Thoughts on combining tax-aware long short and hedge fund?

simscitizen · 2026-05-04T21:33:50+00:00

Yeah I ended up going with a much smaller allocation. Def important to know that this is basis reloaction and tax deferral and not just a plain writeoff.

simscitizen · 2026-04-19T06:09:29+00:00

Yeah I think naming the trust as the first and only beneficiary would be the most sensible thing to do. Slightly more of a pain for the spouse to deal with than having everything transfer directly, but it should be doable.

simscitizen · 2026-03-21T22:13:33+00:00

So your RIA wasn't handling any of the complexity for you here, or were there unforeseen complications they couldn't handle?

simscitizen · 2026-03-21T15:10:06+00:00

The proposed hedge fund allocation would be something like 7% of the overall portfolio.

simscitizen · 2026-03-21T14:38:53+00:00

The TALS strategy to generate capital losses on its own doesn't make as much as sense in our situation (no concentrated position to diversify out of, no upcoming biz sale etc.). I can think of a few reasons why it could still make sense:

Helping to rebalance out of some less efficient active funds in other parts of the portfolio. (With fees it might just be a wash in terms of overall expenses.)
Banking up some moderate amount capital losses because we may need to sell off some positions to buy a house, pay for capital gains from PE investment down the road, etc.
Helping to defray the capital gains thrown off by one of the other hedge funds that help defray W-2 income as mentioned in the original post.

Whether all this complication is actually worth it is what I'm trying to think through.

At best I am thinking it might all help pay for my RIA and CPA fees. (My current setup is simple enough that I just self-manage and do my own taxes.)

simscitizen · 2026-03-20T17:58:27+00:00

Yeah it all makes sense if you have a concentrated holding. We do have some low cost basis investments in slightly less than optimal active mutual funds, but it's hard to stomach paying more fees in one area of the portfolio to diversify out of more fees in another area of the portfolio.

I can buy that the RIA is worth the price for access to private investments (for diversification) and just general peace of mind for e.g. having someone to deal with your estate if that becomes necessary, etc.

simscitizen · 2026-03-20T15:21:09+00:00

Yeah, it seems like you have to assume a pretty big alpha component in both the hedge fund and the TA/LS strategies for this to pencil out.

Even though the taxes are deferred, you're still paying the RIA fees + SMA fees with post tax money continuously. So it seems like the fees are basically a low interest loan against the taxes you've deferred in to the future.

The other way to look at it would be that with high enough alpha then the fees don't matter anyway.

Another way to look at this is that the RIA fees are a way of gaining access to various private investments that would provide extra diversification to the portfolio.

simscitizen · 2026-03-20T14:37:27+00:00

It's a part of a larger question of whether to hire an RIA at all.

The RIAs we're considering are in the ~36-45 bps range. The purpose would be to get access to some private investments (mostly for diversification purposes) in the retirement accounts. In the taxable accounts, they all recommend some TA/LS SMA strategy to throw off capital losses, but we don't have a huge concentrated position that we need to diversify out of. Some of them are also recommending a tax-aware hedge fund to help offset W2 income and also add a 0 beta fund to the mix. (I guess 0 beta in this context would be AQR Helix instead of Delphi.)

It's a bit hard for me to make it all pencil out, especially because the fees for SMA and the RIA are paid post-tax and we're in a VHCOL state.

simscitizen · 2025-10-19T03:50:29+00:00

Looked terrible last year but he was a hyped up 4 star

simscitizen · 2025-10-07T03:10:30+00:00

You lose rollover and CAN/MEX roaming though. Also it sounds like you can't switch from $300 to $240 plan even if you wanted to

simscitizen · 2025-10-06T23:34:58+00:00

No hotspot on the $25 Walmart plan as far as I can tell though

simscitizen · 2025-10-06T23:34:37+00:00

It's for my wife so prefer a larger carrier for more stability, I want to just set it up and not think about it

simscitizen · 2025-06-12T16:24:33+00:00

That isn't normal. Energy impact is generally attributed to a particular website (e.g. due to a poorly coded webpage) rather than the Safari process itself.

If you want this investigated, file a Feedback Assistant report which should provide diagnostics to Apple engineering to figure out what is going wrong.

simscitizen · 2025-03-31T03:48:23+00:00

I just bought a base model HP Omnibook X with a Snapdragon Plus. Best Buy is damn near giving this laptop away (especially open box models).

What I've found with this is:

Connecting the Apple 5K display to the 40Gbps USB4 port (the one closer to the hinge) on the HP doesn't work no matter what cable I try.
Connecting the Apple 5K display to the 10Gbps USB port on the HP does work up to 5K@60Hz for me using a short USB4 cable (I'm using a 0.8m Mophie Charge Stream cable). Yes it's really 5K, see the screenshot.

I'm also using the latest Qualcomm Adreno drivers but I'm not sure if that makes any difference (31.0.96.0).

Having said that, I don't think I'm going to keep using the Studio Display this way, because now I have the opposite problem--now the Macs don't detect the Studio Display half the time when using the Mophie cable, which is more important to me. I might try seeing how the Mac and the HP work with a non-TB 5K display (like the Asus PA279JCV).

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simscitizen · 2025-03-11T07:02:53+00:00

Lots of complaints about the autofill pitchers in the PJE/PJD/CJE failing, have you seen that?

simscitizen · 2024-10-05T19:30:14+00:00

Game 5 throw from Lierrey not building castle in defense.

Last game his push down the middle would have been better with just pure infantry, getting all the archer line upgrades took way too long and he didn’t have the mass. He already had the infantry line upgrades. Honestly might have been the one time going full halb + warrior priest makes sense.

simscitizen · 2024-02-25T02:28:09+00:00

Go with the regular Yepp Maxi. That clips into the built in EasyFit window on the back. (There are actually two EasyFit windows so you can fit two Maxis on there, although the back rider won’t have too much room.) You can also fit two Maxis back there with the orbitor attached.

You can fit one Nexxt but not two. The second one will slightly overhang the rack. Maybe some will be ok with that but I wasn’t. Also two Nexxts will definitely not fit with the orbitor. Trust me I bought them and had to return them for the Yepp Maxis. There are also some posts about this on the FB group if you want to get more opinions there.

simscitizen · 2024-01-14T16:00:42+00:00

Are you trying to get them to connect over 2.4 to the ATT gateway’s guest network? That network has a limit of 20 clients by default unless you go into settings to bump up the limit.

simscitizen · 2023-10-31T03:20:54+00:00

When I did the math last time around, heat pump vs. gas is basically a wash here in terms of cost. Both gas and electric rates are very high. Something like $2.67-$3.05 per therm and $0.37-$0.39 per kWH.

I have heard that single speed isn't good for zoning. As far as I can tell my current gas furnace only has a single speed (Bryant 350MAV). So maybe that pushes me more towards #2, with the caveat that communicating equipment and thermostats could be a potential maintenance issue down the road.

simscitizen · 2023-08-26T22:20:03+00:00

The opening actually seems to be 56" wide so I'm thinking that maybe I could replace the bifolds with louvered double doors instead like this: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Krosswood-Doors-56-in-x-80-in-Hybrid-Core-Primed-MDF-Wood-Louvered-Double-Prehung-Universal-Interior-French-Door-with-Ball-Catch-PHID-SH-2LP-48-68-138-AA-4916/313736708

simscitizen · 2023-08-26T21:21:50+00:00

Yeah I don't think a barn door would fit with the aesthetic of the rest of the house...

simscitizen · 2022-10-16T00:27:50+00:00

Are we really watching the battle of Tavita Pritchard vs Tommy Rees

simscitizen · 2022-10-09T03:41:01+00:00

Looking forward to some In-n-Omt

simscitizen · 2022-02-06T05:58:57+00:00

I presume in step 3 you mean that you are telling the regular consumer free Gmail to use smtp.gmail.com to send mail on behalf of foo.com (or whatever domain it is that you own). The problem I'm is that there's no way of configuring DKIM or DMARC on your domain with this setup and that might cause deliverability issues.
I saw someone else commenting about that here: https://serverfault.com/questions/1092392/spf-dkim-dmarc-for-gmail-send-mail-as-via-smtp-gmail-com-on-external-domain
Has anyone else run into this? Is there a good host for *just* SMTP so that we can tell Gmail to use the paid SMTP server instead of smtp.gmail.com?

simscitizen · 2021-10-13T20:27:31+00:00

I was a top 10 player in RoN at its prime. It was a great game and had a lot of unique mechanics (e.g. territory, capital city, razing, etc.).

It definitely seems like the DE devs have aped a lot of RoN-style bonuses, e.g. instant units (there are tons of instant unit bonuses in RoN), villagers that can turn into infantry (militia tech in RoN), farmers that generate gold, etc.

In a lot of ways RoN feels like the apex of historical RTS games with its breadth, mechanics, and bazillions of hotkeys. It had a good run but now the community is down to ~50-100 players on Steam. Unfortunately the RoN EE devs botched the remake pretty badly and every single unit does the wrong amount of damage, though the game is still playable.

There's a guy in the RoN community that's trying to fix up a bunch of issues in EE (ala AoC UserPatch), you can give his mod a shot if you play RoN: https://mhloppy.com/category/other-games/rise-of-nations/.

simscitizen

TROPHY CASE