this is why I think financial literacy should be a core part of K-12 education. Could do basic money things in K-8 and build up to compounding, investing options, the effect of expenses, types of investment vehicles, reading paychecks and understand how much is taxed, etc. in high school. K-5 could be as little as an hour a week or something and then a little more in middle school and high school. It doesnt have to be a full hour long class everyday or anything to impart this knowledge.

I'm sure DeVos already has the wheels in motion on this.

If any of these still exist then I have never heard of them. Commission compression on trades had more to do with technology than anything else.

edit: nevermind, I guess woody knows of some that exist

edit 2: and I guess it depends on what it means for $300/trade. I can't imagine that many/any institutions operate on flat fees and even at below $.01/share many institutional trades end up well over that amount. I can't understand why anyone would pay that in a personal account though.

In other AL news, they're releasing Don Siegleman. While I'm happy he's getting out, I'm kind of bummed that I'll no longer be able to point to my diploma and proudly brag that one of the three signatures on it is from a guy doing time in federal prison :/

I've just been sinking 10% of my income into pork bellies as long as I can remember. It drives my gastroenterologist crazy, but what can you do?

I doubt they exist outside of Long Island but this is where all the magic happened so a few of those guys are still around trying to run the same game. FINRA is a pretty big joke.

on a lighter note this is a great tweet crossposted from politics:

Nordstrom Rack so elite

i dont get that nordstrom tweet

Nordstrom said no to carrying Ivanka Trump clothing lines

White House is spending time trying to tell anyone who'll listen that this is an attack on the President

One of the dudes at my work is like 62 years old. We started talking about our allocations and he was all I'm at 25% company stock, 25% small cap, 25% mid cap, 25% large cap. Except the company stock has done pretty well the last couple of years and it's up to about 1/3.

....

"Um. Bro. You're 62? Don't you think you should be partly in bonds?"

"What's a bond?"

*explain what a bond is and why he should probably have some*

"Also we need to talk about your stock allocation. You already have a lot tied up in our company's success, it's kind of crazy to double down on the company stock like that"

"OK that makes sense"

"Also why are you so high in small and mid cap, is that on purpose?"

"That's small risk and medium risk, right?"

"Uhhhhhhhhhhh"

Dude was just mashing buttons with like 600k. In the end he was like just tell me what to do and I'll do it. Here take my mouse. Should I give you my password? "WTF NO". I just put him in 70% stocks with some foreign and 30% bonds. A little aggressive for his age but my dude was clearly pretty comfortable with risk. He rode out the 2008-9 markets with that allocation and didn't sell a share, well done bro.

I didn't either and maybe still don't. Apparently Nordstrom Rack is their discount outlet to dump merchandise they discontinued from their main stores. It must be a shot at Ivanka's merchandise line.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemc.../#2fded6dc772e

In what I assume is unrelated news, Nordstrom stock jumped 4% today

Is it odd that TRUMP goes hard and fast at anyone who is "someone" who bashes him, but he totally ignores Cuban when Cuban throws shade? If he's ever so much as acknowledged a Cuban tweet I've not seen it.

Probably on the news that they dumped an unprofitable product line...

Lol at the image accompanying this tweet.

physically very soft lol

Trump gonna smack the **** out of him

Maybe Trump thinks Cuban might run in 2020 so don't give him a Trump vs Cuban platform yet?

PIVOT

I disagree with this. Finance is not like any other industry. Speculation and rent-seeking is rife. The point of free markets is not for participants to extract money from them, it's to create wealth. Activities which do not create wealth should be discouraged. There's a short article making the same point here:

This is a serious amount of intellectual capital being assigned to the finance industry. What are all these people doing? The social benefit of the finance industry is the efficient allocation of capital, but there have been some spectacular industry-wide misallocations of capital in the last couple decades. And most managed funds fail to beat indexes, for instance. This seems to me pretty clear evidence that there are more people involved in allocating capital than are required.

I'm not speaking to any particular regulations here and it's an open question how big the finance industry needs to be. It's my experience though that a lot of finance people don't even recognise that the question exists. Their attitude is that as long as you're making money and doing so legally, then it's just the free market and therefore by definition good.

Told some so-called "smart" people Gorsuch wasn't the man for the job - too WEAK - they told me I was wrong. Big mistake! I should have overruled them. Bad, bad people pouring into the country!

Ah well I stand corrected

Lol this is severe owning tbf

Trump and his 270 lb fat ass would look like Walmart trailer trash in a T-shirt.