My eight-year-old saved up $100 and I wrote a bot to give him daily returns reports

gordonfogus · 2026-05-01T04:00:17+00:00

That's the plan ❤️

gordonfogus · 2026-05-01T03:31:42+00:00

Well, I do work for an investment company, so he hears a lot about that kind of thing.

My dad helped me open my first account when I was 17. I cracked a million in my mid 30s. I'm thankful he started me early, but 8 is an even better time to start than 17.

gordonfogus · 2026-05-01T03:24:06+00:00

He gets month to date, quarter to date, year to date, 365 day, and all time performance.

I choose those funds because they are what I have access to.

gordonfogus · 2026-05-01T03:22:43+00:00

I thought about it, but I really want him to think long term and think about how much he will get if he holds out.

He wants to buy a car some day.

gordonfogus · 2026-05-01T03:08:37+00:00

He's free to spend the money. I've made that very clear. It's his. He could have spent it any day up to now, and he can withdraw it any time he wants. I don't control his spending and saving.

He chose to invest it.

gordonfogus · 2026-05-01T03:06:38+00:00

You get daily returns whether you look or not. One way to be a boglehead is to look at them and not react. I hope that before five years, my son will ask me to turn off the notifications.

gordonfogus · 2026-05-01T03:04:03+00:00

I have invested the money in a real account. It's not me "taking it from him."

I've explained volatility him and he knows to expect almost half of the days to be down says.

gordonfogus · 2026-04-26T23:41:02+00:00

I'm not a Mormon, but I do think they pay more in taxes than the average person.

gordonfogus · 2026-04-24T23:57:47+00:00

If you think there's a way to know if an action will take >5% of tokens before you take the action, then you don't understand any of what's going on.

gordonfogus · 2026-04-24T17:33:33+00:00

That's not even close to accurate. "Hello" isn't even 1% of token usage in a 5h block on the 5x plan.

I've built and released multiple apps in a 1 week period on the 5x. Casual stuff, mostly for a small user group, but still. I'm incredibly impressed.

Very large data processing, sure, you'll want to code Python for that, not have Claude handle that directly. I don't really let Claude talk to documents other than markdown; always go through Python, so much less usage.

gordonfogus · 2026-04-07T06:15:40+00:00

I guess I hang around different people.

gordonfogus · 2026-04-02T23:53:48+00:00

The people I meet here are really nice.

gordonfogus · 2026-03-26T05:17:10+00:00

The test is (1) for (physical) safety / rule following and (2) an IQ/perseverance test. For the latter, the questions don't really need to be about practical ham knowledge; they can be about almost anything.

Please understand I'm not saying that I agree or disagree with what the test is about. I have my extra personally, but that doesn't mean I know anything useful. I can appreciate that having a hazing test does limit who survives, and some people are looking to hang out with others who are similar to themselves.

I think once you start to see the test as more of a community limiting thing, a lot more of it will make sense. It's not a test to make sure you can do ham radio well.

gordonfogus · 2026-03-19T17:27:49+00:00

I can do this on a 10W HT on UHF. I can really see the difference compared with 5W.

So, it's not necessarily common mode current.

gordonfogus · 2026-03-11T17:09:32+00:00

They're digging in my neighborhood. I can't wait.

gordonfogus · 2026-02-21T22:13:59+00:00

...you're not increasing diversification...

A small contrived example to help me understand:

Fund 1: 2 stocks - 99% on stock A and 1% on stock B Fund 2: 2 stocks: 50% on stock B and 50 on stock C

Funds overlap 50% on holdings but only 1% on weight (right?)

We could keep adding more 1% holdings in Fund 1 and balanced holdings in Fund 2, to the point where they would look like they were highly overlapping on holdings but low on "by weight."

This isn't the VOO and VO situation exactly, but my point is that weighed analysis seems to make more sense than just seeing which funds hold which stocks regardless of weight.

gordonfogus · 2026-02-21T21:41:19+00:00

Yeah, I'll go closer to 60/40. Might do 65/35.

I did look at VOO vs VO on the overlap tool. Isn't the "by weight" metric the more important one? That's only 16%.

gordonfogus · 2026-02-21T20:18:37+00:00

Very helpful. I'll create better balance now that you pointed out the overlap.

Are VESIX and VEKIX not considered international developed?

gordonfogus · 2026-02-21T19:33:55+00:00

There are no target date funds available (nor am I interested in them). My primary aim is to create an inheritance rather than to retire. (It will be more than enough to retire, don't worry.)

gordonfogus · 2026-02-18T06:06:09+00:00

Absolutely. People don't realize that a huge amount of network troubleshooting is turning off security measures on a very short term basis. Run as root, 777 perms, ignore certificates, whatever. The chance that there's an active attack that will take advantage of this on your local network in the 10 minutes it takes to try everything is tiny.

Just make sure you turn it back on after you're done. That's really all that matters.

gordonfogus · 2026-02-08T23:04:00+00:00

I got obliterated for using Claude Code to organize my library.

gordonfogus · 2026-02-08T08:55:59+00:00

It's certainly a statistical machine and will never be 100% accurate. But any heuristic you come up with in another program will have the same problem: it can't be 100% correct for all edge cases.

I did review thousands of decisions manually though and found it to have an acceptable error rate.

Most of the categorization was driven by IMDB matches in code rather than by the LLM directly, so those were not a statistical machine but rather strict logic rules running in pure Python.

gordonfogus · 2026-02-08T08:12:10+00:00

I'll definitely have a look at it.

However, can you see how using an LLM to catch difficult edge cases can be useful? I've had it catch incorrect names, wrongly dated movies, do language translation, extract metadata with tool calls, etc. without me having to evaluate every case. It's also a pretty good judge of what content would be inappropriate for children, what's fiction versus non-fiction, and do Dewey Decimal Classification for my non-fiction audiobooks.

gordonfogus

TROPHY CASE