Top all-time · #5479
P
pwlcapital.com
Company blog · pwlcapital.comeconomicsbusiness
pwlcapital.com is the company blog at pwlcapital.com, writing about economics and business. Since 2015, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 51 times, most often “Investing in Technological Revolutions”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
No feed foundVisit the blog
51mentions?
15HN people?
2015–2026first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (21) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
PWL Capital publishes investing research and articles on index funds, dollar-cost averaging versus lump sum, gold as an inflation hedge, market timing and technology investing. HN commenters cite them as evidence.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 21 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /will-gold-save-the-day/5 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2021-01-10
- Investing in Technological Revolutions3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-12-14
- There Is No Such Thing as an Index Fund Bubble (2019)2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-10-11
What Hacker News says?
> Perhaps there is an argument to Bitcoin being a kind of "digital gold" even if it is all but useless as a currency. Gold is less useful than most people think: > In a 2012 paper entitled "The Golden Dilemma",[1] Claude Erb and Campbell Harvey examined some common assumptions about gold. First they looked at gold as an inflation hedge, analyzing gold returns from 1975 (the year the U.S. came off of the gold standar…
Comment linking /will-gold-save-the-day/
on “Nassim Taleb: Bitcoin failed as a currency and became a speculative ponzi scheme”Submitted Finding and Funding a Good Life as a story · 4 points
HN discussionBy propped up, do you mean index funds are affecting price discovery? Because from my understanding that's not how it works: https://www.pwlcapital.com/there-is-no-such-thing-as-an-inde...
Comment linking /there-is-no-such-thing-as-an-index-fund-bubble/
on “Coinbase stock lost over 75% value”Submitted There Is No Such Thing as an Index Fund Bubble (2019) as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Yes, and not only that, but the index funds a skewed towards entities with large market caps. There are index funds of every publicly traded company in the US: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_3000_Index Vanguard themselves have changed things so that employees no longer have the option of choosing the S&P 500 fund in their own retirement accounts, but rather the Total Market fund: * https://www.marketwatch…
Comment linking /should-you-invest-in-the-sp-500-index/
on “Ask HN: I have $450K cash, what should I do to maximize my return?”Submitted Finding and Funding a Good Life [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> A market with no active management would allocate capital arbitrarily, without an eye to returns. I recommend you read up on the following (from me elsewhere on this topic): > So what would happen if the majority of investors started to buy the market and stopped trying to beat the market? > Mispricings would start to develop regularly, and the people that had continued to try and pick stocks would be able to prof…
Comment linking /the-grosman-stiglitz-paradox/
on “Ask HN: I have $450K cash, what should I do to maximize my return?”Submitted Investing in Technological Revolutions as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> ISTM that the more people push on index funds, the more overvalued equities in the index become relative to those outside the index. What "index funds" are you referring to? The S&P 500? Dow Jones? NASDAQ 100? If you purchase a Russell 3000 index fund you are purchasing a piece in every publicly traded company in the US: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_3000_Index Any 'pricing irregularities' are discovered…
Comment linking /the-grosman-stiglitz-paradox/
on “Ask HN: I have $450K cash, what should I do to maximize my return?”Submitted Are Markets More or Less Efficient? (2019) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> I'm not comfortable investing the entirety into an index fund, given the current socio-political climate. Over the the long term there is not really anything better to do with it than equities: the Great Depression, World War 2, gold standard retirement, 1980s inflation, etc. Even if you only invested in the peaks, you'd still do quite well over the decades: * https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-…
Comment linking /should-you-invest-in-the-sp-500-index/
on “Ask HN: I have $450K cash, what should I do to maximize my return?”> If we end up in a scenario where the prices of S&P 500 stocks are determined primarily by the number of indexed investors rather than the performance of the underlying companies... The prices of individual equities is determined by buyers and sellers coming to an agreement, not buy-and-holders. As long as there are two people who think they can take advantage of each other, there will be price discovery: * https:/…
Comment linking /there-is-no-such-thing-as-an-index-fund-bubble/
on “Reddit's Stock Threads Become a Must-Read on Wall Street”And in six of those years (2013-2019) it was absolutely flat: * https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GOLDAMGBD228NLBM If you bought gold in 2005, you would have peaked in 2011, and not recovered until mid-2020. If you have the nerve/patience to do that, you have a stronger stomach than I. I am constantly reminded of Buffett's 2011 take: > Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.…
Comment linking /will-gold-save-the-day/
on “Why in the world would you own bonds?”> Bitcoin will never be used directly for payments, it's a value store. Immutable deflationary digital gold. The usefulness of gold itself is questionable: * https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/ * https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2078535
Comment linking /will-gold-save-the-day/
on “Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants”I've been a landlord for ten years and I've always been a renter. For people like me with no desire to have kids and minimal ownership of furniture and toys, renting is nice. I've always wanted to be a renter for life, but recently I also have been thinking about buying some land in upstate New York or in the outskirts of some European city and building a livable structure like an A frame or a geodesic dome. I do th…
Comment linking /rent-or-own-your-home-5-rule/
on “A new chapter – full-time working from a van in a forest”> If the a company never pays dividends or does buybacks its value will plummet. AAPL went public in December 1980. It paid dividends from 1987 to 1995. It then restarted in 2012. Steve Jobs returns to Apple in 1997. Somehow I see AAPL rising in value during its non-dividend paying years. AMZN when public in May 1997, and has never paid a dividend. AMZN has done some share buybacks in its history, but has not since…
Comment linking /the-irrelevance-of-dividends-still-a-non-starter/
on “Stock buybacks are dangerous for the economy”> That is done via dividends or buybacks. Nope, dividends (and buybacks) are irrelevant: only total return matters: * https://www.pwlcapital.com/the-irrelevance-of-dividends-stil...
Comment linking /the-irrelevance-of-dividends-still-a-non-starter/
on “Stock buybacks are dangerous for the economy”Stock buybacks are no different than dividends†: a form of returning capital to the owners / investors of a company. The problem is when boards / executives game the system to front-load options to themselves and other trickery and then cash them out. †And dividends themselves in turn should be irrelevant to your investing decisions: * https://www.pwlcapital.com/the-irrelevance-of-dividends-stil...
Comment linking /the-irrelevance-of-dividends-still-a-non-starter/
on “Stock buybacks are dangerous for the economy”> ... high-tax income into low-tax capital gains while maintaining a plausibly deniable investment cover story. There are public swap-based ETFs (in Canada) formulated around this concept: * https://www.pwlcapital.com/understanding-swap-based-etfs/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_return_swap
Comment linking /understanding-swap-based-etfs/
on “Renaissance Technologies”> Financially almost never does Can you support this claim by evidence? There are various sources [1] reaching the opposite conclusions: > One thing is clear: renting your housing is not a waste of money, and it can even result in a greater accumulation of wealth over the long-term compared to owning [1] https://pwlcapital.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2017-07-07...
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2017-07-07_Felix-Benjamin_The-Case-for-Renting_FINAL.pdf
on “High-income job losses are cooling housing demand”Heh, I totally agree with you. I don't know hoe many times I've explained people the given strategy is not what researchers mean when they compare lump sum investing (LSI, a.k.a. converting all cash you have available for investing into equities) and dollar-cost averaging (DCA, a.k.a. splitting the available cash into equal parts and slowly converting the cash into equities at a regular pace.) What that strategy is…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Dollar-Cost-Averaging-vs-Lump-Sum-Investing.pdf
on “More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market”> I feel like the easiest way to accomplish this is just investing into stable dividend stocks. Yes, you're generally better off with equities. Though going for total return is better. It's not that dividends are bad (they're an important part of returns), but (a) you're limiting your diversification options by only focusing on dividend-paying companies, and (b) there's little correlation between dividend-paying com…
Comment linking /the-irrelevance-of-dividends-still-a-non-starter/
on “Wealthy use debt to buy future cash flow everyone else uses debt to buy stuff (2020)”@2: Research on the topic seems to disagree with you. You're not taking less risk, you're just trading one risk for another. Vanguard Research actually wrote a paper about this called 'Dollar-cost averaging just means taking risk later' [0]. Or if you would like more recent research the paper 'Dollar Cost Averaging v.s. Lump Sum Investing' by Ben Felix [1] is worth a read imho. 0: https://www.passiveinvestingaustral…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Dollar-Cost-Averaging-vs-Lump-Sum-Investing.pdf
on “Money bubble”Just because some technology may end up changing the world, it does not necessarily mean that it is a good investment: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_... * Via Ben Felix: https://www.pwlcapital.com/investing-technological-revolutio...
Comment linking /investing-technological-revolutions/
on “Money bubble”For the Canadians in the audience: * https://www.highinterestsavings.ca/chart/ * https://www.ratehub.ca/savings-accounts/accounts/high-intere... There are also 'HISA ETFs' like CASH.TO: * https://moneyguynow.com/best-canadian-high-interest-savings-... However note: > The biggest difference between HISA mutual funds and HISA ETFs is that ETFs are not CDIC-insured. This occurs because HISA mutual funds allow investors…
Comment linking /high-interest-savings-account-etfs/
on “High Interest Savings Leaderboard”> It's digital currency without counterparty risk and no inflation risk. Similar to why gold is useful as a store of value. Not being able to reverse transactions is itself a risk, and a deflationary currency that is susceptible to hoarding isn't a great idea IMHO. And given gold's fluctuating value (though better than BTC's), I'm not sure I'd consider it a good store of value; it certainly isn't a good inflation he…
Comment linking /will-gold-save-the-day/
on “Bitcoin Block 840000”All new technologies go through this: canals, the Industrial Revolution and steam engines, railroads, telegraphs, electricity, phones, etc . See: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_... * https://www.pwlcapital.com/investing-technological-revolutio...
Comment linking /investing-technological-revolutions/
on “Ask HN: Could AI be a dot com sized bubble?”I'm not an expert, I am referring to the following. Am I misunderstandibg something? > due to its real-price volatility, gold had not been a good inflation hedge over the short- or long-term. They did find that, going back to the era of Emperor Augustus who reigned from 27 BC–14 AD, gold had been a pretty good hedge for inflation measured by military pay. So, if you have a liability due in 2,000 years, gold might be…
Comment linking /will-gold-save-the-day/
on “Using Benford’s Law to Detect Bitcoin Manipulation”> By the time you buy gold as a hedge, it is often too late..a lot of inflation is already priced in. If by "hedge" you mean a hedge against inflation, it seems to be of questionable utility: > Gold objects have existed for thousands of years but for many investors gold has only recently become a tradable investment opportunity. Gold has been described as an inflation hedge, a “golden constant”, with a long run real…
Comment linking /will-gold-save-the-day/
on “Why gold and Bitcoin are popular”Canadian Couch Potato and PWL Capital have a rate-of-return calculator: http://canadiancouchpotato.com/2015/07/13/calculating-your-p... and scroll down to "Use the Rate of Return Calculator": https://www.pwlcapital.com/en/Forms/Return-Calculator-Simple It's a spreadsheet and you just fill in your cashflows.
Comment linking /en/Forms/Return-Calculator-Simple
on “Ask HN: Which personal investing tools do you use?”
