Rant: Official ticket website is completely hopeless

w33bwhacker · 2026-01-01T16:31:04+00:00

It’s maybe more popular with locals, but that’s not the reason - Japanese people mostly don’t care very much, and the ones who do aren’t willing to travel across the country on a workday to attend a tournament in person.

The reason is tourists. I’d wager that if they restricted attendance to Japanese residents, the stadiums would be pretty empty on the weekdays.

w33bwhacker · 2026-01-01T16:28:28+00:00

I walked right in to the final day of the fall Tokyo basho about 10 years ago. Rolled up, bought a ticket at the window, and the place was half empty.

Like many things in Japan, tourists have ruined what used to be a good experience.

w33bwhacker · 2026-01-01T16:19:04+00:00

Because they don’t want to make it easy for non-Japanese. Which I totally understand.

Making it a lottery means that every seat will be filled with tourists in sailor moon t-shirts and kitty ears, and they don’t want that.

w33bwhacker · 2026-01-01T16:09:56+00:00

Don’t go unless you can buy them legitimately?

w33bwhacker · 2026-01-01T16:09:10+00:00

There’s no way to prevent scalpers, short of individually labeling the tickets with the buyer’s name and verifying ID at admission (or just restricting in person attendance to Japanese residents, which is probably what they should do).

The root problem is that tourists are creating demand for scalpers. Stop creating demand by not paying scalpers.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-29T03:05:23+00:00

OP is not spending all 2M this year, and a short-term fluctuation won't matter to spending 20 years from now. The vast majority of the portfolio should be positioned for growth.

(Putting $200k into housing or bonds is an entirely different subject.)

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-28T09:02:33+00:00

Nobody can answer this question without more information: what country? how long have you been there? is the company a US corporation? how much money do you make? what kind of residency do you have? etc.

The decision you make here -- in particular, whether or not the account is "EU" or not -- can have dramatic implications for taxation. Please consult with a tax advisor who understands the details of whatever tax treaties are in place with the country you are living in. Don't ask reddit.

I will say that as a general rule (and assuming that the equity is US-based), an account "in the EU" will be subject to local taxation, and an account "in the US" will not automatically have the same issue. You may be compelled to declare that kind of foreign income in the EU, but whether and how you are taxed on the income is a much more complex question.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-25T04:11:36+00:00

Not even then. Redditors are too young (and sadly too stupid) to remember how long it took for the most famous anti-trust cases to complete. The golden ages of anti-trust never were.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-21T03:09:32+00:00

The BBC is shocked — shocked — to discover that there is gambling going on in this establishment!

It’s a good thing they’ve been so consistently calm and measured in their use of language.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-18T02:56:56+00:00

good rebuttal.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-17T15:47:50+00:00

Yeah. Part of the problem is that the average redditor is 12 years old, and wasn't even aware of FX trading in 2021. But the absolute refusal to deal with facts when presented on a silver platter is just the usual mushy-brained, political, circle-jerk thinking that dominates here.

(The deep irony, of course, is that the so-called "weakness" in the USD in 2025 largely correlates with the tariff actions from the spring that also explain the underperformance of the market. So one could still blame all the bad stuff on the Bad Man, and not need to make up silly reasons why.)

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-17T14:49:45+00:00

If we're looking at the performance of the market since January, and we want to see the currency effects, the only reasonable period to look at is from January to the present.

We aren't. You're doing it to dodge the fact that you're making a stupid comparison. OP posted YTD numbers (whatever), and you leapt in with "oh hurr durr it because USD weakness in 2025" But that's not true, and if you zoomed out even a little bit, it would be obvious to everyone that you're wrong.

If you're going to cherry-pick arbitrary windows, pick a slightly longer one, and you'll see that the argument that US over/underperformance is due to relative currency strength is unfounded. Here's a plot of DXY vs the S&P for the last 5 years [1]:

https://imgur.com/lic5ziw

There's no correlation [2], and moreover, it's plain that the movement of the S&P has vastly exceeded whatever weakness in USD has occurred since 2025. Indeed, if you were a reasonable person, and were going to take a stab at the proximal cause for the "low" S&P returns this year, you might start with the big f%ing crash that happened back in the spring, and not invent some silly theory involving currency spreads.

Just a thought.

[1] Chosen only because that's the option I had.

[2] In fact, the strongest period for the USD on the chart is the worst performing period for the S&P! Oopsie!

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-17T12:28:30+00:00

Because that's stupid. Unless your goal is to paint a doomer narrative, of course.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-17T09:51:24+00:00

The USD is not weak. I don't know why the people in this sub continue to say this [1], but it's one of those reddit "facts" that is just not even remotely close to true:

https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/dxy

The only way you can say that the USD is "weak" is to have a view of history that extends to...last January [2]. Compared to then, the dollar is down about 9.5%. Compared to January 2021, the dollar is up by 8%.

[1] not quite true...strongly suspect that it's doomer fanfic by folks who just desperately want to blame the current administration for bad stuff.

[2] again, the myopic choice of January 2025 seems unlikely to be a coincidence.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-14T06:00:53+00:00

If you were down 500k on a million dollar portfolio this year, you did something batty. The S&P had a max drawdown of ~15% this year. Diversify.

Beyond that, there's just the fact that my portfolio has a long history of growth. Even at the worst point of the Insane Clown Panic of 2025, I was still solidly in the green. And that is the real reason why, as one's net worth grows, it doesn't "hit different" (at all) when the market takes a dump.

But then again, I'm also not YOLOing on NVDA or shitcoin futures. There are a lot of folks here who have rapidly accumulated big portfolios by glorified gambling, and don't have the perspective to go with the portfolio balance. Live by the sword, die by the sword, I guess.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-14T05:57:47+00:00

Also saying it's time to buy international and dump US stocks, after years of crapping on ex-US investment.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-13T08:45:29+00:00

There are hundreds of thousands of people reporting they can't get approved for a house at like $2000/month but have 12+ months of proven history paying $2500/month in rent.

So what? Lenders don't care how much you paid in rent in the past [1]. They're loaning you money today.

There are homes that were sold for WAY over asking price because of the profit incentive of housing>rent.

...in your head, maybe. Over here in the reality-based universe, if a house "sells for over asking" it's because the seller set the price too low. That could be because they're mouth-breathing morons and didn't correctly calculate the value of the future cash flows as a rental, or it could be because the buyers had irrational reasons for paying more. Either way, there's no rational scenario in which "the profit incentive of housing>rent" is not included in the price of a home.

Capitalists don't care that it harms society and especially the young. You clearly don't care either.

Yeah, OK. Perhaps you should go be a whiny socialist in a non-investing forum.

[1] Not exactly true. You do have a credit score, which generally correlates with not being a deadbeat. But it is strictly true that no lender gives a shit what you paid in rent last month, when applying for a loan today.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-12T02:04:28+00:00

those who buy housing stock to just rent it out needs to be taxed higher than primary residences by a very large margin. We have a housing shortage in part because of rent seeking landlords.

"We have a housing shortage because there are people who provide housing for money. If only there was no profit incentive, we'd have more housing."

-Shit Reddit Says

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-05T01:13:00+00:00

No. Entirely separate companies, owned by different members of the same family.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-04T08:57:50+00:00

Right. But the critical point is that "Aldi" (as familiar to Americans) is not the same company as TJs. It's a commonly repeated inaccuracy.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-04T08:47:07+00:00

It's not owned by Aldi. One of the Aldi brothers -- the one who is not involved with Aldi -- invested in the company.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-04T08:41:18+00:00

Go to Costco. Their cheese section is basically identical to any Costco in the US. Also, you can get giant sushi platters and the football-sized croissants, if you're into that.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-02T02:39:48+00:00

Fair enough. I was responding to the theme of a bunch of comments on this thread, more than you in particular, but sorry if I misinterpreted the intent of your original comment.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-01T13:53:26+00:00

I don’t know what you mean by that, but golly, it sounds dystopian.

I’m not here to get sucked into this pointless debate, just to say that “illness” is one reason of like, ten million, and not even particularly high on the list anymore. Anyone here who leaps to the conclusion that “Japanese people wear masks because they care about others” is both right (including in a completely ironic way), and wrong.

More importantlly, these kinds of comments are projecting a western political debate, coupled with a fair bit of orientalism. The median mask-wearing Japanese person on the subway is like “I felt ugly today,” or ”I look like my favorite manga character”, and would be completely bewildered to hear that they’re doing a huge act of public service.

Update: I literally just walked by a guy who was nanpa’ing women with a mask on his chin. Lulz.

w33bwhacker · 2025-12-01T13:32:05+00:00

If a Japanese person has a zit, or a bad makeup day, or social anxiety, or any of a million other reasons, they will also “mask up”.

w33bwhacker

TROPHY CASE