Short Takes: Shorting Bitcoin, Financial Survival, and more

Here are my posts for the past two weeks:

Finance for Normal People

Should You Delay Taking CPP and OAS?

Leaving a Spouse to Pick up the Pieces

Here are some short takes and some weekend reading:

New securities will make it possible to short bitcoin. This is very tempting, but I have to consider the possibility that some government or major set of banks might choose to back bitcoin. I certainly don’t think this is likely, but it’s enough to stop me from shorting bitcoin.

Jason Zweig interviewed Peter L. Bernstein. An important quote: “Survival is the only road to riches. You should try to maximize return only if losses would not threaten your survival and if you have a compelling future need for the extra gains you might earn.”

John Bogle offers 7 rules of successful investing.

Dan Bortolotti answers a question about fees for moving assets out of a brokerage. Will the new online brokerage cover these fees?

 Ted Rechtshaffen explains “two major [conflicts of interest] that every consumer should be aware of, and I believe regulators should focus on”: one for financial advisors and the other for insurance brokers.

Big Cajun Man is looking into how much he can save in taxes with pension income splitting.

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Comments

  1. PotatoDecember 8, 2017 at 8:03 AM

    Divestor had an interesting post on the new instruments potentially leading to a short squeeze on bitcoin.

    No position myself, and I think in 10 years we'll all have a good chuckle of how people poured so much hardware and electricity into this, but that doesn't mean it won't hit [insert arbitrarily large number here] on the way.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Michael JamesDecember 8, 2017 at 8:49 AM

      @Potato: If a short squeeze takes place, I'll be watching from the sidelines.

      My initial reaction to bitcoin was to work on breaking SHA256. If anyone can do this, they've been very careful to control their greed and keep profits to undetectable levels.

      Delete

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