dtcwee: The Value of Nothing

It took 14 years for US stocks to recover from the dot-com bubble. What if we started buying in at the high?

A basic HTML scraper in Python for stock prices that are only available via website. (i.e. not available via free API).

(No spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War ) "Is this thing on?"

Controversy returns as the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) changes service providers for its facial recognition technology.

The value of time is not constant, nor linear. Imminent time is exponentially more valuable than distant time. This ' Discounted time flow ' is easy to gloss over, hard to quantify, but radical. Time discounts money . $1 a year from now is worth less than $1 today. This is not necessarily inflation, or a conspiracy to devalue your savings. To make up for the risk of not receiving it, and the opportunities you forego, I would need to offer more than $1 in return for your $1 today. Time is similarly a resource, so proximity should similarly affect its value. If we expect compound growth rates for future money, we can expect the value of time to decay drastically the further it is into the future relative to now.

Access cloud storage, like OneDrive or Google Drive, as easily on a Raspberry Pi (Raspbian Linux) desktop as you would on a Windows PC.

The widow Naoko no longer needs to care for her husband, but still looks after a son in his forties who lives at home. Naoko's son works as diligently as a Japanese male is expected to - he is no hikikomori - which means he has less, not more, capacity to help with chores. As Naoko ages, she has trouble keeping up with the laundry, cooking, and cleaning for the both of them to the exacting standards required of a Japanese housewife. A once-off visit by a cleaning company like Duskin costs Y30,000 - Y40,000, no easy decision even for a family of means like hers. If Naoko et fils lived in Singapore, I point out to her, a live-in maid from Myanmar, Indonesia, or the Philippines, would cost around Y80,000 a month. Many Singaporean families (including mine) would be lost without their aid in cleaning, childcare, and aged care. Would she be interested if maids were hypothetically available in Japan?

Dystopic Future Mega-corp In the Parable of the Talents , a master entrusts three servants with equal portions of his wealth before leaving on a journey. Upon his return, he finds that two invested and grew their allotments, and rewards them accordingly. The third, however, is punished by the master for merely burying his in the ground. Does this indicate a moral case for investing?

Am I missing out on opportunities to borrow, and thus make leveraged investments, because I bought shares instead of property? After all, banks charge lower interest rates for loans on homes (5.94%*) and investment properties (5.36%*) than for margin loans (6.63%*). You could say that borrowing for shares is 24% more expensive than borrowing for property. Furthermore, banks reputedly allow higher LVRs for property. So if I can borrow more on a house and pay a lower rate, would not doing so multiply my leveraged returns?

As bullets buzz through the African dusk and clink into the armoured SUV's flank, it becomes hard to believe that the tour operators have not lost a passenger yet. The most dangerous prey, we are assured by authors and fictional villains, is man, and the poachers shooting at us are determined to prove the point.

LibreOffice Calc has no inbuilt stock market functions, and a popular plugin which offered those has stopped working along with changes to Yahoo Finance. Luckily, we can get the latest quotes from Bloomberg. [2018-12-15] Bloomberg Finance is, understandably, blocking multiple simultaneous requests. A more flexible solution is using a Python Stock Scraper .  

Singapore, Adelaide (Australia), Tokyo. Asked by a friend about different lives in each, my pithy responses are: Singapore: progressive but controlled, cheap but expensive. Australia: ostensibly progressive, ostensibly fair. Japan: one man's exotic tradition is another man's foreign pedantry. But things weren't always like that.

Housing has kept pace with equities over the long term. Why?