The investment thread

[Ho]

As my grandmother liked to rib my grandfather, you haven't made (or lost) any money until you've sold. The value of your portfolio may go up and down with price rises and falls, but those are unrealized gains or losses. I do understand the excitement or disappointment of watching the numbers, but they don't really mean much until you make the sale. That's the game.

Now, if you're collecting dividends from something...that's cool.

[Merk]

True! Very true, if I were to dump all my positions this very second I would have come out ahead. I've bought and sold 3 of my positions for a meager profit of about $24 (I wanted to just get out of the position since they were small, like 10 shares small) and I've got I think about $20 in dividends that I haven't reinvested yet.

Looking at my portfolio's value vs. the amount I've invested, it looks like I'm ahead $17! woooo

NEXT INVESTMENT MOVE: There's some crazy high 1-year bond that is yielding 11.25%. I'm going to dump a thousand into it to get a low-risk $112.50

[Merk]

Spotify going public? http://finance.yahoo.com/news/spotify-s ... 14499.html


Interesting, I remember posting an article earlier (hell I think it might have been this thread) saying that Spotify makes negative amounts of money but hey, maybe they turned themselves around.

[Merk]

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.

I'm just saying... Does the whole Silk Road 2.0 thing that happened last week surprise anyone? Does anyone give a shit since it was all used for drugs and kiddy porn?

[Potter]

Does anyone give a shit since it was all used for drugs and kiddy porn?

Do you not understand that paper money has been used for drugs and kiddy porn since the beginning of time in about a million times the quantity bitcoin has? Should we ban paper money? How do you propose creating a currency of any type and have it be totally invincible to being spent on things deemed morally unacceptable? Should it have built in AI that sets itself on fire when it detects cp or drugs? If you think bitcoin offers criminals some totally untraceable way of dealing, then you're not familiar with how it works. If criminals were to trade paper money in the middle of nowhere, as they have for centuries, there is no ledger of a transaction, it didn't exist. With cryptocurrency, ALL transactions go into the master blockchain (a giant ledger) which then gets stored and verified 100 times over in every miners PC in the world. It's de-CENTRALIZED, not ANONYMOUS. I don't know why people still can't seem to grasp this, lel

[Fluffyumpkins]

Bitcoin has turned into one of those unmentionable topics like politics, religion, and diet.

[Merk]

Whoa whoa whoa I'm not suggesting that paper money is better or worse than anything I'm saying that no one is going to cry foul and fight to get the money back for a bunch of baseheads and kid diddlers. Enlighten me, I'm not trying to be smarmy because I honestly do not know, how does someone steal $2.7 million dollars worth of Bitcoin if every transaction is publicized and verifiable? Are the victims simply fucked or is there some way they can get their money back?

[Potter]

Whoa whoa whoa I'm not suggesting that paper money is better or worse than anything I'm saying that no one is going to cry foul and fight to get the money back for a bunch of baseheads and kid diddlers. Enlighten me, I'm not trying to be smarmy because I honestly do not know, how does someone steal $2.7 million dollars worth of Bitcoin if every transaction is publicized and verifiable? Are the victims simply fucked or is there some way they can get their money back?

Someone gets that much stolen by storing it in a btc wallet that gets stolen (private keys accessed and copied). Keeping that much in one wallet and/or not exchanging it to fiat currency is beyond dumb, and they deserved it. it's the same thing as keeping 2.7m in cash all in one spot in your house, then complaining when someone walks by and takes it all. Someone probably accessed their pc, grabbed their wallets private keys, and voila. I'd imagine the dude didn't even bother encrypting his wallet, and the private keys were stored in plaintext on his pc. sounds like that worked out for him, lawl. just because your bank keeps a ledger of all your deposits and withdrawals doesn't mean I can't go to the unlocked safe in your house and take all the cash I want. The difference with crypto being that now whoever has those private keys are going to use them, and those transactions will be in the public blockchain. How much that would help the victim at this point is little, because nobody really cares

[Merk]

Welp, BTC is at ~$250 which is the lowest it's been since this thread was started. Is this honest to God a good time to gamble and buy a buttcoin?

[Potter]

absolutely yes

[Potter]

wait, what are you talking about? BTC is still hovering around 600. mt gox is just having exchange issues http://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/btce/btcusd

[Merk]

Hmm, yeah I got my figure from Mt. Gox

[Merk]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-2 ... cmpid=yhoo

God damn, Mt. Gox getting fucked. Not being able to get people's money back sounds incredibly fishy and strikingly similar to what happened with Full Tilit Poker when they went under.



As an aside (since I like talking about what happened to Full Tilt), in poker there's a thing called "rake" which is essentially how the house makes money. They will skim a small percentage off each hand played or take a small percentage of the entry fee of a tournament. When people deposit money onto a site (PokerStars, Full Tilt, etc.) it should go into a separate bank account that is entirely separate from the rest of the company's assets so essentially for every "chip" in play there is real world money backing it and players can trade their chips in for money whenever they want which is exactly how casinos in the real world work. Whenever rake is taken a little bit of money from the players gets put into the company's bank account and they use that money to buy shit like servers, offices space, employees, etc.

However, Full Tilt rolled with the "lololol there's no way everyone would want to get their money out at the same time" approach so player money got mixed in with the company's bank account and they ended up spending a lot more than what they took in. So, on the day that on-line poker went to shit, everybody tried to get their money out and the money simply was not there because it was spent on other shit for the business. To this day there are people with accounts in the thousands of dollars that will probably never be paid or the players will receive a fraction of what they had. The US Justice Department is trying to get the money back but they are a part of the government and move at a glacier's pace. PokerStars luckily actually kept player money separate so every single person, including myself, got their shit back quickly.


Obviously shit like stocks is different, if no one is buying then there's no money the exchange can give to sellers if they inexplicably run out of dollars.

[Merk]

Welp, sucks for everyone that had any amount of money on Mt. Gox!

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/ ... 7920140225

[Merk]

Here is some actual investment advice since this thread is sorely lacking in anything other than Buttcoin chat. I am not a financial adviser, do not trust a rando on the internet.

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.

Obviously your needs will vary depending on your situation, but the rule of thumb is to always max out the 401k and the Roth. Let a professional manage them because you sure as fuck don't have the time or the insight to do it yourself.