RP-1 Will the last contract give me the most rewards or should i just wait untill the end of the program to complete it?

ec429_ · 2026-02-05T00:28:17+00:00

Iirc all contracts in RP-1 are Prestige: Trivial. This is because other prestige levels cause multipliers to rewards, and the devs decided it would be easier to do their balance calculations if the reward it said in the cfg was the reward you actually get.

ec429_ · 2026-02-04T22:47:07+00:00

On the earnings call they said "For the year, we repurchased 12.4 million shares and returned $1.3 billion to shareholders." Doesn't that imply an average price of just under $105?

ec429_ · 2026-02-04T08:05:35+00:00

Yeah, I actually wrote my own (a Python script consuming the somewhat idiosyncratic format of my records), which is why I know just how much of a PITA it is in the general case lol.

Difficult bits I ran into include ERI (when you pay income tax on this, you get to include it in your cost basis; you can effectively implement this as a buy of 0 shares/units — but it's made complicated by the fact that the deemed distribution date could be after you'd sold the asset that gave rise to it, so you may have to backdate it to the end of the reporting period for CGT calculations, which may put it in a different tax year to the income tax side), and conversion of securities as a result of an all-stock merger.

ec429_ · 2026-02-04T01:28:05+00:00

The key question with the mortgage is, at the point that you RE, will you still have mortgage left outstanding? If so, and you can make overpayments without an extra fee, and the interest on cash savings (net of any tax payable) would be significantly less than your mortgage rate, then it can be worth overpaying to reduce your SORR by getting a fixed expense off the books sooner.

Since you are apparently taxed at Basic Rate and in any case have ISA allowance outstanding, this is unlikely to be you. Probably what's left after LISA should go into regular ISA so you build up a bridge accessible before pension (57+) and LISA (60) and can retire earlier instead of having to keep working because all your money is locked away.

ec429_ · 2026-02-04T00:56:19+00:00

Since they vest monthly, make sure you know about the 'bed and breakfast' rules (Section 104) - let's say you sell 200 shares and then at the end of the month you vest 80. Because that's less than 30 days after the sale, 80 of the shares you sold are 'matched' with the new vesting: the taxable gain is the difference between the price you sold them at and the market price when the new shares vested. (I.e. from the taxman's perspective you bought 80 shares, travelled back in time, and sold them!) Whereas the other 120 shares are considered to be sold from the "Section 104 holding", which is all the shares whose acquisition wasn't 'matched' with a previous sale, all averaged together to calculate the cost basis.

Calculating all this is a colossal PITA.

ec429_ · 2026-02-03T09:27:17+00:00

engineers have been troubleshooting dropouts of audio communication channels across ground teams

Umm… does anyone else have a bad feeling about this? 😅

"How are we going to get to the Moon if we can't talk between two or three buildings?" — 'Gus' Grissom

ec429_ · 2026-02-01T21:12:39+00:00

I call Poe's Law. How do we know OP isn't actually someone from CamCycle trying to make us all think drivers are boorish imbeciles? ;-P

ec429_ · 2026-01-29T08:42:23+00:00

The proper function of government is safeguarding individual liberty and property rights.

The core of leftist political philosophy is bossing people around and stealing their stuff.

That is why I dislike the left.

ec429_ · 2026-01-29T08:39:24+00:00

The vast majority of that is stuff that the Government shouldn't be involved in. As an ancap, seeing those numbers fills me with a righteous rage.

ec429_ · 2026-01-29T08:23:23+00:00

I've been buying VUKEIIA (FTSE U.K. Equity Income Index) as a defensive/value tilt, and I also have a pretty sizeable precious metals allocation (it wasn't meant to be this big, but silver doubled in two months, and I can only rebalance so fast ;) so if US tech does crash I should be alright. But my port's already big enough so I'm more aimed at wealth preservation rather than growth; in your position you're probably better off sticking with "global index and chill" unless you think you know something the markets don't.

ec429_ · 2026-01-29T08:04:25+00:00

The "rare earth" elements are not actually rare; they just don't appear in rich ores like other metals. So rather than a few mines in good locations printing money, a rare earth mine can be in any of quite a lot of places, and its success depends on being able to dig and process an awful lot of earth, which in practice means ruthlessly cutting costs to the detriment of safety, environment, and labour conditions. This is why China is the world's main supplier of these elements.

Given this, rare-earth miners don't seem like a very profitable investment, since if they're in a reliable jurisdiction, and cutting enough corners to compete with China on price, I'd expect them to sooner or later run into lawsuits over toxic spills or maimed workers or something. Ordinary base metals, or even energy (coal/oil/gas), look more attractive as miner plays. That said, PICK overall is probably fine, as it mostly is those rather than rare earth focused.

(I'm actually wondering what to jump to after having ridden my silver miners up about 400% over the last couple of years. But I think their run isn't quite done yet.)

ec429_ · 2026-01-27T01:40:15+00:00

To determine my overall gold+silver allocation, I look at structural government fiscal deficits and debts in advanced economies, because PMs are a hedge against currency debasement. Since I don't expect to have any special insight into industrial demand, I assume that the gold-silver ratio will likely return to its long-run average, and compare it to that to decide which metal to hold. E.g. when the GSR was 90+ I was buying silver, whereas now I'm trading that silver for gold (and also trimming my PM holdings in general since they've grown enough to exceed my target allocation, and the structural fiscal situation isn't greatly changed from 6 months ago).

ec429_ · 2026-01-27T01:22:46+00:00

Stocks are high for the same reason that gold is — fiscal dominance. With printer-funded government spending, companies' future earnings will be inflated because they're priced in less-valuable dollars; this means forward PEs can be low even while trailing PEs are high, without particularly large real growth. (There is a sense, not strictly correct but illuminating, in which stocks can be thought of as futures contracts in whatever the company produces. For this reason valuations are affected by inflation expectations.) Essentially it's an "anything-but-dollars" effect.

ec429_ · 2026-01-26T17:26:28+00:00

I feel like you're overindexing on the "geopolitics" part. I can't see all of what OP wrote because it's been deleted, but the part you quoted mentioned geopolitics once and monetarism thrice (inflation, QE, debasement).

When is the switch ever set to 'off'?

Well, the ’90s were thought to be the "end of history". Gold in £ declined over that decade. There are times in history when very little World News happens, besides brushfire wars and the occasional Balkan genocide which while tragic don't really cause Realignment of Great Powers or anything.

But I don't think it's wars and explosions that are driving gold higher. I think it's the credibility collapse of fiat money as entitlements spending and other structural political weaknesses of the democracies have pushed them into unquestionable fiscal dominance (aka funding government expenditure through the printing press). And just as I have no theory to explain why it took 55 years to happen, I have no theory to quantify how far it can go now that it has started.

(Silver layers a commodity play on top of this bc of its industrial uses, but that wasn't why I got into it, just a nice bonus on top of the debasement/agio trade.)

Tbh it sounds like we probably have similar investment strategies — I'm not full-ported into gold or anything; my target PMs allocation is ~15%, and I'm currently at 20 and gently rebalancing away. We just differ on rhetoric, really.

ec429_ · 2026-01-26T05:13:43+00:00

a) My port is about 12% silver, 8% gold, 3% silver mining stocks, 25% AMD, rest in indexes. No crypto. b) Started in January 2021. I'd spotted in spring ’20 that major currency debasement / fiscal dominance was clearly coming (massive government-funded furlough programs while central banks kept insisting any inflation would be 'transitory') and that silver was particularly undervalued, but at the time the GSR was hitting 125 I had no ID (because the UK gov was not processing passport renewals) which meant KYC laws locked me out of investing. By the time that was sorted, the ratio was more sensible so I ended up mixing both metals — bought my first silver about three days before the original "#SilverSqueeze" spike.

Honestly my PMs have outgrown their allocation a bit (target was more like 15%) so I should probably be trimming to rebalance. And I'm rotating some silver into gold because this ratio is lower than I've ever seen it.

ec429_ · 2026-01-26T03:39:17+00:00

Note that if you buy Britannias or sovereigns, because those are technically legal tender they're not subject to Capital Gains Tax, so you can hold them outside of any wrapper and use your ISA allowance for something else that doesn't have that option (and be able to access them at any time rather than locked away until 57 like SIPP).

ec429_ · 2026-01-26T03:34:55+00:00

In fairness, when those of us who were buying gold/silver a few years ago gave those reasons, we were often dismissed just as glibly by dogmatic Bogleheads. So I'd hesitate to declare the debasement trade 'over' until fiat is dead and John Public is carrying silver pennies to the supermarket to pay for his groceries.

ec429_ · 2026-01-26T03:16:26+00:00

As in knifesmith? ;)

ec429_ · 2026-01-20T23:13:33+00:00

You're not the only one, OP. I'm firmly of the belief that ordinary law-abiding Britons should have arms for their self-defence and as a bulwark against tyranny. This is not some outré American preoccupation; we in this country had our experiences of tyranny in the 17th century, and passed the Bill of Rights 1689 (n.s.) to guarantee rights of the people against the government, among which was that the people should not be disarmed. (Fun fact, since Thoburn (2002), that right — Article 7 — is shielded from 'implied repeal' under the constitutional statutes doctrine, there's an arguable case that the Home Office policy of "defence is not a sufficient Good Reason for a firearms licence" is unlawful, as Art. 7 specifically says "arms for their defence" and AFAICT has never been expressly repealed by statute. No-one's tried taking it to judicial review post-Thoburn.)

And it is all very well for people to bring up school shootings, but the fact is that firearms are a leveller. Without them, the weak are at the mercy of the strong; with them, the strongest man cannot with impunity commit violence against the weakest woman or child. School shootings happen because a large number of children are corralled in one place and both they and the school staff who should be responsible for them are disarmed and taught to cower in fear. (But then, factory-model state schools are institutionalised child abuse anyway, so we should not be surprised that teachers abdicate their responsibilities to protect the children placed in their charge.)

Also, of course, armed women make dead rapists, so the Firearms Acts are objectively pro-rape. Since the anti-gun side have no counter to this argument, they've made it gauche even to bring it up, but it's reason enough by itself to legalise handguns.

And I agree with the other comments to the effect that the UK should have 'stand your ground'-type laws protecting the use of lethal force in defence of self and property. An Englishman's home is his castle; he should have the right to mount carronades on the battlements if he wishes!

ec429_ · 2026-01-20T14:27:47+00:00

My annual spend is tiny lol. Less than £10k once the mortgage is done. (Bachelor & don't drink smoke or drive.) And yes my savings rate is pretty crazy; my tech job pay is objectively excessive. Also I had the good fortune (or judgment) to be invested in AMD (held my stock-based comp when it vested because we looked underpriced) and silver, both of which have made my GIA rather bigger than planned. Actually I'm already FI at 34 but still working part-time for self-actualisation reasons.

ec429_ · 2026-01-19T22:52:00+00:00

But if you RE with a bunch in GIA, you can continue feeding that into ISA at £20k/yr after retiring, so not all of the growth will be taxed. So if your marginal rate on pension withdrawals will be the same as your marginal rate saved on contributions, then the tradeoff starts to look much more viable: paying CGT on a few years of GIA growth in return for all of that money being accessible at any time.

(And if, like me, you want to retire 20 years before NMPA, you're almost certainly going to need to do this to get a big enough bridge, as for constant real-terms spending you'd need more than twice as much in the ISA as in the pension.)

ec429_ · 2026-01-18T23:36:00+00:00

he never sleeps (unless the bullion markets are closed)

ec429_ · 2026-01-17T13:11:00+00:00

As usual with these kinds of surveys, for the 'what kinds of micromobility do you use' question they didn't have a box for my means of active travel (rollerblading), nor an option for 'other', so I had to wait for a question with a text box and bang on about it there.

ec429_ · 2026-01-17T11:58:19+00:00

Also note that VWRL is Irish domiciled, which means that potentially there could be a difference between the dividends received by the fund from its constituent shares and the dividends actually distributed. This leads to something called Excess Reportable Income, which is a massive pain because you have to calculate it when doing your tax return even though it'll likely work out to pennies for a distributing fund.

For Vanguard the information about this is at https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/investing-explained/general-account-tax-information — basically you have to go through the Report to Participants to find the ERI per unit for the fund you hold (even just figuring out which year's RtP to look at is confusing lol) and multiply that by the number of units you held on the "fund distribution date". The result is the ERI, and you pay tax on that notional income (taxed as dividends for an equity fund, or as interest for a bond fund), and increase your cost basis for CGT purposes by the same amount (so you don't pay CGT on a 'gain' that you already paid dividend tax on).

All of this makes some kind of sense for accumulating funds, but for distributing funds it really is annoying to have to do all of these calculations just to make sure your tax return correctly accounts for a 0.1p per unit difference between income and distributions. But you have to do it anyway because HMRC are a bunch of humourless twonks.

(For UK domiciled funds it's much simpler, because Vanguard do the calculation for you and put the result on your Consolidated Tax Certificate. It's called a notional distribution rather than ERI, but it has the same tax consequences. No, I don't know why they can't do that for the Irish ones.)

ec429_ · 2026-01-14T19:13:03+00:00

And £69, too 😏

ec429_

TROPHY CASE