You are basing your entire, false, narrative on your personal grievance of not being able to sell your bike. And you complain of being called out? And you flag the comment calling your comments misinformation and whine to the mod about it? You are spreading misinformation. It’s as simple as that. You are spreading an argument that is based on your own personal experience, not on what VAT actually is.
Because you don’t even represent your situation correctly in your own line of argumentation. It wasn’t the VAT that was the problem in your situation. VAT in Spain is 21%. This 200% you are talking about has nothing to do with that. “I really don’t see how anybody cannot understand that” - you don’t see how people can’t understand your 200% ‘VAT’ anecdote? Whatever you claim to have been charged, it actually sounds much more like a tariff than VAT. And the irony is, even if it is VAT, then Spanish sellers in Spain would also be subject to that. So your argument that VAT are like tariffs is still wrong.
It was the cost basis afaiu, custom thinks it was worth more (prob different depreciation rules). In any case it’s a personal anecdote (and yeah VAT can do weird things if you want to do business while not being incorporated) which imo doesn’t represent how VAT works for proper companies.
(Can we move the sub thread elsewhere and maybe close it)
Time in the market really means time in the market. It doesn’t mean “2 years in the market and you’re good”. It means even less “2 months in the market and you’ll beat any active investor”.
It means making sure you don’t need the money under a shortish time horizon (most people seem to consider 10+ years a good horizon for stocks) and staying invested during the good and bad times, because bad times do occur and they do hurt (both psychologically and financially, it’s not unusual for them to happen jointly with difficult economic times).
When we say that stocks are risk assets, it’s because the risk does, actually, exist. And it is for bearing that risk that investors are rewarded with higher returns. If the risk ceases to exist, the returns of stocks should also become akin to those of risk free assets.
I think that’s something we tend to not appreciate enough when we evaluate the value of fixed income in our allocation. We tend to focus on the low yield (especially true in CHF) and not enough on the near certainty (for investment grade bonds) of it being there, and the capital being there at the end of a given period of time.
Over that period of time, the lowish yield of a swiss bond or cash in a savings account can beat the returns of stocks under certain circumstances. It is because it is nearly certain to be there, where stock returns are not, that the returns are so low.
I think current early-ish accumulators are blessed as investors: 2022 allowed us to learn about the risk of bonds. 2020, 2022 and now are exposing us to the risk of stocks. There’s a lot of good learning, self-knowledge and habit forming to get.
Edit: of course, many among us value the higher returns with higher volatiliy over the lower returns with contractual certainty of getting the capital back after a set period of time. That’s fine, we just need to acknowledge that fluctuations do happen and that a long term investing horizon does actually mean long term.
Yes, they use the new value while Switzerland uses the actual value. And of course the VAT is higher in Spain. 21% of the new value was more than I already sold the bike for, so I had to cancel the sell. It is a small example of how VAT for import/export is no different than tariffs.
Agree to a new thread and please no personal attacks or insults, this is against the forum rules. “spreading misinformation” and “whining” are not appropriate words just because your opinion differs somehow and you seem to have no arguments for your case.
I think that’s the part you might want to reflect on and revisit.
This small example 1) doesn’t generalize (companies pay VAT on actual value) 2) is still not the same as tariffs 3) is also due to not being aware of the rules (“21% of the new value was more than I already sold the bike for”), rules for a person importing/exporting vehicles around are hard to navigate (VAT, certificate of conformity, etc.), it’s not just Spain, from what I heard Switzerland is also tricky (I know people who gave up importing a motorbike they had in another country)
With three bear markets in 5 years, I believe many of us have had the fortune to experience atleast two of them. I was not invested in 2020, so I experienced only two.
Personally I have learnt (something I intuitively knew) that 100% equity is not for me. So my plan to stay between 60-65% equities is good for me and I will stick to it.
Yeah. I meant that even though logically it would make sense that market remains flat for 20 years while we are in accumulation phase and then suddenly spike up in the end and we can experience CAGR of 7% but all returns coming after acclimation phase is over.
But the reality is that logic doesn’t work in real life investing because most people will stop investing if there absolute returns are zero or negative
That’s what I meant , I would prefer to be not in RED in absolute sense over my investing horizon. But I also know I need to be in DCA mode for 6-7 years to reach that level that market crashes of 30% won’t wipe out all gains
And hence this is why many people fail to match (let alone beat) a simple buy and hold, low-cost, broadly-diversified index fund. One has to trust past performance, otherwise none of this makes any sense, we’re all here due to past performance.
/rant Most people want to get rich quickly, have short memories, zero self-awareness, zero self control, are emotional, paranoid, immature, ignorant, flippant, inconsistent, confused, dim and have critical thinking ability equal to that of used toilet paper. Can you feel the humanism coming through?
Even though I agree partially, I think we shouldn’t be unfair to folks who are not experienced in investing. 5 years back I didn’t even invest. So it’s irrational to panic but it’s not illogical
Logic is based on personal experiences and only with time and new experiences people change their next actions
Posts by yes, quoted text from those users yes, but not the entire answers to them.
Open the user’s profile (click on their profile picture in a post to open a popup, then on the large profile picture in the popup)
On the profile page you’ll see a bell icon next to “normal”. Click on that, and switch the setting to “ignored” instead.
You’ll be able to set a timeout for the ignore, see that somebody you ignore posted something, and still click though to see what they posted.
That last bit means that some discipline is needed to just not just read the ignored messages anyway. If you can’t resist the temptation, it is just extra work
Hard to explain why, but in my experience many months of contango works quite nice. It is not the VIX, it is the VIX future. However, it did not work last time, was too early.
Very good performance. May i ask how long you have been running this active managed portfolio and how have your returns been since inception vs S&P 500?
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