kaistinchcombe

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

FWIW, my position in the world is protecting vulnerable seniors and people with special needs from fraud. So part of my view that this isn't a better recipe for trust is coming from that perspective - just imagine telling a person with alzheimer's that their life savings are gone and it's their own fault for downloading a virus…

kaistinchcombe

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Depends on how you define "adoption" doesn't it?

kaistinchcombe

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

People say that a lot about the internet – that nobody knew what it would be useful for at the time it was invented. It had MORE uses than originally foreseen (same as computers) but one of the internet pioneers chimed in on the comments thread to the first article saying that actually they did know exactly why they built the internet at the time they built it: they wanted a better way to send messages and share files, so they built one, and the day it was built it was the best way in the world to do that. Same with IBM - scope wasn't foreseen, but those machines were the best in the world for the purposes they were designed for.

But the myth that people create amazing technology that has no use (TCP/IP, the computer), and then a decade later people discover what it's useful for, is just that: a myth.

kaistinchcombe

9 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Everyone would agree that right now and the US dollar is experiencing about 2% inflation, and the number of bitcoins in circulation is increasing about 4% per year, yes?

kaistinchcombe

9 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Hi everyone! https://www.truelinkfinancial.com/careers :)

kaistinchcombe

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Love to help you out on this if I can. The other thing to note is that because of the fear of double dealing there's a lot of stuff on the regulatory side about what kind of fees you can charge – my sense is, even saying, "any quarter in which you lose money, I'll just waive my fee" is illegal (perhaps because it would push the advisor to focus on preventing loss rather than tracking the market). But it's something that to a typical retail investor seems incredibly obvious – why do you get paid for losing me money?? – and I'm kind of sympathetic to, like I'm happy to share the pain in a down market (and to retain the customer). And saying "I actually have to charge a fee in a down market because it's in your best interest for me not to try too hard to avoid bad quarters…" well… there's only so much game theory your typical retail client wants to be doing sitting there in your office.

My gmail address is the same as my HN name. :)

kaistinchcombe

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Great question. It's a lot like a target date fund, but you actually want your fund a lot more personalized. E.g. a man or a woman both 70 years old today would be in the same 2015 target date fund, but she's going to live longer and so has a longer time horizon and should be one or two percent more in equities maybe. But this also varies based on whether you have equity in your home as a cushion, have long term care insurance (which pushes financial needs sooner), are married (especially to someone older or younger), have a separate tax-advantaged account (that should be spent later, typically, meaning you actually have a very short horizon on your non-tax-advantaged account), etc.

The point is, you'd be surprised how different two people are in terms of investment needs even if they retired the same year.

As an aside, we model our investment model most closely after target date funds and annuities. Annuities offer a guarantee (subject to to the insurance company's solvency) but high fees and low flexibility, while target date funds offer good market participation and low fees but don't have the guarantee component. We include a similar blend of securities as a target date fund might, but also include an annuity component for the guarantee.

kaistinchcombe

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

RRG YES

kaistinchcombe

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

The place this ends up sticky is that a manager with multiple clients can jointly maximize fees – e.g. instead of properly hedging a bet within each client's portfolio, you can put the bet in one client's portfolio and the hedge in another's. If risk preferences are divergent enough the manager can basically be making one-way bets – and frankly the point of this is it could be socially efficient for two of your clients to bet against each other, that's the point, but for almost any nonlinear compensation structure you dream up (even just sharing a little bit in upside, like venture) you can figure out that the manager maximizes his/her own risk adjusted return by playing clients off against each other or creating scenarios that sometimes throw a client under the bus.

To be clear, a flat fee is the ULTIMATE one-way bet… but making the one-way bet simple rather than complex means that it doesn't incentivize one type of behavior over another, you get the one-way bet even without throwing a client under the bus. And maybe at the end of the day your broker or advisor is a good human and, barring any incentive to the contrary, will do his/her best for the client. Kind of a crazy bet, but…

kaistinchcombe

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

As it happens, our glide path in aggregate ends up within conventional bounds – we have a screen in the tool that compares the equity percentages to what you'd have in a Vanguard or T Rowe Price target date fund and usually it's in the same ballpark.

kaistinchcombe

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Hi! Kai here from True Link. #1 lesson from the launch so far is that graph is totally incomprehensible! We love it here in the office but it's going to be totally re-done in the next release.

That graph is how your money is invested today – we divide your money up based on what age you need it and invest it differently, so what the graph is saying is that "money you need for age 61" is 90% in cash, and "money you need for age 86" is 85% in equities.

People are so used to seeing the glide path graph that like half of people see our graph and are like, wow that's incredibly smart, and half are like, your glide path is upside down.

Also, probably didn't help that I cropped out the axis labels so it would fit nicer on Medium. Thanks for noticing! I'm going to fix that right now.

kaistinchcombe

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Garry saved my company … twice. There is nobody like this team.

kaistinchcombe

12 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

we have this

kaistinchcombe

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Yeah, I've heard rumors that lot of those blacklists are shakedown operations. We're following our customers' lead on which transactions are unwanted -- if we're getting phone calls where people are saying (e.g.) that they signed up for a free sample and got billed 40 dollars of shipping and handling... well, I don't much care about what the company says, the point is, our customer feels deceived and our customer is who we work for.

kaistinchcombe

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Haha, thanks for that. Well taken. The goal is to make sure we've provided the value we promised before we bill you for it.

kaistinchcombe

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Kai here. Well put, absolutely right. My grandma has gotten scammed three times a day on average every day for ten years and obviously it's something that I'm passionate about. I think it's just really low to make a living by taking advantage of vulnerable elderly people.

Later I said to the reporter that I should have put that a different way, and the reporter said that she felt it was the perfect quote, that it really expressed how I felt about them. And yes, as a customer whose family needs this product, I'm frustrated and angry about how they've treated my grandma. But what I meant was: "We're going to go after those guys and try to stop them."

In summary: lesson learned. You're absolutely right.