vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
Because /u/Wanderer360 is the one who turned this into a political issue, as if the monopolies mentioned in the article had suddenly sprung up on November 8th 2016. Its not a political issue, it’s a government issue, and both sides are to blame since they allowed legislation that makes it easier for monopolies to keep competitors out of a market place. If you drain the swamp, then their will be more competition.
There's only one hard constraint in there:  &gt;A population grown completely accustomed to a resource-intensive, globalized lifestyle relative to that enjoyed by almost any other country on Earth.  We do have to live within the limits of real resources. Labor, energy, commodities, clean air, water, etc.  Fortunately, we're not *at* the limits on those things right now and the rest of the problems are financial. Financial problems have financial solutions and those are always within our grasp *if* we [understand how the monetary system works](http://moslereconomics.com/mandatory-readings/soft-currency-economics/) and manage the poltiical coordination to get things done.
&gt;Not one of the components I listed did GM manufacture in the 1970s. Sure, if you were to look today, that list would be even greater including things like entire door assemblies, entire instrument clusters, even entire engines, but even in 1970 a huge amount of components were purchased rather than made.  Nor did I list the manufacturers of the BOXES that iPads are packaged in. (Nor the petroleum mining and refining that lead to the plastics used to mold the cases, wrap the wires, and shrinkwrap the boxes).  &gt;I'm not sure that this won't happen. If it does it'll create a much different society as we suddenly can't afford all the crap that we've become accustomed to. I think it's equally likely that the equities market and the huge profits created in the financial industry and tech industries, along with the dollar being the world's only reserve currency will prop up the dollar and give rise to the bipolar society of which I describe.  Highly doubtful.  Such EXTREME bipolar societies are VERY unstable.
There are many reasons, some already covered by other answers. I have a blog post on the issue here, and I'll summarize:
&gt;You need an outside party ref - govt. to set the rules and regulations.  Except that in your analogy, the rule book is written by the wealthier team, and the ref is paid for by the wealthier team, and for some damn reason, the wealthier team always wins. But there's a ref!!!
In a fixed currency system large corporations can easily fund big new investments and it's super cheap.  That's because they are using retained earnings and not competing with lots of fractionally reserved money that is squandering resources chasing whatever bubble is in vogue at the moment.  If you know that a company called Toyota with no access to any retained earnings should build a car for $1 billion dollars and it is guaranteed to be a success before you ever even got started well then you've solved the central planning problem and can just do away with private industry and omnisciently run the whole world by dictatorial decree because you have perfect information about the future.    That doesn't mean that government shouldn't exist.  In a gold backed system the government can tax the population and invest in infrastructure or whatever but when they do that the population will have less to spend, consumption industries will contract and production will be reallocated to the government's whim until the investing is over and then the people will all get their money back through wages or business profits from selling to the government.  It's important that the government have a stable and predictable spending program so they don't cause undue damage to the capital structure.
It's a question of the type of globalisation, not the 'globalisation' in itself. Functioning democracies are bottom up affairs. Evolution is an essential and fundamental element of The Enlightenment and functioning democracy is one such manifestation. Top down affairs do not support evolution - they make the problems systemic and endemic and rot from within.  The Enlightenment produced our fantastic wealthy modern technological society. One of the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment is evolution - in all respects - whether this be business, political or social. Fundamental to this is :-  1) a bottom up environment that supports the basic principles of evolution (personal, commercial, local and national, cultural etc... ) :-  i) many low cost successes - capitalised on.  ii) many low cost failures - lessons learned. Also - problems are sorted at source (they don't become systemic and endemic).  iii) diversity (not sameness).  iv) constructive competition (localisation) - eg. countries, states, companies, people competing against each other.  2) the promotion of personal and societal capital - strength and quality of morality and character, education, skills and abilities, culture; traditional nuclear and extended families; national - societal - capital - culture. Self responsibility.  3) Conservatism - as per the 3 pillars of conservatism :-  i) socially conservative - traditional marriage - provides stability.   ii) economically liberal - bottom up democratic capitalism, freedom of thought, freedom of speech - allows evolution.  iii) law and order - fairness and justice, honesty, stability and integrity.
Ha!  All right ChaosMotor, you seem like the guy with the 'can-do attitude'.  Put something together and start a completely new market to compete with the Dow and the S&amp;P.    I'm sure it can't be too hard, I'm just really busy right now setting up a search engine to compete with Google and Microsoft.
It takes some time for folks to renegotiate contracts and adjust policies in the commercial realm.  It's never as easy as simply going to a different web page. The different buearus have slightly different ways of scoring people, different APIs to integrate with everyone's software, and take somewhat different things into account. That takes some time to change.
That's the point though.  They are allowing themselves to be *led*, in the first place, to the decision to do something with their capital that they don't understand.  While I don't condone how these Wall St. people behave with peoples money (hence why I don't put any of my money into it), I also cant sympathize with the people who lose money to Wall St. because they were too lazy to be informed about what was going on with their money and to act in their own best interest.  I am guessing (pure speculation) that a lot of the problem with the financial industry could've been avoided if people were proactive about their money and only made investments that they were personally knowledgeable about.
I think your comment sounded a lot more reasonable and aware of how it goes than the writer; and yes it does makes sense that for little investors like retailers, there is not really a point to consider it, as you said. I don't think it redeems the article at all.
i don't understand why people try to do this as a living. the people bulge brackets hired to do prop trading with the best equipment, capital, technology still has a hard time trading. Oh and they are smarter than you will ever be with . And they have been learning on the job for years
"I'll give the TLDR answer. 1) You can't forecast the price direction. If you get it right you got lucky. If you think you get it right consistently you are either a statistical anomaly or a victim of confirmation bias. Countless academic studies show that you can not do this. 2) You reduce volatility and, importantly, left-tail risk by going to an index tracking ETF or mutual fund. That is, Probability(Gigantic Loss) is MUCH lower in an index tracker. What's the trade off? The good thing is there is NO tradeoff. Your expected return does not go down in the same way the risk goes down! 3) Since point (1) is true, you are wasting time analysing companies. This has the opportunity cost of not earning $ from doing paid work, which can be thought of as a negative return. ""With all the successful investors (including myself on a not-infrequent basis) going for individual companies directly"" Actually, academic studies show that individual investors are the worst performers of all investors in the stock market."
I don't think retail cares so much about being taken for a few bps here and there, but more so about the insane volatility that is the new normal in markets. This vol., which in many cases can be tracked back to HFT, has had a negative feedback loop that resulted in lower volumes across the board.  I don't think retail cares about a few bps here and there, but if the entire system is based on trust in market efficiency, and computers make them less efficient by purposefully manipulating the system, retail might just not chose to play any more.  Think of it like baseball vs. football.  Football has salary caps, and, as such, all teams have a fair shot at winning every year, baseball doesn't, and a few teams with the biggest budgets consistently win year over year. Yeah, it's great if you're a Yankees, Red Sox, Giants or Phillies fan, but many other cities in the country don't care about baseball much anymore and favor football. Look at viewership stats by market over time. HFT is the same way, it's great if you have the money to compete in that system, but by destroying the integrity of the system itself, many participants just stop caring as much and go elsewhere...
Let me guess... The ultimate point of the article being about how this time it really is different and how individuals are more incapable now than ever to make wise investment decisions in the market? Might as well just give up and let the pros do it right? Or just buy an index and forget about it?  Sure, okay.   /throws unread paywall'd garbage article in the trash
If you're a person of normal means, being a short-term trader/speculator is a game that you are going to lose. Don't do it -- do some research on investing.
They are much too easily distracted. They have no focus compared to the deadly chugging beast of a train that is Amazon. They might be prettier or fancier than Amazon, but they don't put nearly as much care into their long term business plans.
Well the problem is it's tough for people to get loans through banks and mortgage brokers now. Even if you can afford it on a monthly basis.   Investors are paying cash for homes and renting them for more than it would cost people who legitimately need a place to live.
Plus a lot of retailers use completely different size standards and don't bother putting the scales they use on the product page. So a large at one store can quite literally be a small at another and unless you knew that beforehand or they happened to tell you the sizing scales, *have fun*.
Why the heck am I paying you when I could've made triple myself for nothing?   That's a familiar line among the redeemers.   They will probably cry when they don't understand why their losses outpace most of the funds once the bear market comes, also.
Would if I had the capital it is an intensive and low margin area, it requires serious creativity and drive to do it and often needs at least one person per store that is seriously locally invested.   Not sure where anger comes from, just stating my opnion as a 20 year professional consultant who has worked at the executive level for BB, Target and GSK and a lifetime of being a customer. Sorry my opnion is both appreny offensive and entirely incorrect. I honestly don't read much of the retail distribution industry trade publications. I just work here.  EDIT: It's important to note that big box reailers and how they treated customers was already on the downslide and had been for nearly a decade prior to Amazon showing up. As such honestly very hard for one to make a direct comparision as the retailers had alredy given up much of thier competitive advantge prior to Amazon coming on the scene.
You have got it wrong. The profit or loss for smaller investor or big investor is same in percentage terms.
On the risk averse side, they think of how much they are spending on the item (even if it is less compared to large items like cars or houses) and don't want to lose that. On the bad at dealing with large numbers side, they don't think about the overall cost of the coverage and don't read the fine print as to what they are actually getting coverage for. (This is the same reason that you always see prices one cent under the dollar.) People often don't really subconsciously get that they are paying more even if they would be able to eat the loss, so they pay what feels like a small amount to offset a large risk. The risk of loss is a higher fear than the known small, easy payment that keeps the risk away and the overall value proposition isn't even considered.
I believe it is because you can withstand a loss in your early life better than you can in your retirement. If you lose 25% in your 20s it is a lot less than 25% in your 60s. You, hopefully earn more in your 60s and you have a lot more already in the bank in your 60s.
"But it can't beat ""I'll just run into Best buy on my way home from work"".  Retail stores screwed up big by not embracing online shopping, but they'll continue to lurch on because free same day shipping beats free two day shipping."
Simply thinking about how to deal with the phenomena of people going to stores, trying the product, and then going online to buy it. Another post stated that people just go to malls to do this, but given how badly malls have suffered we might find ourselves in a scenario where malls just go away completely- and what then?
I tried direct indexing the S&amp;P500 myself and it was a lot of work. Lots of buys and sells to rebalance, tons of time in spreadsheets running calculations/monitoring etc, dealing with stocks being added or removed from the index, adding money (inflows). Etc. All of the work is the main reason I stopped. I came to realize the 0.05% I pay Vanguard is a great deal.
This question is likely to be voted closed as opinion-based. That said - In general people have become accustomed to instant gratification. They also have the media showing them luxury and are enticed every day to buy things they don't need.  In the US, the savings rate is awfully low, but it's not just the lower 50%, it's 75% of people who aren't saving what they should.  see http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/working_papers/pfeffer-danziger-schoeni_wealth-levels.pdf for an interesting article on the topic of accumulated wealth.
Whatever you do, don't take your retirement savings to Vegas. Second, you should also consider investment expenses. Your investments profit after the managers pay themselves. Get the lowest expense ratio mutual funds you can. Third, most active managers do not beat the market. Index funds are your friends. They also tend to have the lower expense ratios.
Even people who did think it was a good didn't really get screwed. If you are an investor who thinks Facebook is a good buy then fucking hold it. The company hasn't even released its first quarter of earnings yet. If the people who bought Facebook are right about it it will be worth it in five years. The fact is we cannot say whether or not that is going to happen right now.   The only people who really got screwed are the ones who wanted to flip it. If you wanted to flip it you lost a lot of money, but the retail investors who figured that Facebook long-term was worth the money, didn't get screwed. They might be wrong and might lose all their money five years from now, but they didn't get screwed yet.
A lot can happen to a stock's price in 1 hour and especially 30 days.  Not allowing investors to back out of if they desire would be a bad idea.  These HFT firms operate on milliseconds.  Requiring investors to hold for even just 1-5 seconds would be a major blow to the industry.
Ding ding ding ding ding!  Too bad Reddit doesn't understand banking, investment, or business. You've implied that the banks might not actually be acting out of intense malevalence toward the little guy, thus, your post will be drawn, quartered, and banished to the wastes of downvote.
"I actually love this question, and have hashed this out with a friend of mine where my premise was that at some volume of money it must be advantageous to simply track the index yourself. There some obvious touch-points: Most people don't have anywhere near the volume of money required for even a $5 commission outweigh the large index fund expense ratios. There are logistical issues that are massively reduced by holding a fund when it comes to winding down your investment(s) as you get near retirement age. Index funds are not touted as categorically ""the best"" investment, they are being touted as the best place for the average person to invest. There is still a management component to an index like the S&P500. The index doesn't simply buy a share of Apple and watch it over time. The S&P 500 isn't simply a single share of each of the 500 larges US companies it's market cap weighted with frequent rebalancing and constituent changes. VOO makes a lot of trades every day to track the S&P index, ""passive index investing"" is almost an oxymoron. The most obvious part of this is that if index funds were ""the best"" way to invest money Berkshire Hathaway would be 100% invested in VOO. The argument for ""passive index investing"" is simplified for public consumption. The reality is that over time large actively managed funds have under-performed the large index funds net of fees. In part, the thrust of the advice is that the average person is, or should be, more concerned with their own endeavors than they are managing their savings. Investment professionals generally want to avoid ""How come I my money only returned 4% when the market index returned 7%? If you track the index, you won't do worse than the index; this helps people sleep better at night. In my opinion the dirty little secret of index funds is that they are able to charge so much less because they spend $0 making investment decisions and $0 on researching the quality of the securities they hold.
Obviously, these numbers can never be absolute simply because not all the information is public. Any statistic will most likely be biased. I can tell you the following from my own experience that might get you closer in your answer: Hence, even though I cannot give you exact numbers, I fully agree that traders cannot beat the index long term. If you add the invested time and effort that is necessary to follow an active strategy, then the equation looks even worse.  Mind you, active trading and active asset allocation (AAA) are two very different things. AAA can have a significant impact on your portfolio performance.
A much less verbose answer is.  Don't worry about buying low.  You have a whole lifetime to dollar cost average your retirement dollars.
I don't blame the platform at all. The cheapest product will attract the more uninformed investors, and those who previously couldn't afford to lose their money in the market. That has no effect on educated investors who choose to use Robinhood.
I don't get why people insist on listening to cable tv to buy their stocks or any list. I remember one time a old lady was about to invest a good chunk of money in AOL because a broker said to do it. *face palm.*
Sort of.  I mean that even though TV generally sucks, and there are better alternatives, the average human may not be smart enough to care.  TV is easy, something they're used to, and requires no energy to watch or make any changes.  So, they may eventually catch on, but the TV industry will probably be able to stay a step or two ahead of them simply because it's not too hard to do, and nothing will happen too fast.  I learned about investing back in the dot com days.  I invested too heavily in high tech thinking it was really happening, and I was somewhat right, but it just didn't happen as quickly as we all thought, and a lot of companies went broke because they had no short-term income or plan, and ran out of capital.  Now I know there's more to it than simply knowing which way the wind blows.  You also need to know about butterflies and hurricanes so to speak.  Timing is important, and shorting stocks can be profitable unless it takes too long, and you end up being forced to act before you're ready.
That's what most athletes should do, but they don't. They end up getting an uncle or cousin to invest for them and they end up stealing it or losing it on terrible investments. It's really sad. And all the major sports put these guys through learning seminars when they are rookies, but they just don't listen.
Exactly; it also really rubs me the wrong way when people pitch just throwing everything in an s&amp;p 500 vanguard fund, and pretend like thats a diversified portfolio.  Bonus points if they make this pitch to someone 5 years from retirement.
People will never stop being items they need. Clothes,Computers, Phones, Cars, Furniture etc.  The problem the way I see it is that we lost mainstream culture. In general, we define our identify via the goods we purchase. Are we iOS or Android, Bike or Car, Vegetarian or Meat, Democrat or Rebublican. Nothing matters anymore. Today you can be anything you want and you will find a community that supports your worldviews. Grunge is not dead, as Punk or Goth is not dead, even Juggalos or fist pumping guido's have their space. Retail is fragmented obliterating the need for large Department stores.
Ah - sadly I have no money. Mostly just curious after watching The Big Short last week haha.   I find that line of insight interesting though.  I've been seeing a lot of mall closures in Canada as anchor tenants like sears leave though. Kind of makes me wonder whether franchisees will start closing stores like footlocker and food court restaurants since they operate on such small margins, and the leases usually seem to be written around the presence of foot traffic generating anchor tenants.
thats my main regret - similar to cfa vs. mba  they only hire kids right out of top tier schools with inflated gpas (harvard im looking at you) and these kids dont know their asses from their elbows and they immediately get into the models and bottles mindset  id take a state schooler with a level head any day over wanna be rainmakers
Retail is not in crisis... In fact it in in a reinvention stage.  You see the problem Sears is facing, and Wal-Mart will face is the fact that the digital transformation is proving to be a jobs engine therefore meaning it will not stop.  Additionally you have the problem of selection... Wal-Mart, Sears, KMart all use to work for busy busy Americans in a up swinging economy.  Quick one stop shops that were often much cheaper then their local counter parts.  This was achieved by using the same model that is now completely obsolete.  That model paired large broad selection spanning multiple departments and categories.  This model could never afford to display a full variety of products in any one category so it choose a selection of strong selling brands.  It was all mass appeal.  Today more and more consumers want a bigger selection, nicer cutting edge products, and knowledge.  Additionally they want speed and convenience.  Nothing about this describes a Wal-Mart which are usually located in-between residential areas, as opposed to strip malls which have crept into many suburban areas.  Same with Sears.  Malls scream traffic and time, and are usually located far away from main street and my street.    Want a true prediction.  The death of Sears is followed by a rapid decline in Wal-Mart as Kroger overtakes Wal-Mart in reach and scale.  LIDL grows across the landscape capitalizing on excess retail space.  Amazon splits into two; with grocery/pharmacy being a major piece of a new company and they continue to streamline your grocery visit.  And last but not least, main street thrives.  With The big department stores disappearing, their competition will fill the void.  Best part of this scenario is the result in the economic market.