How much do you know about financial independence?

Posted by: Fast-Orange

Posted by: switch

Posted by: Fast-Orange

Posted by: switch

Posted by: Fast-Orange

Bloodbath incoming:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/27/tech/deepseek-stocks-ai-china/index.html

I love announcements that have zero information other than a claim.

AI has been driving the stock market for a couple years now, Deepseek is superior and they did it all with in-house chips.

Not to mention there's currently a mad man in the Whitehouse.

Lol Asia you'll see in 6 months?

They use NVidia computing units. Thousands of them.

Great model that they've generated:

Q: "What happened at Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989?"

A: "I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses.

See the cool thing is unlike chatGPT deepseek is open source so anyone can take the code and change the parameters to suit them.

They scraped every existing LLM out there to produce their own condensed model. Typical stealing of what others have spent a ton of money to develop.

You can easily run your own LLM at home on your personal computer. With a mid-level gaming graphics card you'll get the same thing with good performance and accurate results. And it's all available for free from companies like NVidia or Meta.

Oh, and I forgot:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/chinese-made-deepseek-ai-model-collects-extensive-user-data-stores-it-on-china-based-servers

Posted by: Couch_Surfer

Posted by: heckler

Came here to say the same. We’re back baby!

VFV $155.xx last week, now $154.99

My buddy with a bunch of financial degrees texted me to let me know that my VGRO outperformed his balanced portfolio by 8% this year.

I told him I'd be happy to manage his assets for a minimal fee.

if balanced means 60/40, then it's clear why a 80/20 VGRO would outperform. He needs to compare to VBAL.  I'm getting much closer to changing everything to VGRO or BAL

OK, AI lessons and data harvesting talk, get your own thread please.  Commiserating with panic sellers can stay here.

Posted by: [email protected]

Ignoring the noise and staying the course is not for everyone ;-)

Why not do both?  95% stay the course and 5% grab what you can from the noise

Posted by: Fast-Orange

Posted by: [email protected]

Ignoring the noise and staying the course is not for everyone ;-)

Why not do both? 95% stay the course and 5% grab what you can from the noise

Go for it.

Honestly, 5% of your overall portfolio for flyers is perfectly reasonable.  Just understand and accept the downside.

Diamond hands GME to the moon

Posted by: Couch_Surfer

Posted by: Fast-Orange

Posted by: [email protected]

Ignoring the noise and staying the course is not for everyone ;-)

Why not do both? 95% stay the course and 5% grab what you can from the noise

Go for it.

Honestly, 5% of your overall portfolio for flyers is perfectly reasonable.  Just understand and accept the downside.

Diamond hands GME to the moon

Sure, if it satisfies the FOMO and you can stick to the 5%, why not.

To me, having enough is good enough and staying the course delivers enough. More than enough doesn't add much value. No need or desire to strike it big.

The conversation about NVIDIA dropping half a trillion in a day, the general overweighting of the tech sector as a proportion of the S&P500 (close to half it's value) and the generally the silly valuations for companies (PE ratios of 30+) got me thinking about my exposure to the Magnificent 7 in VGRO.

VGRO is an ETF of ETFs.  It holds 5 other ETFs to have an 80/20 balance in stocks to bonds with both regional and sectoral diversification.  All the percentage allocations for these funds as a make up of VGRO is available on vanguard.

Anyway, it was interesting to me to find that in VGRO - the US Total Market ETF (tracking 3600 stocks) is weighted at 38.05% (VUN), but of those 3600 stocks, the top 9 stocks make up 30.80% of the fund's value.  Multiply that into VGROs underlying ETFs allocation and it looks to me like 11.72% of VGRO is made up of those 9 stocks.

Not sure I love that, feels a bit too frothy for it's own good. 

VBAL(60/40) and VCNS (40/60) are 8.76% and 5.82% respectively.

go watch Taylor T in the other thread, she's pretty funny about how much she cares about NVDA

I've always underweighted (25%, now sitting at 27%) S&P and US total market VUN/VTI/VFV, but over-weighted Canada VCN at 22%. I guess that's why I'm still working (for now...). Still trying to maintain a 70/30 manually.

Funny you mention this, Vanguard literally today sent us in writing, old school paper, regarding VTI (aka VUN):

...the Fund will continue to track its target index even if the fund becomes nondiversified.

Shareholder approval will not be sought if the Fund crosses from diversified to nondiversified status under such conditions.

Sector risk: The chance that significant problems will affect a particular sector, or that returns from that sector will trail returns from the overall stock market. Daily fluctuations in specific market sectors are often more extreme or volatile than fluctuations in the overall market. Because a significant portion of the fund’s assets are in the information technology sector, the fund’s performance is impacted by the general condition of that sector. Companies in the information technology sector could be affected by, among other things, overall economic conditions, short product cycles, rapid obsolescence of products, competition, and government regulation.

Nondiversification risk: Because the fund seeks to closely track the composition of the fund's target index, from time to time, more than 25% of the fund's total assets may be invested in issuers representing more than 5% of the fund's total assets due to an index rebalance or market movement, which would result in the fund being nondiversified under the Investment Company Act of 1940. The fund’s performance may be hurt disproportionately by the poor performance of relatively few stocks, or even a single stock, and the fund’s shares may experience significant fluctuations in value.

Posted by: Couch_Surfer

The conversation about NVIDIA dropping half a trillion in a day,

and yet VFV is less than a canuck buck off it's all time high, and VTI is less than 3 greenbacks off it's ATH. I would stay the course, ignore the noise. "Wal Mart and costco and other essentials retailers" are the next sector to rotate in, we're already owners.

Are we allowed to call it a bloodbath yet?

Posted by: Fast-Orange

Are we allowed to call it a bloodbath yet?

Meh.

VEQT -0.66% YTD right now

VGRO -0.16% YTD

I don't know where it will head from here but the market has been going up for a while so sooner or later it was going to go down.

I reached my target back in Oct or Nov and stopped contributing. Since then the market has kept going up until now. Despite small recent drop, I'm still above my target and on top of that I've used the time to fill a cash buffer.

7.5 more corporate work days to go and then we will see if this stuff really works.

Just awaiting my monthly VAB interest payments today, should be shy of a pre-tarriff carbon wheelset to put into cash for later this year. Accounts total sitting at January 16th's level, minus a significant physical purchase made.

Meh. Global Diversification works, EAFE index is +9.16% YTD, a full +12% pullaway from the S&P.

Congrats Niels!

Posted by: Fast-Orange

Are we allowed to call it a bloodbath yet?

It's barely a flesh wound at this point.  Maybe you weren't around for 2008 or 1999.

Yam Turd's rhetoric around the USA entering a recession and ramping up the trade war have made the markets jittery AF. S&P trading at in its 98th percentile on P/E... and has only really given up the 'trump bump'.  I can see lots of reasons to see a proper correction of 20 or 30 points or more, just need a real catalyst to kick the panic up a notch.  You know, like a measles epidemic or an invasion of Taiwan.

Oh, almost forgot that the Atlanta Fed model has swung from a forecast of ~2% growth in US GDP in Q1FY25 to a forecast of negative 3% in Q1FY25.  They base that model on a whole bunch of data inputs, but what's notable is that swing happened in a week.  

I guess a bunch of skilled economists thing trade wars and rhetoric around recessions are bad for economic growth.  Go figure.