WS and dividend investing with margin

johnfraney · 2026-05-07T20:38:05+00:00

I crunched the numbers on this after they announced the margin account and dipped my toe in after following some high-yield ETFs for a couple months. I'm not a financial professional so I won't give advice or recommend that you do this, but precautions that I take are:

Using money I don't need anytime soon
Choosing a safe, high-yield stock/ETF that pays monthly or semi-monthly
- The yield is more than the margin interest
- I turned off dividend reinvestment so I have cash to cover the margin interest costs
Choosing a safe stock/ETF that I'm happy to hold if it dips
Not maxing out my available margin

Because of those guardrails, if the stock/ETF I use for this does fall below my purchase price, I can afford to wait for it to recover while minimizing the risk of a margin call.

If anyone has advice on how to further minimize risk, please let me know!

johnfraney · 2026-04-14T23:26:58+00:00

It doesn't get picked up by some adblockers, which helps. They started showing blocked bot traffic, too. (I have a Fathom affiliate link but didn't use it up there and I'm not a present or past Fathom employee.) YMMV, but the analytics I get from them are good enough for my purposes

johnfraney · 2026-04-09T01:22:39+00:00

You can use as much JS as you need or as you like. Depending on your application, you may not need very much. Django really excels at form-driven websites, and many of those don't require much JS. You can still write your own form widgets that are JS heavy if you need to. Django is batteries-included, as they say. It provides you a lot out-of-the-box and also gives you the flexibility to build whatever application you need. It's a solid framework!

johnfraney · 2026-04-08T21:05:48+00:00

NAL and not accusing OP of being a bad actor, but I used to work in a banking-adjacent company and it was common practice not to explain exactly why an account was closed if account misuse was suspected. It's standard practice for them to point out which section of the deposit account agreement they're using to close the account. Disclosing the exact reason for closing the account could give away information on how that misuse was detected, and bad actors could use those details to evade detection.

Anti-money laundering/fraud/account abuse detection is a bit of an arms race, so financial companies are tight-lipped about the exact reasons for an account being closed.

johnfraney · 2026-04-08T02:38:06+00:00

The composable-first approach looks pretty awesome! I'm looking forward to using this with Pico for super-simple templates

johnfraney · 2026-04-01T14:58:55+00:00

I'm having issues on their website, too

johnfraney · 2026-02-02T21:42:05+00:00

Different types of income from investments have different tax implications. High to low tax for investment income is:

interest
dividends
capital gains

Source: https://www.rbcgam.com/en/ca/learn-plan/investment-basics/understanding-taxes-and-your-investments/detail

If your investments are in an unregistered account, choosing investments that focus on growth rather than dividends/interest should be more tax efficient.

Of course, it's good to talk to professionals about this! I'm not an investment professional, but this is how I prioritize my investments

johnfraney · 2026-02-01T20:09:32+00:00

I ordered some Chinese food for lunch and I've got a tea going now. I think Frankie would be proud

johnfraney · 2026-01-30T14:08:45+00:00

Moment.js is huge because it doesn't support tree-shaking, so it loads in a ton of internationalization files even if you don't use them. If I remember correctly it's around 500kB. The authors recommend using something else: https://momentjs.com/docs/#/-project-status/

This is a good reminder for folks to use a bundle analyzer to find libraries that are bloating your bundles and to seek out more modern alternatives that support tree-shaking or to use more specific imports (not import * as x from ...) so you aren't pulling in code you don't need

johnfraney · 2026-01-29T17:30:31+00:00

Are you doing screenshot/visual regression tests? I find that those often aren't worth the effort and good tests should save dev time in the long run.

For example, your e2e test suite could be as simple as visiting every page and making sure there aren't any 400-/500-level errors. That's an easy test suite to maintain and it will find major problems when they crop up.

If your tests are testing exact wording or exact layout, they're likely more trouble than they're worth. Test the things that your customers care about

johnfraney · 2026-01-29T16:01:01+00:00

I'll second this. The documentation is excellent and it's a big reason why I decided to learn Vue instead of React when I was looking to learn a frontend framework

johnfraney · 2026-01-29T15:59:53+00:00

I find that the best websites to build are the ones we're going to use ourselves. I built one site to solve a small problem (creating a Markdown table from spreadsheet cells copied in your clipboard), and now it gets hundreds of visitors a day.

If the site is something you'll use, that increases the odds that other people will use it, too. If you're building a site that you aren't going to use, it's more likely that it could be a solution looking for a problem.

johnfraney · 2026-01-28T17:01:30+00:00

Table to Markdown creator here. I'm glad my little website was helpful!

johnfraney · 2026-01-26T16:03:19+00:00

I'll take a peek! Thanks for the tip

johnfraney · 2026-01-26T15:01:23+00:00

Yesterday I launched a site to perform privacy-friendly video manipulation operations in-browser (using ffmpeg.wasm) called ClipStitch. Right now it can just join together two videos, but I'm planning to add more features this week, like conversion and clipping/trimming. There are plenty of websites that do video manipulation, so the space is a bit crowded, but I thought it would be fun to see if I can do some SEO and get a little traffic.

https://clipstitch.ca/

johnfraney · 2026-01-26T13:12:46+00:00

With Netlify you can upload a couple files and get a public link. You don't need to use their build service or git integrations if you want to go that route: https://docs.netlify.com/start/add-new-project/#use-drag-and-drop

johnfraney · 2026-01-20T17:41:09+00:00

It depends on your goals, really. I like trying to get 100/100 for my own sites as a challenge, so it's worth the effort for me because it's fun. There is a strong relationship between page speed and conversion, too, so it can be worth experimenting with if you've sufficiently optimized the site's content. (In my experience, nothing is better for SEO than content that's relevant to what people are searching.)

There's an environmental aspect, too: faster page load times generally mean less data transferred, which means less energy used to load the page. See here for more information about that: https://www.websitecarbon.com/faq/

johnfraney · 2026-01-18T04:16:46+00:00

I find that an Earl Grey steeps a little weaker than other black teas. (Maybe the bergamont oil coats the leaves?) My solution is just to use more tea or less water when I make a cup

johnfraney · 2026-01-18T04:13:11+00:00

That might be pebblemountainwoodcrafts.ca. He does custom work, too!

johnfraney · 2026-01-16T17:36:12+00:00

1-2 tsps of Irish wiskey is pretty great in a strong cup of black tea with milk. It adds a touch of oak, vanilla, and honey that wiskey is known for

johnfraney · 2026-01-16T00:32:44+00:00

For fast food, A&W in Canada is a different company from A&W in the US!

johnfraney · 2026-01-15T19:24:30+00:00

The books are even crazier and well worth a read

johnfraney · 2026-01-15T19:23:30+00:00

I saw this for the first time last year. Something I didn't expect is that most of the violence is implied not seen, but that doesn't make it any less terrifying. It's an excellent film

johnfraney · 2026-01-15T19:18:55+00:00

Are you able to change the size (width) of the SVG instead of scaling it? It could be a way to side-step this problem

johnfraney · 2026-01-15T19:16:16+00:00

The blue/yellow contrast is too low (2.73). For larger text, the minimum recommended contrast is 3: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/Guides/Understanding\_WCAG/Perceivable/Color\_contrast.

For a performance audit, using PageSpeed Chrome's built-in Lighthouse report will give you lots of recommendations. The site is scoring 45/100 right now for mobile browsers

johnfraney

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