antipaucity

There’s often irrational panic in investment markets.

Most recently that’s been due to the Wuhanvirus/coronavirus/covid19 scare.

If you’re selling while the stock market is falling, you’re losing money.

You want to buy low, and sell high – but since you can never know where either the bottom or top is, how can you mitigate against market ups and downs?

Cost averaging.

What is cost averaging? It’s a way of hedging your investments against momentary swings in the stock market by lowering your average cost of each share.

A simplified cost averaging example for Universal Widgets Inc.

Universal Widgets Inc (UWI) is trading today for $10 per share. You like the company, and decide to buy $1680 in UWI shares (a total of 168 shares).

Next month, UWI has dropped to $7 per share. You still believe in the company’s future, and you still have $1680 to invest in the market, so you buy another $1680 worth of UWI stock at $7 per share (240 shares total).

Two months later again, and UWI has dropped to $3/share. Perhaps your confidence in the company has dropped some, but if you sell now, you’re guaranteed to lose over $2000! So instead of selling, and guaranteeing your loss, you again buy $1680 in shares (560 more).

You now have 968 shares of UWI that cost you $5040.

But they’re only worth $2904.

What share price does UWI need to hit in order to show a profit?

Now you merely have a simple math problem: take the cost, subtract the value, and divide by total shares: (C-V)/S

$5040 – $2904 = $2136

$2136 / 986 = ~$2.21

So when UWI gets back above $5.21 per share, you’re in the black.

If/when it recovers to your initial purchase price of $10, your portfolio will be worth $9860!

By cost averaging, you’ve reduced your risk, and increased your likelihood of coming out ahead when investing

Sidebar

This is, more-or-less, how some mutual funds grow (and why beginning investors (and most seasoned investors) should buy-into mutual funds instead of individual stocks).

I noticed I haven’t updated my previous post on keeping my Let’s Encrypt certs updated since building-out a couple new servers.

systemctl stop httpd.service
/bin/certbot renew --preferred-challenges http-01,dns-01 --must-staple
systemctl start httpd.service
systemctl restart postfix

Not a big change, but one worth making

If you haven’t installed certbot yet, you should

“Telsa will add solar power to the Cybertruck to generate 15 miles per day. Fold-out solar wings for the Cybertruck would generate 30 to 40 miles per day. The average daily commute in the US averages 30 miles per day.”

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/11/solar-power-tesla-cybertruck-could-have-free-15-40-mile-daily-commutes.html (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1197889310550216704)

Or remember my comments on SolarCity 3 years ago?

Offering a solar option (or standard) tonneau cover for the bed is an absolute no-brainer. When you own the solar production plant, why wouldn’t you include it?

But more than this, the multi-motor options are a real-world implementation of something I’ve been saying for 20+ years: it makes far more sense to put a motor at (or very near) each wheel or at least axel in an electric vehicle than it does to have one that’s distributing its work everywhere.

Sure, running the cabling to each wheel/axel is a little complicated – but it’s a lot less complicated than drivetrains.

As I mentioned a while back, I am maintaining a merikebi for myself of as much of my public internet content as possible.

The initial seeding of content was done via WordPress import. Then I added a dump from Pocket of everything I’d saved there.

Lastly, to keep it going, I made a few IFTTT triggers – one for my Twitter account, and then one each to import from RSS from my other blogs.

IFTTT has been a great tool for me for several years. And though their current interface isn’t as simple as it used to be, it’s still got great functionality.

A lot of talk has been made in the past couple years (and even currently by one of the fellas running for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination to be their candidate for President) of governments (which really means taxpayers) funding a universal basic income.

Alaska’s been doing something like this for close to 40 years.

So have several other places – including Finland.

In the vein of Scott Adams (sidebar – if you’re not listening to his podcast (or watching it on YouTube (or participating in the Periscopes)), you should), here’s an idea.

At birth, every citizen born in the United States will be granted $100,000 in a safe financial vehicle (T-Bills? Savings bonds? CDs redeemable at a Federal Reserve Bank?) – as a prorated benefit over 18 years (if, God forbid, they die before adulthood – accumulated funds will be designated to their parents or legal guardians in the event they pass before reaching their 18th birthday.).

That’s an accumulating ~$5555 per year for 18 years.

There are about 4 million babies born in the US every year.

Additional cost to taxpayers (ie the Federal budget)? About $22.2 billion per year² (for ~20-25 years, then it would be flat (at ~$550B/year), presuming no major increase in birth rate).

But when you turn 18, BAM!

$100,000 to do with whatsoever your heart desires.

Down payment on a house? Check.

New car? Check.

Tuition to college or trade school? Check.

Invest in stocks, bonds, starting a business? Check.

Roll-over into an IRA? Check.

It’s yours.

Tax-free.

To keep.

To do with whatever and however you like.

What would you do with it?

For a long time, I’ve been concerned about knowledge capture.

And archiving.

I’ve finally done something about my own public persona.

It’s not 100% complete, but I’ve created my own “online merikebi” of public content.

It’s over at https://merikebi.warrenmyers.com. It’s collecting posts from all of my blogs, Reddit, and Twitter.

As and when appropriate (and possible), I’ll add other public sources (for example, I cannot collect my Quora content anymore).