If you're good at sales, do that. Otherwise, you need a specialized skill, which may involve going back to school. Basically, you need to create a reason for somebody to pay you a lot of money for your time. Pretty much anyone with decent people skills can manage a coffee shop, so it's unrealistic to expect that you would make the kind of money that you want to make in your current occupation.

Sometimes people in similar situations such as yourself find a job with a company that pays well that they can do (HR, for example) and stick with it for a number of years and work their way up. The problem is that such a job usually has a very high value over replacement (meaning it would be very difficult for them to find a similar job with similar pay if their current job went away), and these people tend to be the first to get canned when a recession hits.

So, while applying for random jobs that seem interesting could definitely work, a safer choice might be to go to school and study something more specialized, or potentially get an MBA.

Check the Programming forum, a bunch of us have done coding bootcamps. If you're willing to move to SF and get into one of the best ones, the average starting salary is > $100K. However, these are big "if"s, and I think it's gotten considerably more difficult in the last year. Still, learning to code on your own might be a good idea. The Odin Project is a decent place to start.

If you go a mass-applying route (for whatever type of job), do a consistent like 5-10 per day, every day, never stop. Remember that "grit" is the biggest factor in success.

say I bought 30 $20 July calls that are now just in the money. The bid-ask spread is really high, so in order to not give up a ton of equity I want to exercise them and sell the stock. each contract would cost $2000 to exercise. since I don't just have $60,000 sitting around in my account is it standard to exercise say... 5 at a time, sell the stock. 5 more, sell the stock, 5 more sell the stock, etc. All on the same day? Just want to know in advanced if that works (or if it makes sense...) before I wait till the expiration day to do it.

thanks for the input

Or...you could just place a limit order at the mid point of the bid/ask spread.

Thought I would elaborate. The "or" in my above post makes it sound like you have a choice. I don't think you can do what you are suggesting. It will depend on what kind of options you have American or European.

But I would guess you won't have a say in when the contracts are executed. If you hold through expiration you may get an assignment.

If you have European options you may be able to do what you are talking about piece meal.

But the correct answer is, just get out before expiration. Work an order, or if worse comes to worse, get out at the market.

And don't trade illiquid options or contracts with big spreads if you don't know what you are doing / are uncomfortable with things.

Sell the options at mid price if you can. Adjust your offer by a penny or two if you don't get filled immediately.

You're losing more value by exercising the option, specifically the time value. And next time don't wait until your options are deep ITM.

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cool, thanks for the advice. turns out I didn't exactly know what I was doing (definitely didn't know it was so easy to get a fill in the middle). Luckily things worked out.

I was thinking about buying an ETF in medium term, high grade corporate debt to hold some capital that I do not want to take a lot of risk with. VCIT is the fund and it's return has been significantly better than the return of high yield savings accounts or CD's. I know that bonds have exposure to interest rate risk and if interest rates go up the NAV of the fund will go down and I could lose money. I was looking for some feedback.

What's the best way to sell one physical gold kg bar ?

guy I bought it from would wants 4% off the spot price

https://www.quora.com/When-are-oil-p...-to-rise-again

Hi, is the argument in the first post here a good one? That would mean it will be a long time until oil prices rise again....

The way I see oil is that all the countries with 50+ years of proven reserves (e.g. Saudi Arabia) are battling eachother in a race to quickly monetarize those reserves and turn them into "sustainable" income generating assets. If you realise that 78% of oil is used in transport and then realise that in the past ~15 years we got tesla's, airplanes/boats on biomass fuel / even solar powered airplanes that cross the atlantic etc. you'll have to ask yourself as a country with 100 years of oil in the ground how much longer there will be such demand. You already see Saudi Arabia not being very compliant in reducing oil production.

So you think Dan Loeb, Steve Mandel, David Shaw, Jim Simons, Lee Ainslie, David Tepper, Bob Koenigsberger, James Dinan, Ray Dalio, Seth Klarman, WEB are all lucky coinflippers*?

Or are you saying a 20, 25, etc track record isn't long enough to tell?

Or some special talent to have spotted them - I mean, the media never talks about them do they...

LOL GMAFB & GTFO. It takes only One manager to disprove your already disproven theory.

Regardless, Roger Ibbotson already showed that Winners Repeat, and Winners Repeat with Style.


The reason you don't listen to salesguys with 25 funds and x that have outperformed is that you don't know about the ones that were closed and opened along the way. they could have had 250 funds over that time frame. But if you had 25 mgrs running 25 funds at one shop at 4 of them consistently outperformed for 15-20 years, that's all the evidence you need. After fees and expenses of course.



* Yeah ~half of them are closed now but half or more are not. And some of the closed ones were open very recently.

And there are multiple mutual funds that qualify as well. You probably think Will Danoff is lucky too. 26 years at the helm, at a no-name firm like Fidelity, running almost no assets except for $100Bn, 3.18% average annual outperformance after fees. Yeah, just lucky I bet.

I said nothing of the sort. I just mentioned a mathematical fact.

did you get a great deal on knee pads or something?

Najdor, this thread isn't going to like you not going along with the groupthink going on ITT.

Wheres that initial quote from. I agree with the coinflipper theory. Sure some have more talent/determination etc. to have a better shot at becoming a hedgefund billionaire (proxy for succes) but there is definitely this Arcsine Law in stockpicking (and poker for that matter). If you re-run the lives of an Ackman/Einhorn/Paulson etc. a hundred times, they will end up being a billionaire or hedgefund titan < 50 % of the time.

They become widely successfully over 50% of the lives that they decide to be hedge fund managers. No sense in counting the lives they don't show interest in the market.

Maybe, maybe not. If you were writing this post a couple of years ago you probably would have included Ken Heebner, Bill Miller and David Einhorn but then they stopped performing. Which of the above will stop performing in the next 5 years?

This seems relevant to the discussion:

Directed at people who have little to no investing experience. I particularly like the part where he said past performance doesn't predict future performance then touted passive MFs because they've done well recently.

what services are you guys using to track your accounts? i have a lot of accounts and would like them(credit cards, banks, investment) viewable all in one place. Mint.com seems to be pretty crappy as of late(havent logged in for awhile until today), often times not connecting my accounts properly.

If your GPA was above 3.0, "not the best" is still okay. If you can ace LSAT/GMAT (90+ percentile on either), you can still get in pretty good law/business schools that will open doors to 100+k jobs (with 60+ as safeties). With your experience, with a new degree, as long as you're not bottom of the class, you're immiediately hirable for middle management with your retail experience, which is more valuable than you might realize. This is very expensive but ultimately worthwhile. And the student loan risk is nowhere nearly as bad as many people believe. The federal loans are structured in a way to make it impossible to default unless you just ignore it. (no income? deferred until forgiven, never actually putting you into technical default. low income? payments are capped so it's 10% of your income at most)

A route that I didn't know existed until a few years ago was informal "extension" or adult education, professional studies, and what not, programs at prestigious (Ivy/Stanford/NYU level) universities that get you started on a pseudo MBA track.

The schools run them, frankly, for money and accept relatively weak applicants but everyone I know that has done the classes say just having the school on resume helped them advance their careers, in a few cases, apply to much more prestigious MBA programs that rejected them prior to taking the extension classes. The downside is they are expensive (way cheaper than actual degrees but still) and financial aid is less readily available.

Playing poker in a different spot than normal last night. Guy next to me was a 20 something stoner who claimed to: day trade for a living, named a couple pros he was tight with, said he brokers deals between publicly traded companies who need large investments from outside sources (said he somehow got tight with ceo's and whatnot), and other similar stuff.

Basically said he does a bunch of technical analysis and aims to hire folks and start a firm. Also said he has already profited a ton. Specifically off some Avaxia(sp?) deal 3 years ago I think it was.

Obviously, this all sounds like total BS and I wasn't buying it. Pretty sure the next decade will be pretty rough for this kid.

What's the best way to diversify in bonds? I'd like to just tell my mom (6-10 years from retirement, already set her up with stock allocation) to buy a Vanguard domestic and international bond index and call it a day, but was looking into it and consensus seems to be that those are weighted too much towards very low-yield government bonds. Would it make sense to still go with Vanguard and do X% total U.S. (Vanguard's conservative version of U.S.), X% international (Vanguard's conservative version), X% corporate investment grade int'l/domestic, X% junk int'l/domestic, X% emerging markets? If so, what would good allocations look like?

Maybe income stock funds? Yields are really really low now.

If you are staying within bond sphere, I'd just go with corporate investment grade 100%. Simplicity is very important for amateur investors.