself, you don't need a professional. Such help is necessary for people who are ""rank beginners"" in investments."
"2.47% is a really, really good rate, doubly so if it's a fixed rate, and quadruply so if the interest is tax-deductible. That's about as close to ""free money"" as you're ever going to get. Heck, depending on what inflation does over the next few years, it might even be cheaper than free. So if you have the risk tolerance for it, it's probably more effective to invest the money in the stock market than to accelerate your student loan payoff. You can even do better in the bond market (my go-to intermediate-term corporate bond fund is yielding nearly 4% right now.) Just remember the old banker's aphorism: Assets shrink. Liabilities never shrink. You can lose the money you've invested in stocks or bonds, and you'll still have to pay back the loan. And, when in doubt, you can usually assume you're underestimating your risks. If you're feeling up for it, I'd say: make sure you have a good emergency fund outside of your investment money - something you could live on for six months or so and pay your bills while looking for a job, and sock the rest into something like the Vanguard LifeStrategy Moderate Growth fund or a similar instrument (Vanguard's just my personal preference, since I like their style - and by style, I mean low fees - but definitely feel free to consider alternatives). You could also pad your retirement accounts and avoid taxes on any gains instead, but remember that it's easier to put money into those than take it out, so be sure to double-check the state of your emergency fund."
I think I should note that you cannot expect a return of 10% or more because, as everyone always says, if there were a way to guarantee it, everyone would do it. You say you don't have any idea how this works so I'd go to my bank and ask them. You probably have access to private banking so that should mean someone will be able to sit you down and talk you through. Also look at other banks that have better rates and/or pretend you're leaving your bank to negotiate a better deal. If I were you I'd invest in blue chips (big international companies listed on the main indeces (DAX, FTSE 100, Dow Jones)), or (passively managed) mutual funds/ETFs that track these indeces. Just remember to diversify by country and industry a bit. Note: i would not buy the vehicles/plans that my bank (no matter what they promise, and they promise a lot) suggest because if you do that then the bank always takes a cut off your money. TlDr, dont expect to make 10-15% on a passive investment and do what a lot of others do: shares and bonds. Also make sure you get a lot of peoples opinions :)"
"You have several options depending on your tolerance for risk. Certainly open an investment account with your bank or through any of the popular discount brokerage services. Then take however much money you're willing to invest and start earning some returns! You can split up the money into various investments, too. A typical default strategy is to take any money you won't need for the long term and put it in an Index Fund like the S&P 500 (or a European equivalent). Yes, it could go down, especially in the short term, but you can sell shares at any time so you're only 2-3 days away at any time from liquidity. Historically this money will generate a positive return in the long run. For smaller time frames, a short-term bond fund often gives a slightly better return than a money market account and some people (like me!) use short-term bond funds as if it were a money market account. There is a very low but real risk of having the fund lose value. So you could take a certain percentage of your money and keep it ""close"" in a bond fund. Likewise, you can sell shares at any time, win or lose and have the cash available within a couple days."
"The standard low-risk/gain very-short-term parking spot these days tends to be a money market account.  However, you have only mentioned stock. For good balance, your portfolio should consider the bond market too. Consider adding a bond index fund to diversify the basic mix, taking up much of that 40%. This will also help stabilize your risk since bonds tend to move opposite stocks (prperhaps just because everyone else is also using them as the main alternative, though there are theoretical arguments why this should be so.) Eventually you may want to add a small amount of REIT fund to be mix, but that's back on the higher risk side. (By the way: Trying to guess when the next correction will occur is usually not a winning strategy; guesses tend to go wrong as often as they go right, even for pros. Rather than attempting to ""time the market"", pick a strategic mix of investments and rebalance periodically to maintain those ratios. There has been debate here about ""dollar-cost averaging"" -- see other answers -- but that idea may argue for investing and rebalancing in more small chunks rather than a few large ones. I generally actively rebalance once a year or so, and between those times let maintainng the balance suggest which fund(s) new money should go into -- minimal effort and it has worked quite well enough.,)"
"Rebalancing is, simply, a way of making sure your risk/reward level is where you want it to be. Let's say you've decided that your optimal mix is 50% stocks and 50% bonds (or 50% US stocks, 50% international, or 30/30/30 US large-cap/US small-cap/US midcap...).  So you buy $100 of each, but over time, the prices will of course fluctuate.  At the end of the year, the odds that the ratio of the value of your investments is equal to the starting ratio is nil.  So you rebalance to get your target mix again. Rebalance too often and you end up paying a lot in transaction fees.  Rebalance not often enough and you end up running outsize risk. People who tell you that you should rebalance to make money, or use ""dollar cost averaging"" or think there is any upside to rebalancing outside of risk management are making assumptions about the market (mean regressing or some such thing) that generally you should avoid."
To get lower correlations you need to look at different asset classes (e.g., bonds). So the answer is basically that some of the funds you were already looking at may be the ones you were looking for. The trick is that no category will outperform any other over all periods. That's exactly what volatility means --- it means the same category that overperforms in some periods will underperform in others. If international funds always outperformed, no one would ever buy US funds. Ultimately, if you're trying to decide on investments for yourself, you need to take all this information into account and combine it with your own personal preferences, risk tolerance, etc. Anecdotally, I recently did some simulation-based analyses of Vanguard funds using data from the past 15 years. Over this period, Vanguard's emerging markets fund (VEIEX) comes out far ahead of US funds, and is also the least-correlated with the S&P 500. But, again, this analysis is based only on a particular slice of time."
Other Aspect Edits: The Annuities need to invest in guaranteed risk free instruments; generally bonds. As the rates are locked for life, they need to factor things like average life expectancy, demographics, etc. This is largely statistical. Similar to how the Insurance premiums are decided. This is adjusted periodically. Say they offer 6.5% for 100 people. The investments into bonds is yielding only 6%. Then for next 100 people, they would offer 5.5%. However if the mortality increases, i.e. 50 people die at age of 70, they just need to adjust it to 5.75% for next 100 ... so there are quite a few parameters that go in and statical models output what the rate should be offered. At times the corpus manager may take a hedge to minimize downside. This is a specialized subject and there no dummies that show how rates are determined. It is also a trade secret.
Investors already can trade their assets - simply tokenizing a bond is unlikely to make it more liquid.  The key to liquidity is having a willing counterparty who wants to buy/sell what you are looking to sell/buy.  Because debt can be structured in a myriad of ways, markets for some bonds will be extremely thin, with limited buyers and sellers.  I don't see how tokenization will solve that problem.
It's not pre-tax but you can consider some short term municipal bonds. The interest is tax free. I would keep to short term ones (1 year maturity), so that you aren't affected by big swings in interest rates and can get your money back within a year.
Here's a reality check. They likely cost on the order of a few million/yr, which is small potatoes compared to what Taibbi makes it sound like. They got caught, and are going to jail. Since Taibbi exggerates at every turn, and demonstrably so, I do not trust his reporting. The bid riggers were charged with corrupting *dozens* of bids from 1999 to 2006. Know how many bids were performed in that time? I challenge you to find out. I bet there was more than dozens issued over that 7 year period. In fact, since there appear to be 400B in new bonds issues a year and the one mentioned in the story was for 300M, if that is representative of the sizes then there are over 1,000 issued a year, for 7000 or so over that period. They corrupted *dozens*! Oh the humanity. Feel free to correct any of these numbers as you see fit. Reading the actual PDF from the charges, one finds that the fraud was no where near as egregious as the Taibbi story makes it out to be. [Here](http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f261600/261602.htm) is the indictment, and [here is the DOJ](http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/May/12-at-620.html) press release. [Here's](http://www.bondbuyer.com/issues/121_88/cdr-financial-bid-rigging-trial-1039416-1.html) article reporting on the trial with no where near the sensationalism that Taibbi lives for, an article that actually reports *facts* from the case and makes no innunendo. [Here's](http://www.fbi.gov/newyork/press-releases/2012/three-former-financial-services-executives-convicted-for-roles-in-conspiracies-involving-investment-contracts-for-the-proceeds-of-municipal-bonds) FBI press release.