Recent content by dunkelblau

A couple of decades ago Florida had an intangibles tax that included stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, but excluded bank deposits and annuities. No idea how this arrangement compares to the various European countries that impose a wealth tax today.

Apparently California Franchise Tax Board requires three payments per year: https://www.ftb.ca.gov/pay/estimated-tax-payments.html#When-to-pay I knew about the 3/yr system but always thought it was optional? I've been sending mine in four equal installments and haven't had any issue so far. The...

Most of my share trading the past few decades involved small speculative tech stocks, and in my experience your question is the most difficult to answer. FWIW I regard the window between a 50% loss and a 100% gain as roughly break-even, so I almost never sell inside this window, nor would I...

That's right, I don't have the background to be able to judge the opinions in analysts reports about biotech/pharma pipelines, so I usually focus on the statistics page on Yahoo Finance to kick out what I see as likely serial diluters among the small caps. Among the bigger names I assume these...

My thinking is that mean-reversion is highly unlikely for companies with certain financial metrics, but it's more likely for established companies with long track records that include some successes in the past. Someone had mentioned here that biotech and pharma stocks are usually hard to...

Agreed, what you call "value investing" I call mean reversion bets, and in my experience the majority of these fare poorly, but the allure is that those that survive often have stellar returns. In this space with equal sized starting positions I care more about mean than median. I've bought...

A couple of years ago I would have disagreed with this approach as being overly complicated, but I think I see the benefit now. My issue is when calculating expense rate as annual expenses divided by net portfolio value, unusual gains that incur commensurate income taxes hurt the numerator but...

If we look at this through the lens of managing spending, I can imagine how a hardline budgeteer could hit an unexpected windfall from a cash merger (meaning he can't decide to not sell) at a huge premium on one of his share holdings. Should this person cancel his trip to Cancun to pay down the...

I think you're making exactly the point I intended-- your 2.1% withdrawal rate calculation excludes the income taxes on the AGNC dividends which I presume are taxable. I happen to hold a little bit of AGNC and my 1099 has them marked "Non-Qualified", they're now $0.12/sh per month, so I was...

How about a single laid-off 50 YO NYC resident who inherited 1M shares of AGNC in a taxable account and has no other significant assets or liabilities and whose estimated living expenses (excluding taxes) are $200k/yr? FI or not? Obviously the lack of diversification is a huge red flag, but I...

I wonder if his rent expectation is realistic? My brother just sold his home for a bit more than that while an identical unit down the street is up for rent at $5k/mon. That's a gross rent yield of 4% which I believe is typical in these bubble areas. Seems unattractive when cap rate is less...

Not sure about lumping income taxes with living expenses. Perhaps not a realistic scenario, but if someone is returning say 15%/yr on their stash and paying a third of that in income taxes, then income taxes alone would be a 5% WR, which sounds "above SWR" even though their stash is growing...

Panel seems to have a conservative tilt, but these are "luminaries" and not financial experts per se, so perhaps this article is more in the spirit of "portfolios of the rich and famous" rather than financial advice for the reader? This brings back memories, my inspiration for pursuing FIRE...

Well 2023 hasn't been kind to most biotechs, and VNDA was no exception. Interesting how its net cash minus debt has actually increased a bit even though its market cap fell by almost half. But there are plenty of names out there now with MC less than half of net cash. The big drop in VNDA on...

Bottom five as of yesterday? https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/12/25/should-you-buy-this-years-worst-performing-sp-500/