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Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.
  • Ex-FTX CEO Bankman-Fried arrested in Bahamas as U.S. files charges
    @baseball Fan and @larryB, The MAGA crowd are unreal in their ignorance and stupidity. They say the mainstream media is full of crap but then they follow Qanon who has never, ever been correct about anything, ever. They try to overturn the election and make none of our votes count, they are fine with Trump saying to tear up the constitution, the document our country is founded on and then they run around calling themselves “Patriots.” Trump has done more damage to this country than 9/11 and Pearl Harbor combined. I cannot believe that this pathological liar, con man, grifter is able to pull the wool over the Maga crowds eyes so easily. If the MAGA crowd used the same standards they judged Obama by and applied those to Trump they would of turned on him after a week in office. But what is the difference between the two men…….hmmm……oh yeah, Obama is black and that is where the other great thing the Maga crowd brings to the table, racism.
  • tax loss selling question
    Capital loss can be used to reduce taxable income. It does not directly reduce the tax owed on a specific source of income. After offsetting capital gains leftover capital loss can be used to reduce overall taxable income. So it indirectly reduces tax by reducing taxable income.
    Put another way:
    According to my understanding of what the IRS says, your capital loss of $1k would first offset capital gains. If capital gains were less than 1k you will have some leftover loss to work with. It does not get applied directly to any specific area of taxable income, but to taxable income added together from all sources. So if your taxable income before figuring in the capital loss was —let's make it simple — two thousand dollars and your remaining capital loss was 1 dollar, you would owe income tax on $1999 of income. It is not calculated in any way that eleven cents of that dollar got subtracted from an IRA distribution etc
    I hope this makes it clear.
    Probably I'm not understanding this correctly. I have an IRA, with required distributions. Those distributions of course are taxed. Lets assume that the tax due is $1000.
    If I were to sell an asset and take a $1000 loss, would that loss offset the tax on the IRA distribution? Somehow that seems too good to be true.
  • Are the risks of Financial Account Aggregation really worth it?
    @Observant1 says-
    Wow, I would not have guessed there would be so much drama regarding account aggregation! This wasn't a controversial investing topic like active vs. passive or domestic vs. foreign. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    For sure... me too. BTW, I just learned something new about emoticons. Thanks. :)
  • Donald Trump NFT Collection Sells Out, Price Surges
    "Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s non-fungible token (NFT) digital trading card collection sold out early Friday, the day after its initial release.
    According to data from OpenSea, at time of writing, the collection’s trading volume is 900 ETH, or about $1.08 million. Its floor price is about 0.19 ETH, or about $230 – more than double the original price of $99."
    Did you miss out?
  • Are the risks of Financial Account Aggregation really worth it?
    @sven
    I think it is possible for a hacker to impersonate your phone SIM card and break the two factor authentication.
    I use LastPass but not for financial sites.
    Does anyone knw any more about LastPass hack? second time this year but company says no passwords were compromised.
    Anybody think 1Password etc any better? Anyone other than @Observant1 have experience with KeePass?

    I neglected to mention that KeePass is used only on my PC.
    I do not use KeePass (or any password manager) on my mobile devices.
  • tax loss selling question
    Unfortunately, 11/30/22 distribution would be WITHIN the +/- 30 day wash sale window.
    Good news is that only the distribution amount would be disqualified due to wash sale. In case of partial sale, that amount would be added to cost basis of the remainder, so basically, the wash sale defers the tax loss. If total sale, then there would be no way for the broker to adjust the cost basis and it won't be shown in 1099.
    In reporting the losses to the tax person, are the corresponding purchases needed for the tax person (or IRS) to determine what loss is allowed? My Schwab account will show realized losses/gains on a screen and indicates when a loss is not allowed per wash sale. Possibly my year end aggregate 1099 will show all the info required.
  • Are the risks of Financial Account Aggregation really worth it?
    Quick search of usual tech sites ( Ton's hardware/Tom's guide, Wirecutter from NYT, PCMAG) for recommendations after Dec 1 Lastpass hack
    1Password and Dashlane are top choices, with Bitwarden best for free
    KeePass gets good reviews, and seems to be the only manger that still supports saving PW only on local computers, but is technical and somewhat complex to set up. Transferring access across platforms requires storing PW vault in DropBox, Google Drive etc, which obviously could also could be hacked
  • Are the risks of Financial Account Aggregation really worth it?
    @sven
    I think it is possible for a hacker to impersonate your phone SIM card and break the two factor authentication.
    I use LastPass but not for financial sites.
    Does anyone knw any more about LastPass hack? second time this year but company says no passwords were compromised.
    Anybody think 1Password etc any better? Anyone other than @Observant1 have experience with KeePass?
  • Are the risks of Financial Account Aggregation really worth it?
    The notion of account aggregation services being 100% safe based on the collection of beliefs below is .... [fill in the blank]
    - There isn't a detailed hack manual
    - There aren't in the public domain dozens of published cases
    - Published RH hacks don't count
    - Hacks can only happen due to user error, hacks can never happen otherwise
    - Large organizations like Microsoft, Experian, Capital One, etc.. can be hacked at scale but account aggregators cannot be hacked
    - 2FA cannot be hacked
    Whether the probability of a hack is 0.1% or 1% or 10% I have no idea but I know it isn't zero risk.
  • What’s Wrong at the New York Times
    To me, the cost of living adjustment indexed to inflation or COLA described in the article makes the most sense. If the Times is worried that inflation won't last and they'll be promising too much, COLA would hedge their bets but also ensure that employees' wages keep up with prices everywhere else instead of being a wage reduction after inflation. From the article:
    Whatever pay increase the Times eventually agrees to, the NewsGuild is calling for a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) that would equal inflation, that would hold Guild members harmless against any increase in inflation. The Times has rejected that COLA proposal even though enlightened employers often agree to cost-of-living adjustments. Not only do such provisions protect employees from having their pay eroded by higher-than-expected inflation, but if inflation remains low, COLA provisions would help the employer’s bottom line by holding down any promised raises. I hope that Times management will see the light on this—and take the enlightened approach.
    It’s not as if the Times can’t afford to give newsroom employees a 22.7 percent raise over four years. That’s around ten percentage points above what the Times is offering, and with each percentage point translating into $1.5 million a year in raises, that would cost the Times $15 million annually. That represents just 10 percent of the $150 million stock buyback and a small fraction of the Times’ current $465 million in cash on hand.
  • Are the risks of Financial Account Aggregation really worth it?
    I'm writing fiction David, I've already stated that explicitly. Here is some more fiction about zero click attacks
    https://www.csoonline.com/article/3660055/zero-click-attacks-explained-and-why-they-are-so-dangerous.html
    Meanwhile you on the other hand are purportedly not writing fiction but have yet to provide a single substantive rebuttal.
    Fwiw, changing the goalposts and whining about CNBC citing 3 sources vs. promising 4 would not pass muster even in a middle school debate competition.
    You appear to be having difficulty connecting the dots -- any device can be hacked, ergo nothing is off limits. The krebs site even describes how SMS messages can be forwarded by malware. So much for SMS based 2FA being indestructible.
    Hey btw you accused me of fearmongering and asked me what my angle was but didn't
    address the same question I asked you. What is your angle around your ridiculous stance
    that logins cannot be hacked and that using account aggregation is 100% safe. Are you shilling for an account aggregator service?
    Cheers and I wish you happiness and joy in your beliefs and angles.
  • What’s Wrong at the New York Times
    In the current negotiations, the NewsGuild is demanding a wage increase averaging 5.25 percent a year over four years.... According to the union, the Times’ latest wage offer comes to 2.875 per year...
    Meanwhile, the Times raised paper subscription rates 10% at the start of 2022, and will raise them another 12% at the start of 2023. That's more, cumulative, in just two years than the workers are asking for spread over a period of four years.
    I had been thinking about cutting back the number of days I get the paper in hardcopy. But after reading about how the Times values its employees, I'm thinking of skipping pay subscriptions altogether and taking the free digital subscription offered through my school.
    I appreciate the service that the Times provides, but it shouldn't be on the backs of its employees or its customers alone.
  • Are the risks of Financial Account Aggregation really worth it?

    Snippet below from a Dec 14, 2022 post is a figment of imagination from both Krebs and Microsoft. They both have overactive imaginations. You have been warned.
    --
    The security updates include patches for Azure, Microsoft Edge, Office, SharePoint Server, SysInternals, and the .NET framework. Six of the update bundles earned Microsoft’s most dire “critical” rating, meaning they fix vulnerabilities that malware or malcontents can use to remotely commandeer an unpatched Windows system — with little to no interaction on the part of the user.
    --
    https://krebsonsecurity.com/
  • Are the risks of Financial Account Aggregation really worth it?
    @david
    Boy you love to bluster and also change the goalposts I see. Inspired by the current soccer World Cup?
    So we went from "show me how a brokerage account can be wiped, post some links" to "without operator error, how can an account be wiped" and "CNBC does not have competent editors" because strangely enough this became an exercise not about commenting on the substance of the issue but about CNBC citing 3 sources when they pinkie promised 4 at the top of the article.
    I take it then you're an InfoSec guru + writing wizard. Any other skills you'd like to dazzle us with? Why do you spend time on this forum with us uneducated folks when you could be monetizing your genius and be consulting with CNBC, Cloudflare and the like. InfoSec is hot David, you are severely underutilizing your skills. Google, Mandiant and Microsoft will pay you top $$ I assure you.
    On the topic of how your PC can be hacked without operator error, I suppose Microsoft and Google are both being run by rubes because they keep issuing OS and Chrome browser patches all the time coz -- hey they got nothing better to do. They also offer big bucks for zero-day exploits because hey tech companies have a lot of moolah to burn. Meanwhile users who haven't updated Chrome or Windows for more than 6 months wonder how in the hell trojans and worms got onto their machine.
    While Lapsus$ can directly breach Microsoft, they don't stand a chance of breaching David's system. If I didn't know any better I would have thought Pegasus is just a mythical stallion and not also the name of a product that can hack into a phone without any action needed from the owner of the phone. Egads, can't happen. All humbug. The entire Khashoggi story is all urban legend. Also humbug is all of the stuff that Edward Snowden described in great detail in his book as to what the NSA was capable of more than 10 years back. Because technology and hacking sophistication move backward, not forward. With the passage of time and exponentially more powerful CPU's (that can brute force password cracks) hacking actually gets more difficult.
    Hackers also reduce in number and age out even as world population grows and rewards for hacking (including new pathways for hacking such as crypto) grow ever larger.
    Meanwhile we all scratch our heads and wonder why when Windows, Chrome, Android etc.. are becoming impenetrable why companies and talent in cybersecurity are fetching top $$. All of the breaches mentioned at --> https://www.upguard.com/blog/biggest-data-breaches-us all baloney, all operator error. Had Mr. Moran been the CISO at all these places, none of this would have occurred.
    But all of this to no avail to our (super)man Moran. If there ain't a written manual, it ain't true.
    Peace
  • MAPOX losses
    Thanks. Yes a CG of 5.44 plus a few holdings that went down a bit in value would account for an apparent one-day loss of nearly 7%. Because my M* portfolio didn't show that more shares were bought with the CG it appeared like a substantial loss. But it isn't. :-)
  • Are the risks of Financial Account Aggregation really worth it?
    Come on, don't deflect, and don't project. Email and sim hacks and all that are trivially easy to prevent. Send me $500 and I will explain. I will post the explanation here, too.
    https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/14/brokerage-log-ins-for-sale-on-dark-web-robinhood-sees-highest-prices-.html is inexcusably weak, detail-free, fright reporting.
    Like so much of the financial press.
    So ... Robinhood alone has pisspoor access and authentication control? That alone is a major story.
    Inside job? But that would not meet your scare criteria.
    I am going to google to see if I can find out what actually happened w poor old Nate Heard.
    The last six CNBC paragraphs are shocking, writer-firable for their slop and laziness. Also preposterous as factual narrative reporting.
    And while I expect that you are not a working editor, did you notice that CNBC leads with speaking to 4 people but then can list only 3? yoohoo, editors!?
    Again, can you recount for all of us the steps for a bad actor to, out of nowhere and without operator error, access and drain a Vanguard (or ML or Fidelity or Schwab ...) investment account?