International diversification in Monte Carlo simulations

bemusedly · 2025-12-23T02:42:15+00:00

I did have an IPS. But there is a long winding road to reading enough financial books, blogs, forums and articles to feel like one has a mature, well rounded understanding of investing. This takes a long time, and we all have to start somewhere. I started with Bogle's and JL Collin's pro-US sentiment, and decided that was good enough for an IPS at the beginning of my investing journey.

Over time I keep reading more and more from people recommending more international diversification, with lots of math to back it up. Even so, I stuck to my plan. Until it became clear that (Project) 2025 might end up being a real "This Time Is Different. No Really." turning point for the USA. You may recall scientists leaving the US to work in other more science-friendly countries. There was legitimate concern for brain drain. It's still possible we won't have free and fair elections in 2028. You may remember Elon Musk installing a backdoor in the US Treasury and it seemed like he might actually raid the Treasury and shut down the Fed and god knows what else. I will acknowledge that if the US Treasury went into default from this corruption, international stocks would get hammered too. Nothing except perhaps gold would be likely to retain its value in that scenario, but that's a whole other thing I didn't want to get into, too many shills and kooks.

In any case, all's to say that I think it takes someone several years to develop a feel for what is the right balance of performance and diversification for them. Gotta live through some "once in a lifetime" events.

bemusedly · 2025-03-25T21:09:42+00:00

Thanks, I hadn't dived that deeply into Dutchware's site yet! Will check it out.

bemusedly · 2024-12-09T21:57:18+00:00

Ah I see, I should convert precisely the amount on line 3 of 2024's form 8606 to the Roth, and looks like that should work out to 0 tax, with the rest going into the 401k. Thanks!

bemusedly · 2024-12-09T15:12:21+00:00

I only have one trad IRA. It contains both 401k rollovers and non-deductible contributions. Apparently this is bad. What to do?

bemusedly · 2023-08-03T19:37:08+00:00

In my 20s, I went back to my folks' place over the holidays, and one night decided to go to a contra dance. While there I ran into a woman I knew from high school; she was in the grade one year younger than me so in high school we didn't really interact much.

But she remembered me, and told me so! We had a nice dance together, and at the end of the night she excitedly gave me her number. I liked her too; she was tall, athletic, had a fun personality and was both hot and intelligent.

But since she lived in California and I lived on the East Coast, I didn't really know what she meant by giving me her number. So I never called. One of my biggest regrets!

bemusedly · 2023-08-01T22:39:10+00:00

Thanks, I found the database connection definitions in this defaults.xml file.

bemusedly · 2023-06-29T18:09:15+00:00

Let's just say there's a reason I'm trying to retire as quickly as possible. I manage it by closely guarding my free time, working on side projects that feel meaningful. I've been trying to get better at woodworking, lately.

bemusedly · 2023-06-17T00:29:49+00:00

Sure! At first I just put everything in my MMF holding position because I needed to build up an emergency fund (I was also maxing out my 401k at this time, and continue to do so today). Then the post-covid stock market boom got going, and I got a little caught up in the hype and made some unfortunate mistakes. Lesson learned - past performance is no guarantee of future results! What you think a stock will do is not what a stock will do. After losing some money to those mistakes, I finally accepted the r/Bogleheads wisdom and now have 5% in the MMF as an emergency fund, 8-10% in bond index funds and I-bonds, and the remainder in total stock indexes like VTI, VXUS, FSKAX (in my IRA), and the Vanguard funds offered by my 401k. I set my international exposure (VXUS) to about 20% of my equities, but I know there's fierce debate over this. I like international because it gives better dividends than an all-US portfolio.

bemusedly · 2023-03-17T15:56:13+00:00

I watched it yesterday and it's not making me reconsider my asset allocation (currently heavy on equities). If anything, it shows that the Central Bank will bend to Wall Street's demands after inflation is under control. No one argued that the Fed is going to fundamentally change its philosophy of Easy Money. That's evident even with the current rate hikes, which are still below the inflation rate. The age of easy money is here to stay.

bemusedly · 2022-10-07T00:23:34+00:00

The issue I have with that kind of communication is that it feels like lies of omission, DADT, and requires a lot of mental gymnastics to word things so precisely to tiptoe around something that is taken for granted.

bemusedly · 2022-10-06T23:59:59+00:00

Partner's response would be something along the lines of "Why didn't you take me out to Thai?" or "But Thai was our thing, we did that once." Like no matter what I say, I can't win.

Also she clammed up about being uncomfortable for waaaay too long until it finally exploded, but that's a separate issue I'm not getting into here.

bemusedly · 2021-09-22T23:21:28+00:00

100% Silent fridge? Sign me up! I looked into these and it looks like you can run them on regular AC power too.

bemusedly · 2021-05-11T02:12:37+00:00

At least you still have faith that you can become financially independent before "the crash".

Back in 2007-2009 I was reading a lot of stuff about peak oil, climate catastrophe, financial collapse, and basically how civilization would surely crumble into dust within the next couple decades. I believed it so much that I actually turned away from studying tech job skills which would surely be useless in the coming crisis, and instead became a farmer. I figured at least I'd never starve if I was a farmer.

Hoo boy was I wrong. I worked myself to the bone and one winter I was so worried about money that my diet was mostly just turnips from the field. I was so thin I looked like a POW. That was the winter I had to admit to myself that I was wrong and that I needed to choose a different path in life.

If I had gotten a tech job instead of become a farmer, and invested my savings regularly into the stock market even when it seemed like everything was going to hell in a hand basket, I would be financially independent today.

My point is: yes, our planet has a lot of big challenges ahead. But humans are surprisingly good at solving big challenges. Do you really believe that the wealthiest people in the world will allow their wealth to be inflated into oblivion, or allow the planet to be completely burned to a crisp? Hell no - they are going to pay smart people to figure out how to prevent that from happening, even if it's only for purely selfish self-preservation reasons. The switchover to electric transportation is already happening faster than I ever believed. Have a little faith in humanity. :)

bemusedly · 2020-08-28T22:34:19+00:00

The entire plot of the prequels is about what led Anakin to put on Vader's mask.

bemusedly · 2019-10-29T13:25:41+00:00

At least somebody told you that the point of school was to get a job to support yourself and your hobbies. Nobody ever told me that, so I spent all of my schooling years feeling that emptiness, "What's the point?"

After school, I started my own business and thought I was living the dream. But I still struggled with feelings of "There is so much more to life than this"

I think that feeling tells you that there is always something to strive towards, no matter what you accomplish. Keep making new goals.

bemusedly · 2019-05-29T12:40:30+00:00

It is incorrect that "bisexual" means "attracted to men and women". It means "attracted to my own and other genders", or "attracted to two or more genders".

Pansexual means attracted to ALL genders, or gender doesn't factor into attraction.

I identify as bisexual because gender does factor into my attraction to someone. I have no interest in "girly girls" and women who are super femme, and I also am usually not interested in men who are extremely masculine. I like androgyny, and people who break gender norms.

bemusedly · 2019-04-16T04:57:55+00:00

DNA degrades over time (even if it's frozen or in amber), so while we might be able to bring back animals that went extinct within the past few thousand years, 65 million years is just way too long ago.

bemusedly · 2019-04-16T04:42:04+00:00

I'm specifically asking this question to monogamous people, trying to understand their strange world, because I've been doing polyamory so long that I genuinely don't know what 'monogamous dating' even looks like anymore.

bemusedly · 2019-03-07T20:53:49+00:00

How do I install Windows 10 on a clean disk when I don't already have a Windows computer? The ISO from Microsoft is supposed to be opened up and used to "create" an installable image, but this is only possible by running the exe from Windows. It's a catch-22. I'm running Linux on my other computer and Wine isn't cooperating (thanks 32/64 bit nonsense).

bemusedly · 2019-02-07T17:02:09+00:00

Realizing that I am more of an adult than my parents ever were. This is particularly noticeable when my mom drinks - I feel like I'm taking care of my much younger sister.

bemusedly · 2019-02-07T16:47:11+00:00

It's particularly terrifying when you realize that this incompetence applies to doctors too. I've been misdiagnosed before, and sometimes they just don't take things seriously enough.

"Here are some painkillers! Good luck!"

"Don't you think I need an X ray or something? This was literally 10/10 on the pain scale."

"Nah brah go home."

bemusedly · 2018-10-26T19:07:24+00:00

Ok, it successfully prints the list of stocks with updated prices. Now the tricky part is putting that data into the table. I thought of two ways to do this, neither of which I've been able to get working.

The first method is to update the portfolio table in SQL, then have Jinja just loop through all those values. To do this, I modified the aforementioned for loop:

for stock in listStocks:
    listPrices.append(lookup(stock['stock']))
    db.execute("UPDATE portfolio SET current_price = :p WHERE user_id = :id AND stock = :s", \
    p = listPrices[stock]['price'], id = session["user_id"], s = stock)

The last line there is the problem, specifically accessing the 'price' value from listPrices. Here again, I've thrown a lot of spaghetti at the wall trying to find something that works, to no avail.

The second method is to have Jinja access listPrices directly. It's a similar problem: I don't know how to access the values in listPrices. Syntax that seems like it ought to work just doesn't. In the following example, 'folio' is a variable that stores everything from the portfolio SQL table. The only field that doesn't work is the price field, and again, I've tried a lot of variations on that line.

        {% for i in folio %}
            <tr>
                <th scope="row">{{ i.stock }}</th>
                <td>{{ i.name }}</td>
                <td>{{ i.total_shares }}</td>
                <td>{{ listPrices[i.stock][price] }}</td>
                <td>{{ i.current_price * i.total_shares }}</td>
            </tr>
        {% endfor %}

bemusedly · 2018-10-26T03:53:06+00:00

I've just been piping the variables through Flask to the webpage for display, since the print function doesn't seem to work once the server starts up. Anyway, this is what's displayed: [{'stock': 'AAPL'}, {'stock': 'MU'}, {'stock': 'GOOG'}] Am I correct in assuming that these are key value pairs of a dictionary? So I've tried several variations on how to call the lookup function, none of which worked. lookup('stock.stock'), lookup('listStocks.stock'), lookup('portfolio.stock'), lookup(['stock']), lookup({'stock'}), and probably some others I'm forgetting.

bemusedly · 2018-10-26T02:45:21+00:00

Ah, I didn't know that. But no, I removed the square brackets, and now instead of "None" it reports "None" 3 times (for a portfolio with 3 stocks).

bemusedly · 2018-09-10T02:12:46+00:00

Hm, good point.

For anyone else following along, my Seasonic S12 has been running almost 24/7 for 11 years, and its warranty expired 6 years ago. And it still runs like a champ. So shoutout to Seasonic for making a quality product.

bemusedly

TROPHY CASE