Category: 401k and Personal Finance

Weekly thoughts 12-16-2021

Post author By stlplace
Post date December 18, 2021
No Comments on Weekly thoughts 12-16-2021

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Looking at the 5, 10, and 20 years chart of $CAT, $LUV and $SPY, then $MA. It seems in 5 and 20 years, $CAT beats $LUV and $SPY, while the 10 year performance was the opposite. Note I haven’t counted the dividend (or dividend re-investing in all cases). Then when I put the $MA in play (note it only has about 15 year history in the market), the above 8,000% performance since its IPO dwarfs all the others. So in other words picking the winner over a long period of time still matters. Note $MA along with other high flyers such as $TSLA, $NVDA, $MSFT, $NFLX, and $MAZN are all doing very well in last 15 years. Note I used the chart functionality inside TD Ameritrade website.
HSA may be a sleeper that a lot of people did not pay enough attention. I am going to be prepared when the S&P 500 index goes down, and switch some of my cash in HSA to the index fund.

3. $BRK.B break out $300 barrier the first time, and reached its all time high. One share of BRK b share is worth 1/1,500 of the A share, btw.

4. What’s the proper valuation for high growth saas stock. Recently I saw someone mentioned the PS ratio (price to sales, or market cap to revenue ratio) to be 1/2 of the revenue growth (year over year). So for example, if $ZM is growing at 20% year over year, we are willing to pay about $40 billion market cap (about $4 b revenue x 10).

5. #FinTwit. I found on twitter, that some people are just too emotional or personally attached to one specific stock or one sector (for example, saas). We need to be open minded if we want to be successful in investing. A good example again is Warren Buffett, a few years ago, he was probably 85, and he piled into Apple stock as he saw the opportunity there (he observed many iPhone is essential part of many people’s lives).

6. Robinhood or meme (or mean) stocks. I had a small position of $HOOD, and this past week the market was brutal to $HOOD, as it dipped below $20 the first time. I noticed that $AMC and other meme stocks rebounded on Friday, as did $HOOD. It sort of confirmed my speculation or hypothesis that $HOOD is a barometer of meme stocks ($GME, $AMC etc #stonks). I also noticed it benefited from the Dogecoin, but the Dogecoin faded away recently. Re: the crypto wallet and technology overall though, I believe $HOOD is much more sophisticated compared to $BKKT, which had rollercoaster ride in last 2 months. Bakkt holdings rewards and crypto wallet solution reminded me the cash app by $SQ (Square Inc, now Block), as I used the offer to get about $10 worth of Bitcoin so far. I am not a believer of Bitcoin or crypto btw.

7. Last but not least, the recent sharp down trend of Nasdaq high flyers, from the $DOCU medium cap #saas high growth to the big tech such as $TSLA, $FB, $GOOGL or $AMZN. I think once a stock in a downward cycle (the right side of the curve, if I may), and the trend is confirmed, the down cycle could continue for a while. The recent examples include 2000 dot.com crash and 2008 financial crisis (great recession). I understand right now we don’t know/. As the old saying does the hindsight is 20/20: we only know when we look backward.

401k and Personal Finance

Self checkout lane

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The self checkout at grocery store and warehouses. Personally I think Costco $COST got it right, they have plenty of staffs to assist: for scanning as well as alcohol overwrite. Sam’s Club has one staff helping multiple lanes, but it also has a #scanandgo option in its app. /1

The scanning feature in the app works fairly well in my opinion. Local grocery stores Dierbergs and Schnucks have self checkout lanes too. I go to Schnucks more often and have used it’s self checkout many times: and yesterday evening I made a blunder as I had too many items /2

Their self scanning system was not designed to handle more than 10 items, also sometimes it’s hard to scan the bakery 🧁 items in plastic box, as well as meat 🥩 items /3

Now I recall Walmart $WMT has this self checkout feature too. It works fairly well when I used it recently (fewer than 10 items). Last but not least, it doesn’t appear that the self checkout is replacing cashier’s job with machine. For example Costco again, they are relentless/4

On customer service and they have plenty of staffs to cover the self checkout lanes. And I overheard two people talking their hourly pay is $22 per hour. This number is in the high end in St. Louis Missouri /5

Full disclosure: I have some $COST and $WMT shares.

401k and Personal Finance

NerdWallet ipo

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感觉这个市场还是有些泡沫的. EV 就不说了：昨天傍晚🌆的时候开车时我的七岁小女儿说看到一个Tesla. I was thinking buy a share of $TSLA just now, but I changed to $F instead [呲牙] || Separately I noticed NerdWallet the personal finance / credit card 💳 bonus website went public last week. I worked in the credit card rewards space in the past and I used to get some sign on bonus. But the credit card bonus is a bit like snake oil. But it cannot compare to ev, green, esg, climate action and space x etc.

Btw, some engineering blogs from NerdWallet that I like.

VersionAlchemy: Tracking row changes with SQLAlchemy (VersionAlchemy at GitHub; also the original SQLAlchemy website. Note the former is based on the latter.)

Building a product platform at NerdWallet – Part 1

Building a product platform at NerdWallet – Part 2

401k and Personal Finance

Weekend thoughts: Zoom and Math

Post author By stlplace
Post date March 28, 2020
No Comments on Weekend thoughts: Zoom and Math

Reading Time: 2 minutes

For most Americans, Zoom meeting probably becomes the hottest potato in last few weeks, as we saw the pandemic situation got worse: New York, New Orleans, Detroit, Dallas, and so on. I started to using Zoom about a year ago when I started my new job, and the product experience was good. Note I have used many meeting software in the past, from Webex, Skype, GoToMeeting to google hangout, Slack, Microsoft Teams. Before Zoom GoToMeeting was my favorite. Skype probably is the worst. This is not a scientific comparison, mostly my gut feeling. Zoom is pretty standard in technology companies as well, even for interviewing (no more airplane ride, and uber ride, and hotel stay). Couple more points on Zoom. Zoom is not perfect in terms of security and privacy. And yours truly owns a few shares of Zoom. Last but not least, I do like Zoom’s founder, Eric S. Yuan (wiki English; wiki Chinese). It looks like he came to the US the same year I came. He is very much grounded person, even though is a billionaire now. I think he came from a humble background in China, which is common in China in those days (he was born in 1970, one year earlier than me).

But my point here is while Zoom is important, we should not equivalent zoom = learning or communicating or working. For that I am very much appreciative of this tweet by @DHH.

A more important task, in nowadays’ always-on culture, is the basics: reading, writing, thinking and so on. Otherwise we will end like this. Everyone makes mistakes, my point is not that Brian Williams makes stupid math mistakes. It’s more the issue two people talking about the talking points without realizing that their math is totally wrong. This is more issue in the America right now: the guy or the girl who have the microphone (in some sort of public facing position) usually don’t know what they are talking about. If in doubt, just look at the white house.

Last but not least, here is a stimulus check calculator developed by OmniCalculator.

Stimulus Check Calculator

401k and Personal Finance

Financial crisis and wall streets movies

Post author By stlplace
Post date March 23, 2020
No Comments on Financial crisis and wall streets movies

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Hank: about Hank Paulson, available at Netflix

Too Big To Fail: on Amazon Prime

I am only curious about Wall Street and movies by Michael Lewis

401k and Personal Finance

Technology, distance learning and my meltdown

Post author By stlplace
Post date March 22, 2020
No Comments on Technology, distance learning and my meltdown

Reading Time: < 1 minuteI was thinking about this as we are at least expecting one month of distance learning for our two kids (K and 4th grade) due to the lockdown of Coronavirus pandemic. Ladue School use google suite and I think they may use google classroom for some or most teacher / students interactions. I was thinking about Zoom as Zoom recently announced free usage K-12 due to the pandemic. Many tech companies have similar initiatives. Not sure how my two kids will handle this. They are not super confident or outspoken in the class: I was hoping they could be a bit more confident (or a lot more) and be a bit more assertive.

This remind me one thing when I was already graduating from middle school. I called my classmate, at that time it’s not the direct phone, it’s like operator assisted phone. The classmate came online, and I did not know what to say (I was shy at the time too), and just freaked out in the end. I don’t think I would freak out in person. So there is my 2 cents on the distance or online learning. It may create some challenges to students who may not be comfortable with microphone or public speaking. For myself, I tried to improve myself on this aspect, I made some progress: and it was still working in progress. 🙂

401k and Personal Finance

I love Italy

Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe news coming from Italy is heartbreaking: Italy lost nearly 800 people in one day due to Coronavirus. Overall Italy lost more people than the epicenter of outbreak in China’s Hubei province (Wuhan is the capital city of Hubei, with 11 millions people). I think Italy has a population comparable to Hubei’s. In my high school years, a while ago, I watched quite a bit Italian soccer league, from Maradona to other Italian and International players. Milan has two teams: AC and Inter. And I know a little about Italy from the world history class. They are some explanations of the higher death rate in Italy. I hope things can get better from here. Besides the difference in terms of social distancing and lock down, Wuhan / Hubei did have one advantage that Italy does not have: that is China poured help from many other provinces: in total there were more than 40,000 doctors and nurses coming from all over China to help, that was about 10% of the relevant healthcare resources in China. Here is an article talking about the people in Wuhan sending off the medic teams leaving Wuhan when the mission is completed. This kind of arrangement is difficult to accomplish in Italy, if not all possible. But note China did send some help in terms of advisors (doctors) and medical supplies to Italy, Iran, Spain and other countries (Serbia, Czech), also neighboring Asian countries too.

401k and Personal Finance Career Life

Working from home amid pandemic and financial crisis

Post author By stlplace
Post date March 20, 2020
1 Comment on Working from home amid pandemic and financial crisis

Reading Time: 2 minutesI have my first experience of working from home amid financial crisis in Nov 2008. I started a new job with Autodesk consulting division at the time, after working for my previous employer for 8+ years. My intention is to get more customer engagement experience, and also if I stayed, I would probably stay for a year or more to go through the financial crisis. So I decided to jump ship.

It was not smooth experience. I probably would not do it if I have to do it again. Couple reasons: 1) I was not familiar with the software I was supporting or consulting with, it’s a new language and new application for me; 2) I was new to working from home. Before that I did some working from home due to doctor appointment, or as integrator doing after hours work, or doing development work on thanksgiving when I am bored (I was single then). I also worked from remote office (Shanghai) for 6 months: I social with my Chinese colleagues there though. Some of the bad memory I had: I wear panamas all day, the work never stops really, from morning say 9 am until 10 pm, because the laptop was always on. There is no colleague to ask for ideas or chitchat, or have an intelligent discussion.

Financial crisis is another source of uncertainty, as the economy is basically in decline or flat for a while. Job security, project renewal etc. I think of things I can control, and things I cannot (this is something I learned from Arch Coal, esp. from David the CIO later on). I have a bit more control on my work, but absolutely no control on the market or economy. I have some control on the project, or best practice or process. At that time my sweet point is actually work from Panera bread, Borders (the book store, not gone), Barnes Noble and Starbucks (not my favorite because it’s a bit crowded). I recall seeing Frank Cusumano couple times at the Borders (maybe Bread Co too).

So slowly I gained some confidence this way, by playing my strength: developer mentality, analytical, source code version control (even for the automation design we were doing). I still switched to a regular office developer job in Feb 2010. But I think I learned some valuable WFH or remote lessons in my 15 months at Autodesk $ADSK

Also read work from home friendly companies.

(Update 05-27-2023) Came across this article – Elon Musk says the ‘laptop class’ needs to ‘get off their moral high horse’ when it comes to remote work” (also the original interview on CNBC with David Faber on video). My quick comment: Elon made his point. My counter point is knowledge workers (teachers and principals included) don’t stopping working when they are off-work: the brain doesn’t working or thinking in off hours. Sometimes I think about work related problem in sleep (dream) too. || Btw, Elon obviously needs more sleep (and chill) looking from the picture in the article. A side point from Elon is more valid though: that is the envy, or jealousy or “comparison with others is the thief of the joy” are very common in our daily thinkings. Or “grass is greener at neighbors yard”. This is more a physiological phenomena though.

Tags remoteWorking, WFH, work-from-home

401k and Personal Finance

Market, corona virus, panic

Post author By stlplace
Post date March 13, 2020

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The US stock market started to feel the heat of corona virus in recent weeks. This week is the worst in term of the percentage loss (8%) and the fear of the market.

Along the same lines, so much fear among the ordinary people due to the news such as Tom Hanks got infected, NBA / NCAA games cancelled, Italy was getting into situation like Wuhan (healthcare system was overwhelmed), and the quarantine / shutdown of the whole country. I can feel the fear of the market as my friends talked much more about the market on wechat.

Last time things were like this, in terms of both the percentage drop (and the speed of the drop), CNBC running extra evening shows, and friends got excited and discussing stocks nonstop (at mitbbs, trader1688, gutone etc websites, no wechat app yet). Then comes the craziness of the stocking things from grocery store or drug stores, from hand sanitizer to toilet paper, from food to drinks. I do understand the situation in Italy and other countries. I also understand the “under-test” of US sick population. It’s improving as time goes, just as the WH made announcement this afternoon. As to the “buying craziness”, I still think it’s unnecessary. When this thing first started in Wuhan, China, friends here asked about buying face masks. I did not listen. I may still a few left in my year 2017 trip. But I am not overly worried. I am cautious though: try to stay away from the crowds, including office. I think we will likely to overcome this.

While for me compared to 2008/9 financial crisis, I am both older and have 2 young kids, I am not overly scared. I do have some savings and lift insurance. I will try my best to keep myself from getting sick. Short term it will be horrible for many people who have less meanings. We should try to help if / when we can.

Last but not least, I maintained a wiki page for the corona virus at github. You may also note I made some changes to this wordpress website recently. Started about a year ago to upgrade the WP to 5.0 (manual) to the upgrade a day ago. I am still trying to figure out things as I made changes, for example, I found out the comments not longer show: I likely did intentionally a while ago to battle the spams, but I could not put it back as the stlplace.com/uudaddy has. Also note uudaddy.com is moved under stlplace.com/uudaddy (site consolidation, I don’t want to pay $18 for the uudaddy.com domain name). I had the domain in 2010 when my first daughter is born, and I think going forward I am ok with the stlplace.com only. A lot has changed since I have the stlplace.com domain, with the virus I think longer term we will use more internet, web, devices and virtual learn / interaction instead of physical. This is a bit unfortunate, but we live in ab “adapt, or die” world.

Tags corona virus, fear, psychology, stock-market