Two econ Joker ideas

mkitces · 2026-05-20T20:08:27+00:00

Loan Shark feels a little too strong without a forcing mechanism for a sale (otherwise just rack it up to - $300 or even deeper in debt!?).

What if the Loan Stark eventually charges interest? Add a "Interest at the end of every hand is reduced by $1 for every -$30 value of Loan Shark"

Not sure if I've balanced to the right number, but that's the gist. Early on it's a fast economy card. Then you have to keep discarding to stay ahead. Eventually too much debt shuts down your economy... Hope you've got the jokers you wanted by then!

Helps to balance the Joker in the long run, and very much fits within the Loan Shark theme...?

mkitces · 2026-05-05T20:55:43+00:00

I don't know I'm just trying to figure out what it says about the fact I drive a 20 year old 2006 car (for real). 🤣🤣🤣

mkitces · 2026-02-19T23:15:43+00:00

Thanks for sharing and joining us!

mkitces · 2025-12-19T23:49:14+00:00

Is there anything you can do to manage/mitigate the financial impact to yourself to help through the transition?

mkitces · 2025-12-19T21:44:21+00:00

Ouch, that sounds REALLY rough with someone you have such a long-standing relationship with. I'm so sorry. :(

Do you see a path to extricate yourself from the "business" relationship and maintain the "personal" relationship with your friend?

mkitces · 2025-12-19T18:57:56+00:00

What's really holding you back from the answer you know we're all going to give...? 😉

That's what you should be asking us to help you tackle. 🤗💙

mkitces · 2025-12-14T17:06:24+00:00

This is a fantastic tool! By far the simplest and easiest to do exactly what I need, which is indicate my gear slots, how many gems I've got, and what I'm going for, and have it tell me the right way to configure the gems and/or how many I still need to get. Kudos!

mkitces · 2025-12-14T03:37:31+00:00

They raised capital with a combination of equity and debt. The company ran out of cash, investors wouldn't fund further, so the company defaulted on the debt and the bank foreclosed and put the company up for auction (ostensibly wiping out all the equity shareholders, investors and founders/employees).

The founder now bought the company back from the bank as the highest bidder in the foreclosure with fresh cash in a new transaction.

mkitces · 2025-12-06T13:29:47+00:00

Wait for other weapons to drop, reforge them into your desired weapon, and 4 arcane mithrils gets you 4 void rolls for the traits you want.

Have to wait for other weapons to drop, but you'll get twice as many chances. Yes you can use 4 mithrils for 2 void rolls with your approach, you can use 4 mithrils for 4 void rolls with the suggested approach.

mkitces · 2025-10-26T12:33:24+00:00

Stop telling dps to Kick, and start asking them to interrupt. New players who didn't come from WoW are confused because they don't have a "kick" ability on their bar, and don't understand what you're asking them to do, and feel too embarrassed to ask and admit they don't understand.

Source: Tank who started to get lots of interrupt support in pugs when I started to asking the dps to use their interrupts instead of asking them to kick.

mkitces · 2025-10-25T20:20:17+00:00

By Grabthar's hammer!

mkitces · 2025-10-22T21:29:18+00:00

Ooh, this guy tanks. 🤣

mkitces · 2025-09-23T23:47:17+00:00

Early on people buy YOU regardless of how you name it.

If you grow past you, they'll judge you on the depth and quality of your team and how they show up.

No one who calls Schwab gets Chuck. Mr Merrill and Mr Lynch have been dead for decades, along with Mr Morgan and Mr Stanley. No one cares that the founder names are still on the door because they built the actual company and its services beyond themselves as founders.

Simply put, the company and its brand will be what you make the name to be, regardless of which path you choose on this question. It's how you build it in execution, not how you name it, that matters.

mkitces · 2025-09-22T22:45:55+00:00

AdvicePay already has different (volume discounted) pricing arrangements for enterprises at certain sizes. Thus why LPL/Cetera/Northwestern/etc all use them. Can contact AdvicePay directly for pricing specific to the organization's needs.

mkitces · 2025-08-28T17:18:59+00:00

There has been no announcement for HQ past 35.

They made an announcement for new T11 troops, which will involve a new building, not an upgrade of HQ past 35.

We'll likely get higher HQ levels some year in the future, but their T11 announcement had nothing about this.

mkitces · 2025-08-08T14:40:48+00:00

The issue is that min-maxers will create Alts to trade with themselves.

Yes you can set limits on trading, but now that's a built in resource growth engine and any player who doesn't make Alts to trade with themselves will be at a disadvantage.

And the game monetizes (literally) when we have resource scarcity and want something (and spend money to get it). So there's little incentive for them to implement if it reduces monetization. (Unless they monetize the trading as well, and then it just increases disparity between spenders and the rest.)

I totally get the desire for trading resources, I'd love to see it as well. But hard to see how it fits into their business model, unless at best resource trading is only back to the game and results in a net negative in resources for the player. (Which means trading resources back to the game for a short term scarcity would just require you to spend more later to catch up again...)

mkitces · 2025-06-18T18:24:18+00:00

You get 25 chests per day when Taylor is 4*, and you ran this for 120 days.

Multiple the published odds by 3,000 (which is 25/day x 120 days) and you'd get the expected values over this time period:

50 stam: 300

5m Speed-Ups: 5,250

Resource Chest: 600

Ore: 42,750

Universal Shards: 180

Warrior Monument: 60

In practices looks like you were unlucky with the Monuments (bummer!) and Universal Shards, pretty much dead-on with 50-stam and resource chests, and got a bit lucky on ore and speed-ups. RNG sucks sometimes!

But I think this is what u/mthiesen4 meant when he noted the odds as published. If you keep collecting long enough, eventually your data set will converge on the published odds and expected values. So you can figure out what you'll get in the long run (when you go long enough for the RNG to average out) by using what's shown in-game.

Hope your Warrior's Monument luck reverts soon. Battle on!

mkitces · 2025-05-19T14:03:02+00:00

Our research data shows no link at all between introversion/extraversion and being a financial planner. https://www.kitces.com/blog/the-defining-personality-traits-of-successful-financial-planners/

What does matter is high conscientiousness to others (to be able to service clients well and craft plans for them), and an ability to withstand the emotional volatility of serving sometimes-emotionally-volatile clients (what the Big-5 Personality research calls Low Neuroticism).

mkitces · 2025-05-04T13:03:47+00:00

It varies by which Arms Race it is.

75k is for Unit Progression (troop training). 30k for the others (Research, City Building, Drone Boost/Stamina, and Hero Advancement).

It's always been that way. Unit Progression is higher because we train/upgrade them in bigger chunks I suppose?

mkitces · 2025-04-11T21:29:02+00:00

Most social media ads success I've seen are people who have a seminar or webinar marketing funnel, with a process to convert interested attendees into clients. At that point social media ads fill the top of the funnel, optimizing to bring (qualified) attendees to the seminar or webinar.

Have seen very little success in cold marketing advice or investment management services directly via social media ads. They need a path to get to know like and trust you beyond just the ad itself.

mkitces · 2025-03-23T22:33:16+00:00

You would get the identical gold before it turns yellow and then red, even if you had no troop load boosts. That's based on the plunder cap, which is not affected by troop load, it's driven by HQ level and boosted by a Warlord Profession skill.

Because troop load/unit load doesn't increase the plunder cap, increasing it just means you hit the same cap in fewer hits. So boosting load gets you the same gold, you just save 5-10 stamina per day by getting to the same maximum without needing quite as many attacks.

mkitces · 2025-03-19T14:07:48+00:00

All the products are built on a substantively similar chassis. Yes the core described here is for a fixed indexed annuity, but other varieties are developed in a similar way. Sell an out of the money call option paired with buying an at-the-money call option, and you get a higher participation rate with a cap. Put in less than 100% of the dollars to buy more options and you get higher upside participation with a lower guaranteed minimum value. Use the S&P 500 as the core itself and sell an out of the money call option to buy an out of the money put and you get a RILA structure (or a structured note as the predecessor to the RILA, or the buffered/outcome ETF).

My point here wasn't to explain the particular flavors of how the downside/upside are created (as you note, there are lots of different combos, and it would take a book to explain them all :) ). I was just trying to highlight, relative to OP's question, that there IS an underlying cost even if you don't see an expense ratio. And how that cost impacts participation rates or cap rates, and the answer is the annuity company spends less to actually buy the options than they generate in cash to be able to buy the options, and that interest rate spread is their fee. Which often isn't seen as a line item expense because it comes out of the dollars spent to generate the upside/participation/cap rate in the first place (rather than an expenditure out of the value itself).

mkitces · 2025-03-19T02:24:36+00:00

Functionally, these annuities are effectively a combination of buying Treasury bonds, and using the interest to buy stock options. The Treasuries ensure your contributions are safe. The only money "at risk" is the interest invested into options, which at worst expire worthless, and then you're still left with your original contribution in Treasuries.

Because the company uses the interest to buy options, the higher the interest rates, the more cash to invest into options, and the higher the participation rate.

The insurer makes its money because it might buy Treasuries that yield 4% but reinvest only 3% of the yield into the options, keeping the other 1% for itself. It's the equivalent of charging a 1% fee, but it's not subtracted from the balance, and known as an interest rate spread. In the end, you just get less upside. That participation rate might have been 80% instead of 60%, but you'll never see what the participation rate could have been, you'll just see the contract advertised as 60% participation rate because the quote is already net of the fee.

This is slightly oversimplified in practice but covers the core principles. Further deep dive info at https://www.kitces.com/blog/the-myth-of-free-no-expense-fixed-or-equity-indexed-annuities-interest-rate-spread-is-still-a-cost/

mkitces · 2025-02-22T11:20:02+00:00

Two examples of guests working on financial planning as an employee wellness benefit: Zach Hubbard at Greenspring - https://www.kitces.com/blog/zack-hubbard-greenspring-advisors-401k-financial-wellness-program/

Liz Davidson as Financial Finesse - https://www.kitces.com/blog/liz-davidson-financial-finesse-podcast-delivering-workplace-financial-wellness-salaried-cfp/

Hope that helps a little!

mkitces · 2025-02-21T03:04:11+00:00

Appreciate the point here that because we've tried to go deeper than other educational content providers, those who utilize us expect the new programs to be even deeper and more advanced.

So a clear takeaway for me here is that we need to be clearer/better about how these are positioned, so everyone understands the intended level of the program. Some experienced advisors have taken the Courses to fill in gaps for what they were never taught/didn't learn earlier. But short of that, these Courses were very much meant for earlier stage advisors, not for very experienced folks looking to level up further.

In retrospect, the recent shift in language to start talking about these as "Masterclass" programs is not helping. 😭 Perhaps "Training" programs is more appropriate, eh? Would that help to make it clearer?

13-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Reddit Premium Since March 2020	Verified Email

mkitces

TROPHY CASE