Reddit reviews Where Are the Customers' Yachts?: or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street
We found 19 Reddit comments about Where Are the Customers' Yachts?: or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
John Wiley Sons
exactly right - I think rather than random walk OP could leverage the phrase " SIDEWAYS MARKET "
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sidewaysmarket.asp
aside: there is a funny book along the same vein as A random walk down Wall street called "Where are the customers yachts?"
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Street/dp/0471770892
Deeply sorry for your loss. I received some advice as a young man about windfalls that I’ll share with you.
Forget about the money for a year. Open a separate bank account that you won’t see and live like it isn’t there. The lost income from investments for one year will be insignificant compared to the cost of a hurried misstep.
In a year with a clear head and a strong heart educate yourself about different investment philosophies and see which ones resonate with you. Investing is very personal and there isn’t one right answer.
There isn’t a right answer, but be wary of the salesmen. All the money / wealth managers are well compensated for their advice and there are many ways they hide their fees and take advantage of their clients (even fiduciaries). If you’re considering enlisting a professional, a robotic trader like https://www.wealthfront.com/ or https://intelligent.schwab.com/ will serve you just as well with lower fees. If you do decide to enlist an advisor to help formulate a financial plan for you, find a fee-based advisor who you can pay once every few years to update the plan.
Here are a few books that were helpful to me in developing my investment philosophy that allowed me to retire in my early thirties.
Bogleheads / Vanguard Index Funds
https://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Common-Sense-Investing/dp/1119404509
The Richest Man in Babylon (investing philosophy)
https://www.amazon.com/Richest-Man-Babylon-George-Clason/dp/1505339111
Dave Ramsey / Personal Finance
https://www.amazon.com/Total-Money-Makeover-Financial-Fitness/dp/159555078X
Tax-Free Wealth - Tom Wheelwright / How investments affect your taxes
https://www.amazon.com/Tax-Free-Wealth-Permanently-Lowering-Advisors/dp/1937832058
Where are the Customer’s Yachts
https://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Street/dp/0471770892
This reminds me of "Where are all the customers Yachts" by Fred Schwed. This investment classic points out how some of the fat cats on Wall St. are making massive amounts of money while bringing little benefit to clients. It's a quick read and I highly recommend it: http://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Investment/dp/0471770892
AP @ http://financewithreason.com
you should read (below). there's a great section there saying don't sweat the traders. their trades have to come full circle and close out their trades. so if you are willing to withstand the short term ups and downs, the traders can't damage the long term price. and if a little bit of shorting causes the house of cards to come down, it wasn't very secure to begin with.
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Street/dp/0471770892
To cur a long story short, Travis became a financial planner, started his own company, and has made enough money to quit at age 30 & now he's almost a doctor.
The moral is become a financial planner, not one of their customers!
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Street/dp/0471770892
The title refers to an ancient story (which the author finds is probably at least 100 years old by now) about a visitor to New York who admired the yachts that the bankers and brokers had in the harbor. Naively, he then asked where the customers' yachts were. Naturally, there were no customers' yachts.
Then:
Finally, always remember the first line in The Money Game.
Good luck!
https://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Street/dp/0471770892
Just kidding. It is proportional to the amount invested.
It's actually a book: Where Are the Customers' Yachts?
https://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Street/dp/0471770892
> The human mind reacts strongly to wild swings in value and those are best measured by volatility.
See, like I said previous, I pray for wild swings in portfolio value. (wild swings in FCF or dividend payouts would keep me up at night)
>I don't have the accounting knowledge and haven't really cared to venture in that direction yet.
That is insane to me. To the extant possible, I want to have as much knowledge about a company as the CFO or controller does (that is publicly available). I don't know that I would consider what you do investing honestly - I might be cynical, but I do consider the asset management industry to be very much like a casino, where the casino exists only to get its cut. I think the industry is necessary, don't get me wrong, but I feel it can be like real estate agents. They don't care if you are happy with the house you end up with, or about your financial well being, they just want churn and transaction fees. (please dont argue that Wall Street is the one industry with a heart). Obviously some companies are great, and much better than others, but on the whole, I don't see a lot of customer yachts.
I think a more appropriate measure is the free cash flow (or owners earnings) over time. The efficient market hypothesis presupposes that Wall Street is filled with rational actors, but the conclusion doesnt follow from the premise.
Conclusion: We should consider that Wall Street acts rationally and efficiently values companies.
The whole idea seems crazy to me. Farmers don't ask politicians how much a cow is worth, or how to raise one.
for reference, what sort of costs are involved? Is it a fixed cost or do they take a percentage?
I got some advice a long time ago to be very skeptical of anyone that manages your money for high fees, and I love the super low fees vanguard has on their passive funds (0.08% in one case). This book I read half of touches on this: https://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Street/dp/04717708920892
There's a difference between 'value-added service' and 'blood-sucking parasites'
"Where are the Customers' Yachts?"
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Investment/dp/0471770892/
It has definitions for investing and speculation .
Go read Where Are The Customer's Yachts?
>“…[M]y tendency has been to buy stocks, all a-tremble as I do so. Then when they show a profit I sell them, exultantly. (But never within six months, of course. I’m no anarchist.) It seems to me at these moments that I have achieved life’s loveliest guerdon – making some money without doing any work. Then a long time later it turns out that I should have just bought them, and thereafter I should have just sat on them like a fat, stupid peasant. A peasant, however, who is rich beyond his limited dreams of avarice.”
> I would argue that it seems to be something that has happened on a few occasions rather than being the norm
I think the more you get to know how the system works the more you will conclude that it is in fact the norm. This is part of the reason I'm in Bitcoin to begin with.
I can recommend a classic book called Where are all the Customer's Yachts? if you are interested in a timeless perspective on Wall Street.
It's not exactly helpful for personal finance, but it does give you a healthy dose of cynicism about the financial services industry: Where Are the Customers' Yachts?: or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street.
>See, like I said previous, I pray for wild swings in portfolio value. (wild swings in FCF or dividend payouts would keep me up at night)
Yet wild swings in equity prices are often accompanied(generally driven by the expectation of) by wild swings in FCF or dividends.
>That is insane to me. To the extant possible, I want to have as much knowledge about a company as the CFO or controller does (that is publicly available).
But that's why I don't foray in to individual equities a ton. It's something I need to expand on but I haven't yet.
>I don't know that I would consider what you do investing honestly
Admittedly building a portfolio of asset classes is easy. Building the right portfolio for the individual isn't even that hard. But as evidenced by this thread there are plenty who simply wouldn't be able to do it themselves.
>I might be cynical, but I do consider the asset management industry to be very much like a casino, where the casino exists only to get its cut. I think the industry is necessary, don't get me wrong, but I feel it can be like real estate agents.
Financial advisors? Absolutely. Most of them know more about playing a round of golf then investing their clients assets. One of the top producers at the insurance place I interned at told me index funds were like gambling because you never knew what the market would do.
> (please dont argue that Wall Street is the one industry with a heart).
If I ever did please punch me.
> Obviously some companies are great, and much better than others, but on the whole, I don't see a lot of customer yachts.
Great book btw.
>Stock market
OK, ~80% of your reply is on the stock market, and it's one claim more broken than the next. This is serious bullshit... No, I don't day trade. I work in finance, and see things from the inside. And your understanding of the stock market is so poor, it's no better than what a journalist might say. It's hard to accept, and you won't accept my word for it, I'm sure, yet it's true. "Pick good stocks", "real investors", "stocks immune from inflation", "re-invest profits", ... this is all empty talk of someone who has an amateurish understanding at best.
>Thus the market cap of a real company is how much the investors estimate that the company's assets (including those cash reserves) and future profits are worth. That is why Apple's shares keep increasing in value.
Sure, and the flood of money provided by QE has got nothing to do with it. Lol
>Stock investing, if anything, is the opposite: the older generation invests, and the new generation reaps the profits.
Right because it's the older generation that "needs to build a retirement pot", who contributes to their 401k every month, and the younger generation that draws annuities every month to spend as they please. LOLOLOLOLOL Please keep entertaining me.
>Smart investors (real investors) buy stocks for their dividends (or equivalent, like company expansion or stock buybacks from the company).
LOL So naive it's not even funny. But sure, keep believing that.
Once again, read "Where are the customers' yachts?". Written in the 1920s, still just as valid. It's actually a classic in investments.
https://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Street/dp/0471770892/
>Only fools and criminals invest in currencies
I'd gladly be a criminal fool like George Soros or others who made a killing from trading FX.
You also show very little understanding of fiat currency, which, with no exception, over time has gone to zero. The best we, as humanity, have been able to do with fiat is the GBP. Over ~300 years it is nothing but a shadow of what it was at first. (Hint: 1 pound stirling was... the equivalent of 1 pound of stirling silver. I'll let you calculate the inflation.)
I'm not gonna discuss the stock market with you any more, much like you wouldn't discuss CS with a philosopher getting all their information from popular books on CS.
 
 
>Funny thing for a bitcoin supporter to say ;-)
Ad Hominem. Lack of real arguments?
>Thus the fact that the toy LN that is out there (whose users are all there to shill BTC or help the LN devs) has processed thousands of transactions is no evidence at all that it can achieve that goal.
It also doesn't mean that it cannot. In 1990 the internet could not stream 4K. Not only that, it was damn hard for anyone to imagine that one day we could. Then MP3/MPEG and other compression algos came. People are building, you are talking. People are doing real CS research, absolutely needed to make it viable, you are talking.
>> Cost of fiat infrastructure
>And what does that have to do with investing?
You mentioned the daily $6m that miners make, and I replied with the correct analogy. It's the cost of securing the network. Or better, the current revenue for securing the network.
>But any crypto could do that too, without the LN: just have generous miners that accept 0-fee transactions.
Really? Did you really just say 0-fee could achieve the same? Honestly, I will start doubting your CS credentials if you keep it like that. How about a FREE DDoS attack that brings the entire network down if that was the case? Send 100m txs of 1sat each to myself, for free, and flood the network? And write a script that will repeat the same thing after they get confirmed?
>It is "create a functional payment system that millions of people will want to use instead of PayPal and the like, and instead of on-chain cryptocurrency."
You lack basic economics understanding. People will use it IF it is more convenient. Bitcoin offers something PayPal doesn't, censorship resistance. This doesn't come for free, it has a cost. Those who find that valuable will use it, others won't. Market competition. And it's also not instead of on-chain. God, how difficult is it to understand that they will complement each other? If absolute security is paramount, you'll do on-chain and pay the fee. This will likely be for large sums of money. For your coffee? Who freaking cares. You'll use the LN. Credit cards for coffee, you say? Sure, once could build CCs on top of bitcoin, too. But perhaps more importantly, the LN offers use cases previously not possible, like streaming money (stream content for money). Or true micro payments - $10c for reading an article, for instance. Or how about forgetting about the local currency when you travel?
All of these are absolutely legitimate cases for a "digital global currency". This is driven by market forces, nothing else. People who need it will use it, others won't. But if you can't, or refuse to see it, that's hardly anything that anyone can do.
It's not very good reddiquette to put a referral code in your link.
Edit:
err, though maybe there isn't one here...
This is all you need to link to this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Investment/dp/0471770892/
Hence my thinking that there is a referral code in the OP link.