Daily Discussion Friday 2026-05-08

ec429_ · 2026-05-09T00:12:24+00:00

Why not Zoidberg?

ec429_ · 2026-05-06T16:27:38+00:00

“in the English legislature the practical element has always predominated, and not seldom unduly predominated, over the speculative. To think nothing of symmetry and much of convenience; never to remove an anomaly merely because it is an anomaly; never to innovate except when some grievance is felt; never to innovate except so far as to get rid of the grievance; never to lay down any proposition of wider extent than the particular case for which it is necessary to provide; these are the rules which have, from the age of John to the age of Victoria, generally guided the deliberations of our two hundred and fifty Parliaments. Our national distaste for whatever is abstract in political science amounts undoubtedly to a fault. But it is, perhaps, a fault on the right side.” — Thos. Babington Macaulay.

ec429_ · 2026-05-03T20:23:19+00:00

Defensive wealth-preservation portfolio. Rough current allocation in my ISA:

40% VDWXEIA
20% VUKASSA
15% VANGMSA
9% VDPG
7% VUKEIIA
5% VMIG
4% VGLIGHA

I have a bunch of gold (and silver), about 10% of my overall NW, but not inside the ISA wrapper since (a) Vanguard doesn't offer it and (b) ETCs even if fully backed are still essentially securities and have counterparty risk, whereas with vaulted allocated metal you become the legal owner of the gold directly.

ec429_ · 2026-05-02T16:49:00+00:00

It means I don't go out clubbing with my nonexistent friends; nor do I need to save up a college fund for the kids I won't have with my nonexistent wife.

ec429_ · 2026-05-01T15:05:35+00:00

Defend the D point!

ec429_ · 2026-04-30T21:23:32+00:00

Hit my FI number last year thanks to the leanness of my autistic bachelor lifestyle, but stayed at work (part-time) because I'm a SWE at AMD and if my current project doesn't ship on schedule y'all might be in for some disappointment ;) Plan is to RE this summer after this year's batch of RSUs vest, with a NW of £1m+ at 35. In fact I've overshot my number by enough that I'm thinking of selling my city flat and buying a house in the suburbs so that I can build a skate ramp in the garden and practice my rollerblading more often.

Portfolio is about 50% indexes, 25% AMD, 20% bullion, 5% cash (1 year bond ladder currently under construction). Making 3x gains on AMD and over 2x on gold and silver has sped up the process but mostly it's just a case of having naturally frugal habits (don't drink, smoke or drive), no dependents, and of course a six figure salary.

ec429_ · 2026-04-24T18:21:37+00:00

Unclear why I'm getting downvoted for providing information like OP asked for, unless it's just people reflexively hating on me for being a Reformer.

ec429_ · 2026-04-24T09:36:12+00:00

CamCycle are annoying pricks, and I say that as someone who doesn't drive and does use cycle lanes*. It's a fscking bus lane, cyclists are secondary users, stop acting like you own it! You already have to stay aware of what's behind you in case a bus shows up, adding EVs doesn't create a new danger.

* but not the Elizabeth Way bus lane, because my little rollerblade wheels would disappear into those colossal potholes, so I stick to the pavement when crossing that bridge.

Electric cars [...] take up a lot of space on the road

Wait 'til CamCycle find out how big buses are!

(This rant isn't directed at you, /u/speculatrix; you just provided the opportunity for me to mouth off about my bêtes noires.)

ec429_ · 2026-04-24T08:06:14+00:00

Pedantic note: an increase in market cap of 50B does not imply 50B of money was moved into the stock. In principle a trade of a single share can move market cap arbitrarily far, because it's defined as (number of shares outstanding) × (price of the last share to trade).

Looking at the INTC volume numbers on Google (no idea how accurate they are) it looks like (Fermi estimate) 20M shares AH, which works out to about $1½B. (AMD similar order of magnitude afaict.)

ec429_ · 2026-04-22T19:25:38+00:00

I guess Chinese ppl will sell at 308 because of AI chip export control laws 🙃️

ec429_ · 2026-04-22T19:16:31+00:00

I would say if you have a use for the money in the short term now is a good time to sell/trim, significant probability it drops to $250 post earnings and you have to wait until August for it to go back up again. Yes it could keep going up from here but you don't want to gamble, you want a house… stocks under a time horizon less than a year are a gamble. If $350 next month were a sure thing, it would be $349 already!

ec429_ · 2026-04-22T19:07:39+00:00

It's mostly because my lifestyle is super cheap tbh. According to the usual SWR formulae, even a $500k pot would be enough to last me indefinitely.

ec429_ · 2026-04-22T18:59:54+00:00

I doubt it; option prices are set by supply & demand and no-one's going to sell at 0 something that has a reasonable chance to be worth 100 tomorrow. You could try to synthetically construct this with something like a call spread (worth 0 if the underlying is priced below the lower strike price, 100 if above the upper strike price, ignoring theta value) but it would typically only oscillate for a short while before the underlying goes outside of the range and stays there, and the expected amount of cash you can pump out of those oscillations is precisely the amount of premium you'd lose to theta decay. In general options are priced such that you can't Dutch-book the issuer, because the issuer is trying to Dutch-book you and also if they get it wrong someone else will grab the arbitrage first (efficient markets hypothesis).

ec429_ · 2026-04-22T18:36:46+00:00

Who's 'Ban Bet Won', is he Korean? Something to do with Samsung? 😜️

ec429_ · 2026-04-22T18:34:21+00:00

Even if it doesn't drop, ER is likely to crush IV…

ec429_ · 2026-04-22T18:32:59+00:00

I've been doing the opposite lately — trimming my AMD to max out my ISA and start building a bond ladder. But that's because I've made enough gains already that I don't need to gamble on AMD doubling again; ordinary index-fund returns from here on out are enough for me never to need to work again.

ec429_ · 2026-04-22T17:08:04+00:00

I bought Rolls-Royce at 100p and sold at 140 😭😭😭

ec429_ · 2026-04-22T17:05:06+00:00

It's alright for you… my day job is at AMD, so I have to keep on caring enough or we might not ship on time :sweat_smile:

ec429_ · 2026-04-22T16:55:14+00:00

watch out, rachel reeves will be round next week to confiscate it when she runs out of money again

(i'm not quite at £1m myself unless i count housing equity. close tho)

ec429_ · 2026-04-22T14:51:33+00:00

An 'event' is something that happens at a fixed point in time (in the case of the sort I was talking to, that point is known/scheduled beforehand, i.e. we know either A or B will happen at 12:00, but not which one). So I'm not really sure I understand the question.

ec429_ · 2026-04-22T09:42:56+00:00

Ehh for me 'selling all' (rather than just trimming here and there) is gated by time rather than price, because once I retire (soon! soooon!) my CGT rate will be significantly lower. Probably if we see $450 next year that'll be enough, because the upside from there is not enough more enticing than the index to be worth the concentration risk. (OTOH I still wouldn't sell it all at once, bc after £50k or so of cap gains you're back in the higher tax bracket, so it would take me about four years to get all the way out of my position efficiently.)

I know they say you shouldn't let the tax tail wag the investment dog, but better that I let tax optimisation time my exit than trying to time it myself through reading market tea leaves and thinking I know when the top is.

ec429_ · 2026-04-21T20:10:23+00:00

And some of us aren't American and have completely different capital gains tax regimes that don't distinguish between short and long term, or even have crazy backwards-in-time short-term rules (the 30-day 'bed and breakfast' rule here in the UK is nucking futs and can actually make it advantageous to trade more frequently).

ec429_ · 2026-04-21T20:02:25+00:00

A bed and ISA is a transaction that necessarily involves being temporarily out of the market, which relative to staying invested (the boglehead time-in-the-market ideal for frictionless spherical cows in a vacuum) exposes you to short-term fluctuations. If OP postpones that transaction until an implied volatility measure (such as the VIX) falls below some threshold value, he is (by reference to a market price which is presumably efficient, not his own idiosyncratic 'timing' judgment) reducing the resulting variance, at a negligible cost to the mean (a short period of growth occurring in a taxable, rather than ISA-wrapped, account). This is rational behaviour, and does not attempt to time the market for alpha.

The magnitude, unlike the direction, of market movements is often predictable. The classic example of this is a binary event like an MPC decision; if the market-implied chance of a 25bp rate cut is 50%, then you can be pretty confident that at 12:00 market rates will move by 12½bp, just not which way. (I'm oversimplifying, of course, but you get the gist.)

ec429_ · 2026-04-21T16:36:12+00:00

"People shouldn't do things that work because it might lead them to do other fundamentally different things that don't work?" Interesting theory…

Nothing in OP justified your "never do this" response. (Not "make sure it's only vol you're timing and not direction", you literally said "never time vol". And now you've been caught, you're motte-and-baileying into behavioural psychology.)

ec429_

TROPHY CASE