The investment thread

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Merk
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The investment thread

Post by Merk » Tue Dec 10, 2013 5:10 pm

I've been reading a bunch of http://www.investopedia.com/ and I have gone ahead and dumped $6,000 onto E*Trade over the last two weeks and I plan on buying a bunch of ETFs with it to see how they do over a year's time. This thread is for the discussion of investing by people who know nothing about investing.

Here is what I plan on buying:

EXT
DGRW
EES
DES
DIM

I'm curious, what do everyone else's portfolios look like and how have they been performing?

Actual investment advice:
What to do with your excess money:

1) Max out your 401k up to your employer match, no more, no less. If your company matches 50% up to $1,000 then only put in $1,000 in your 401k for that sweet $500 gain.
2) Set up a Roth IRA and max it out. The yearly max right now is $5,500.
3) In the unlikely event you have any excess money left over and you have no other goal other than "retirement" then throw everything else into treasury bonds. Your IRA and 401k will be working the stock market and assuming all the risks involved with that.
Last edited by Merk on Mon Aug 04, 2014 7:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The investment thread

Post by Merk » Wed Dec 11, 2013 9:01 am

I'm going to add SOCL to my portfolio as well and hold it for a month as a risky venture. SOCL is a social media ETF and it's been a bit swingy over the past couple of months but I think that come January 1st and the start of a new quarter people will be bullish on social media stocks and whatever promises Twitter and FB deliver to investors.

Basically I wanna get in and get out before the bubble pops. Holy fuck are the P/E ratios of the stocks in SOCL high, LinkedIn with that sweet, sweet 788 P/E ratio.
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Re: The investment thread

Post by Merk » Wed Dec 11, 2013 9:11 am

I considered investing in Spotify this morning (you know, once it has an IPO) until I read this: http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permali ... nfiveyears


Horry shi
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Re: The investment thread

Post by DAVE101 » Wed Dec 11, 2013 6:05 pm

1) Go balls deep into Apple
2) iPhone 5 comes out
3) lose college fund
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Re: The investment thread

Post by Potter » Thu Dec 12, 2013 1:35 am

litecoin, amd
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Re: The investment thread

Post by Pokebis » Thu Dec 12, 2013 10:01 pm

I was thinking about mining litecoin on my rig in Redmond while I go back down to Bloomington for Winter Break (leaving it open to me via ssh or something).
I have no experience with how it works, though, and I heard it operates best on the GPU so I'm a bit wary because it's my primary gaming PC and I don't want to wear out the GPU with something like that (could that happen?) Also unsure how much it would affect the electricity bill and if whatever I mine would even break even with that.

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Re: The investment thread

Post by Fluffyumpkins » Thu Dec 12, 2013 10:04 pm

I'm actually curious in the same. Is it as simple as downloading a client and letting it rock and roll?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevange ... h-windows/

I read through this, and it sounds like you have to be semi-dedicated to make some dorrars.

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Re: The investment thread

Post by Potter » Fri Dec 13, 2013 4:56 pm

it took me maybe 10 minutes to set up. join a pool, download a mining tool and tell it your pool account info, and let it mine. at some point or another, download the litecoin wallet application,get your receive payment #, and give it to your pool account so the pool knows where to send the mined coins you've been amassing. other than that, it just sits there and makes money

I wouldn't bother doing it unless you have a newer to newish AMD card though. ps video cards don't "wear out" unless something was previously horribly wrong with them. fans are moving parts and do wear out, but you're not going to affect their lifespan by running them at 80% vs 60%. On my nvidia GTX 770 I'm mining about $110USD/month, if I would have spent that 300 bucks on an AMD card like an R9 280x I'd be mining closer to 300USD/mo. keep in mind AMD cards are pretty much sold out everywhere because of how well they mine, and they're being price gouged to fuck on ebay.

I wouldn't recommend dumping any new money into litecoin mining. If you want to play around and actually put a little money in, I recommend buying one or two litecoins on an exchange directly, and holding onto them, and have fun watching the exchange rate go way up. I only recommend mining if you happen to already have a card because then it's a no loss proposition, and it's not doing anything else anyways. If your main worry is power draw and cost, keep in mind litecoin is pretty much GPU only, and even horribly inefficient GPU's max out around 300w, which if ran constantly full out is maybe 15 to 20 dollars a month on your electric bill. Then keep in mind any amd card from the last couple years and any nvidia card from this year will net you at least 60 to 70 bucks a month, closer to 300 to 400 if you're a lucky whore and picked up an AMD R9 series before they went out of stock everywhere

Go here to find out the kH/s rate of your video card, then plug that hash rate into the calculator below that to find out your monthly earnings

https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison

http://www.coinwarz.com/calculators/lit ... alculator/ (if you don't know the power draw of your card, assume 200w and stick that in there. if you don't pay for electric, just put in 0 so it won't add in any monthly electric fee)
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Re: The investment thread

Post by Riot » Sun Dec 15, 2013 10:42 am

Litecoin mining seems kinda fun, but I have a feeling the whole bitcoin stuff will be shut down under the Patriot Act by the government when they tie it to money laundering and some of the stuff it's been used for. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next year, but I have a feeling it'll be a pretty big upset since it's unstable and investors will sell quickly if stuff starts to get shaky.
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Re: The investment thread

Post by MonMotha » Sun Dec 15, 2013 6:05 pm

Interestingly, it's basically impossible to just "shut down" things like Bitcoin. You can make it illegal to engage in by statute, but the network is sufficiently decentralized so as to be pretty resistant to attempts to outright shut it down.

Also, despite what some people seem to promulgate, Bitcoin transactions are anything but untraceable or anonymous. They are, at best, pseudonymous. The source and destination wallet addresses are inherently made public when a transaction occurs as is the amount of the transaction. The fact that the transaction occurred is then even integrated into an essentially unalterable record for all to view at any point.
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Re: The investment thread

Post by Potter » Sun Dec 15, 2013 7:04 pm

Not to mention a lot of trading co's on wall street just announced their plans to dump hundreds of millions of dollars into cryptocurrency. trying to shut it down would either hilariously just knock the exch rate way up, or way down temporarily, making it a great time to buy in

I think certain commissions are just upset because the US dollar finally has somewhat of a competitor. It's funny to see them reference downsides of BTC such as "used in illegal activities, and laundering".....gee, kind of like paper currency has been for centuries? One does not simply create a currency immune to human action
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Re: The investment thread

Post by Merk » Mon Dec 16, 2013 12:07 pm

The pessimist and skeptic in me wants to say that Bitcoin / Litecoin / whatever is going to fail and people that are late adopters are going to get fucked. I back this statement up with nothing other than the fact that it is sort of brave new frontier investment vehicle that a lot of people don't really understand so when/if Bitcoin goes mainstream and Warren Buffet or some sort of powerful voice in the investing community talks shit about Bitcoin then the price of it will plummet. I ensure you that someday someone will counterfeit or otherwise illicitly obtain bitcoins and people will get fucked while the counterfeiters will get away scot-free. Since bitcoin is a Libertarian wet-dream there's no regulatory or government body that protects bitcoins so there won't be any po-po or spooks coming after the perpetrators. Obviously this is something that can change through legislation but as it is now "stealing bitcoins" is not a crime. You can get dinged for privacy invasion like the E-Sports people did but whatever fine they were given can easily be paid off with what they made in bitcoins.

Or I could be horribly wrong and cryptocurrency is the way of the future and I'll look back and say "Man, I should have gotten on the bitcoin train when it was $5 a coin! Now I have to work for the rest of my life!" Kudos to the people that have already gotten in and out and increased their investment 10-fold. I don't have the balls to put my retirement fund into bitcoins but I'm jealous of those that got their sweet, sweet short term profits.


Anyway I got all my ETF trades in on Friday so now my portfolio is well diversified and ready to grow over the next year. I cringe when I look at my checking account now since I'm as broke as a joke but I know that this is the best thing for me in the long run.
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Re: The investment thread

Post by MonMotha » Mon Dec 16, 2013 12:18 pm

Electronic/computer trespass can easily carry criminal penalties in excess of theft of a comparable amount of currency.

Getting that crime prosecuted, otoh, is another matter. Same applies to theft of currency, though. Biggest issue is that insurance may not yet cover "virtual currencies". I guess ask your insurance agent if you care. Nice thing is that, unlike with hard currency, you can back up a bitcoin/litecoin wallet. If you are compromised, you can just transfer everything to a newly created wallet as long as you detect the intrusion and make the transfer before the thieves do anything with the wallet data they obtained.

As to "counterfeiting" bitcoins or litecoins, I suspect either it's already being done or figuring out how to do so would have implications far beyond merely counterfeiting bitcoins or litecoins. There's enough money involved at this point that I'm sure many cryptographers have taken a good look at the cryptosystem, and I've heard of no problems. If anybody's found something, they've kept their analysis private so far, and this would seem to be a prime example of "many eyes make all problems shallow". A break to the underlying hash algorithms could easily break frigging everything - SSL/TLS, S/MIME, PGP, SSH, etc. could easily all be at risk depending on the nature of the break. By nature, you don't tend to "counterfeit" anyway. Most breaks would let you double spend or otherwise re-write history, which is just as bad, I guess.

As far as investment goes, I think the various current cryptocurrencies are just too volatile for use as a real long-term investment, but they're probably a reasonable way to have some fun with comparatively small amounts of money (relative to the size of your portfolio) as a highly speculative venture.
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Re: The investment thread

Post by Merk » Mon Dec 16, 2013 12:42 pm

MonMotha, what does your portfolio look like? Tell me about your 401k.
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Re: The investment thread

Post by MonMotha » Tue Dec 17, 2013 12:51 am

I actually don't have a 401(k). It's not really worth trying to do that being self-employed. I do have an IRA, though. It mostly has mutual funds and some ETFs. I'm trying to observe if the management fees I'm paying to the mutual funds (which are not particularly high but still much higher than what you pay on an ETF of course) are actually worth it. The portfolio is pretty heavy in equities and hence has done quite well this year, but it's pretty diversified within the equities. I also have some bond funds and a floating rate fund that I probably need to keep an eye on as the Fed re-evaluates their rate policies.

In general, the goal of the portfolio is long term, stable growth and income. Being a retirement account owned by a fairly young individual, there's little reason to chase market timing factors and trends with it.
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