I have some experience with accounting software and its use in various types of business (not just startups).
Xero (rather than Quickbooks) is dominant in the UK and it has a lot of problems. However, I think you are addressing a fundamentally different market. Quickbooks and Xero are both targeted at the long-tail of small businesses - think tradesmen, cafes, hairdressers, etc. The main thing they accomplish for those customers is basic book keeping and business functions (like invoicing, payroll, etc)
Your software seems much more aimed at small companies which want sophisticated tools to generate financial insight. This is not a criticism, just a comment that this is a different and potentially smaller market.
However, one way you could capture the "long tail" of small businesses is by winning over the high-street accountant. If you could let them prepare annual accounts with 10x less work - even if the customer book keeping is a mess - then every accountant will recommend your software to their clients.
Anyway - great to see something new in this space. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss further.
thanks - we are indeed working with high-street accountants. I also think there is a driver as you said from founders and smaller business owners who want financial insights. Those same businesses have budgets for reporting/budgeting and planning software, so having it as close to accounting data as possible in one product we can increase the value prop.
Quite amazingly - I never realised how good photo quality was in the 1930s (and presumably earlier too). Look at these examples which were immediately digitised (one of a WWII reenactment scene which enhances the effect) - they don't look anything like how we expect a 1930s-era photo to appear.
By the 1930s, photography as a field had already existed for a century or so, so I'm not sure why you'd expect it to look terrible in any meaning of the word. For comparison, here's a photograph taken almost a hundred years earlier in 1845 [0], aside form lacking colors, it too is already high quality.
Well, I’m not surprised they’re surprised. The two main factors in image quality are optics (which has been a solved problem for a long time), and imaging surface area.
Even what is considered “full frame” today is ridiculously small from a historical point of view, when 8x10 plates were common (that’s 60x the surface area!) and not even the largest format in use.
Cell phone photography has made us used to imaging surface areas that are not even a centimeter on each side - it’s a miracle of engineering we can get decent pictures out of those constraints, but image quality is as low as it gets, even though the marketing tells us those are the most advanced cameras ever.
Optics were not a solved problem in the 30s they wouldn’t be until the 80s at least for camera lenses. 30s camera lenses were optimized for black and white and very poorly corrected for chromatic aberrations. Well corrected color lenses wouldn’t become common until the 50s. Optics bigger apertures than f4 were expensive and often had severe aberrations. Coatings which prevent internal reflections didn’t mature until the late 60s/early 70s. Up to this point lenses had concentrated on a few well known good optical formulas. In particular high quality zoom and ultra wides were tremendously expensive r&d efforts with bespoke manufacturing[1]. This local maxima wouldn’t be breached until computer aided design and manufacturing processes became the norm leading to aspherical, extra dispersion elements and much higher element counts becoming common. By this point camera lens development has become much more iterative many lenses from the 90s and 2000s are 70s/80s optics with slight coating updates with a plastic auto focus housing.
1: see the achromatic Takumar with quartz elements that was produced in a very limited run for scientific laboratories. And aspherical low aperture lenses like the leica noctilux which required hand grinding the aspherical element.
I'm going to dispute that. Given some constraints in both the subject and the use of the image, certain cell phones can really take pretty good pictures. I have a bunch of bigger gear and I mostly don't find it worth taking on trips any longer. Yes, it's older gear but I doubt I'd find it worth spending thousands of dollars to upgrade. I know other serious photographers who feel similarly.
I agree with you only so long as you want to look at those images on those same small devices. The moment you want to print something, the difference is night and day. That being said, I'm a very big believer of the best camera being the one you have with you, so.
I'm not sure I completely agree with respect to small prints. I probably do for 11x14s and beyond. (Which I basically never do any longer as I'm well out of wall space.) But, yeah, it's almost always display on computer and I just don't have a lot of interest in lugging a medium/large camera everywhere like I used to.
1930s films were slower (lower ASA/ISO) than "modern" films. Focusing mechanisms were worse: the SLR was developed in the 1930s; most cameras used in that era were rangefinders (or 'point-and-shoot').
Cameras and lenses were technically capable of high-quality images, but actually making such a photograph required skill or luck; the results were otherwise blurry and poorly-focused. Studio portraits in those days used extremely bright lights to compensate.
In general, the ISO capabilities of modern digital (especially larger sensor cameras but even good phone cameras) is a remarkable advance over film even relatively latterly.
With digital, ISO of 3200 or 6400 is nothing (probably better today with full frame). B&W film really topped out at about 400 in normal use and couldn't really be pushed past 1600 and even that required chemistry tricks and resulted in noticeably lower quality.
I get pretty decent, if high-contrast results pushing 320TX and 400TX to 3200.
Pushing does increase grain; but using a larger format (6x7 or 4x5) reduces the apparent grain in resultant prints.
I can't say enough good things about HC-110 as a developer: pushes well just by increasing development time, shelf-stable for years as a concentrate, and not particularly toxic compared to other developers.
Approximately never used anything larger than 35mm. I don't remember all the developers I used over the years (though I used D-76 for a lot of standard Kodak Tri-X ISO 400 stuff). May have used some HC-110 (forget when that came in), definitely Diafine/Acufine, probably something from Ilford after I largely switched to HP-5 film, some homebrewed stuff...
But it's been decades since I have done film processing. After I graduated, did a brief stint using an apartment half bathroom and drove me crazy after good school darkrooms.
[ADDED: I've never used B&W film emulsions from the past 40 years or so; they're presumably at least a bit faster than what I used. 1600 was pretty much the practical limit when I was shooting B&W on film.]
I did this for years. I tended to use different chemistries for pushing Tri-X or HP5 to 1600+. Don't remember the details, but didn't tend to use D-76 for pushed film as I recall.
I love shooting BW film but Tri-X looks so newspapery or silver to me - I tend to prefer the newer Kentmere films. I've found you can still push them pretty far and not pay a large price. The film is just so forgiving compared to digital (at least to the best of 2014 sensors)
> most cameras used in that era were rangefinders (or 'point-and-shoot')
Rangefinders from that era are not point-and-shoot. They have two separated windows allowing light into the viewfinder and you turn the focusing mechanism until the two views of the subject merge perfectly. They use parallax to find the distance to the subject with a mechanism linked to the lens focus, hence the name rangefinder.
Point-and-shoot cameras from that era were fixed focus.
I have digitized family photos from a tintype in 1880 or so all the way to Polaroids from the 1960's and it is clear to me that peak consumer-photography was late-stage B&W photography.
I shouldn't have mentioned the tintype above (I just wanted to indicate the temporal range here) because I would exclude professional "portrait" photos. And my relatives were blue-collar farmers and factory workers in the Midwaste, so their "gear" was modest for the times.
The oldest "home photos" look poor and likely came from a Brownie or similar. But then a decade or so on and the photos take on a whole new level of clarity and sharpness. That level of quality persists until the arrival of color, Polaroids....
It seems we traded color for quality sometime mid-Century.
> It seems we traded color for quality sometime mid-Century.
Absolutely. My parents have crisp B&W snapshots from their baby years in the early 60ies. They even have old B&W party snapshots from my grandparents in the 50ies, all of which look still great. Then around 1965, the snapshots become colored (not Polaroids), and the quality is... not as good. I wonder of the photographs just aged badly, or if they already looked like that 60 years ago. I also suspect that color film was much more expensive back then than B&W film, and the average consumer just bought the cheapest color films they could get.
With old color prints (or slides, non-Kodachrome in particular) there's a lot of fading relative to B&W of the equivalent era.
There was definitely a period, when there were really crappy cameras (e.g. Instamatics) for the mass market which were far crappier than any random smartphone these days. And there were really good, often (West) German-made, cameras. I'd have to look up exactly when the good Japanese cameras came along.
I'd say they started getting into their swing in the 1950s, if my father's Yashica-A twin-lens reflex is any indication. That camera produced absolutely gorgeous shots in square format on 120 roll film.
The square format TLRs were an interesting format, My high school had an ancient one and I think I shot a roll of film once for fun and giggles. Never owned one. As I recall, Rolleiflex were the kings in that category.
Rollies are ok (I have one :) but for TLRs, the thing to have is the Mamiya 330C. Great viewfinder, optional prism, and interchangeable lenses. I have one and have used it quite a lot. Lovely photos, but heavy camera. OTOH, completely indestructable. You could pound nails with the thing.
I own a Yashica, and bought a 330C to supplement it, but decided the weight was just unmanageable. Very cool camera, and if I ever worked in a studio I'm sure I would have appreciated it, but too much for me in the field.
I seem to recall that ergonomically it was a bit iffy too, but that may have just been the fact that I was more familiar with the Yashica.
Crappy cameras; smaller format films (e.g. Kodak Disc); weird hues from color photos taken in fluorescent and other non-natural light; inconsistent dyes among manufacturers (compare Fuji film to Kodachrome); an inherently lower resolution in color film. These all combine to make color photos of that era tend to look worse than b/w.
I'd also speculate that because color film on average is less sensitive to light than b/w film, it led to more blurry photos at the time, especially when taken by the many amateur photographers with their cheap cameras.
Yeah, there was a period when color photography was enabled for the plebes with really crappy cameras and film formats--I had even forgotten about the Kodak Disc. So a lot of stuff that survives from that general era in shoeboxes looks almost uniquely horrible. There were Brownies and the like before but they were still a lot less widespread.
Even a decade later, I as a high school student really into photography wasn't getting a Nikon. Started with my dad's Pony and then Retina and then used a Konica system through university and beyond until it was stolen in a break-in.
I understand they were either the first, or at least very early, to take standard cinema film (35mm) and run with it. Were the press some of the early adopters? (Tired of lugging their monstrous Graflex cameras around.)
No, that was Leitz (Leica). Nikon didn’t start making cameras at all until 1948. Their first cameras were rangefinders, sort of a cross between a Contax and a Leica. They were very good (some of my very favorite cameras), but not super popular.
Their first SLR, the Nikon F, came out in 1959 and quickly became a sensation with professionals. They’re built like tanks, and still very usable.
Don't forget Kodachrome, especially Kodachrome 25.
But, yes, even Leicas aside, Kodak Retinas among others where pretty darn good. I got my dad's Retina IIIc which I used until it just wore out eventually. And both the Nikon and Canon SLRs in particular were great once they came on the scene though some of the rangefinders from Olympus, Pentax, Canon, etc. weren't half-bad either.
APS had a lot of cool features mixed with smaller frame sizes and higher prices right when digital was taking off. I feel like they could almost bring it back - the ability to roll a half shot film back up and swap it is neat but there is no way it's going to happen and is arguably useful.
There are lots of high quality photos from the 1930s. Look at studio portraits of movie stars, for example. I’m not sure where the expectation of low quality would come from.
I think there is a conjunction of factors at play. Only slower film available means no clear images of action. No digital copies means that most pictures have had LOTS of time to deteriorate before being digitised and reproduced. Most people see images from the 30s as a one copy of a picture the great great grandpa had in a shoebox kept in a moist cellar and no negatives to recover.
I think most people would have had contact with old pictures from newspaper and books that did not prized image quality so you mostly see bad quality pictures with low dynamic range.
The most important pictures of the olden eras, in an artistic setting, would also be experimental photography which is not necessarily concerned with sharpness and traditional qualities, so you see weird stuff.
And, the main culprit, as for most of society misconceptions. Movies and tv shows, you have to age and crap out a picture to look old. I am certainly that the screwed up videotape effect will skew a lot of the expectation of old footage from the 80s-90s.
Put all of that together, there is where I think the expectation comes from.
I have the book Great War, Photographic Narrative. With images from the first world war, the quality of some of the images is outstanding. Those same images would've look terrible on old mass produced books and newspapers.
Medium to some extent and large format can produce some exceptional image quality (Sharpness, details and contrast). Cliché at this point but Ansel Adams work still look very modern today.
They where however slow, heavy ,difficult to work with and extremely expensive so most people stuck to small format when they became available .
In fact I would bet that most pictures taken before small format took over look better technically than after it took over
Photo quality could be really good with lots of light, the right exposure, and fine grained film.
Age can also be unkind to old photo's. Especially color I swear the dyes fade causing the colors to be muted and muddy. And tend to slowly bleed making them blurry.
Film grain resolutions for high quality emulsions can result in nearly perfect image representations, even under pretty high magnifications. Digital imaging is limited to the pixels on the sensor and/or the display.
I mean, sure, but it depends a lot along which dimension you make the comparison. There, you are looking at a shot in broad daylight, on modern film, printed at a small size. To make it more obvious, here's a comparison: The daylight shot printed at small size[1] appears fairly detailed. The same film, same photographer, same camera, etc. only at night and presented as an ostensibly high-resolution picture[2] starts to reveal the problems with the older tech.
Usually the cameras themselves are fine – we perfected optics enough to not be a problem on 35 mm film in the 1800s – it's the medium on which the image is recorded that is more finicky. However, if we put the old optics onto modern sensors, we would start to notice its problems too. I don't have an example at hand, but there's noticeable chromatic aberration (no problem on black and white film!) among other things.
Nit pick: chromatic aberration is a significant problem on panchromatic black and white film. (You don’t get color banding, for obvious reasons, but you do lose sharpness.) This is why the development of achromatic lenses long predates the widespread use of color photography.
Indeed, it is surprising that you would be able to pull this stunt on such a huge buyer as McDonalds.
Here's an alternative theory that will disappoint the readers of Jacobian - potatoes are a commodity and commodity prices drive inflation. A bad crop, expensive fertiliser, a ground war in one of the largest potato-exporting countries in the world (Ukraine) - all these things would cause suppliers to increase prices in lockstep.
Inflation can be good cover for price collusion, sure, but the reason why it's such good cover is that its effects are almost indistinguishable without a smoking gun. Lets see what the FTC investigation brings up.
(Another note - inflation inflates profits as well as prices.)
Just to augment what you are saying... all potatoes aren't created equally either... size, starches, variety, organic... there are places around North America where certain kinds of potatoes are grown that are completely unsuitable for french fries but might be fine for retail. Even among Russets, for example - you see smaller ones bagged up for retail, but larger ones are often sold loose as "bakers." And sometimes those same big beautiful Russets are undesirable for fries because they are inconsistent sizes, which can be problematic for processing.
My understanding of GDPR law is that the fine is up to EUR 20M per breach. I have some experience with the data protection culture in Germany and it's frankly excessive at times. It's incredible that this was able to happen at this scale. In theory the company could be bankrupted by fines if the letter of the law is followed, never mind the reputational implications for a company only just getting over the emissions scandal.
Modelica is is in wide use in many industries, just not yours apparently. This is kinda like linking to Java or C++ and then being surprised it doesn’t have a top level intro explaining how to use it.
That doesn't mean anything to somone who doesn't already know what Modelica is. It would be hard to be more vague. C++ technically satisfies that definition.
This is a back door channel to illegal immigration, nothing more.
The students never turn up to courses and go to live with relatives in cities miles away.
The bloated UK university sector (your experience of a UK university, if you have it, is not typical of the vast shadow educational establishment which rakes in billions per year and delivers almost nothing in return) obviously has no interest in stopping this.
This has been spoken about for years now among people who work or have worked in these third-rate unis. As immigration filters up the political agenda I expect we'll start to see a mass decimation of these pseudo-educational establishments.
Do you have anything you can cite that supports your point about this being a back channel immigration method?
I live in a city that has a huge number Chinese students, who I regularly see coming and going from the campuses. Not all top universities, either. It does seem to me like these foreign student communities can be overly insular but I've never seen any evidence that they're illegally overstaying at any scale. As they generally come from wealthy backgrounds and societies that heavily emphasise family values, I am skeptical that they'd get higher quality of life in the UK than their home countries.
the goal is legal residency, not illegal overstaying. the universities offer the path of: pay money, get a visa. by not teaching anything, the "students" are free to go work and earn back the outrageous tuition fees, or if they're rich enough, just go enjoy life around europe.
free (long term) movement/immigration for the people to anywhere desirable is dead in the modern world, you generally need to pay (golden visas, "education") or be paid (work visas).
The vast majority of Chinese students do not plan on migrating to the UK. They usually do it so they can complete a Masters in 1 year instead of the 2 years required by Chinese universities. Having an international degree also holds weight in the domestic job market.
The visa is (a) not permanent and (b) only valid for the UK, which was never in Schengen; if you are a non-EU national you need to get a visa for each European country you plan to visit, separately, according to their rules.
And with Labour there will be no justice here. Tax payers just have to keep paying more while the burden is just increased daily and the actual tax payers get less. Hopefully this will be the end of Labour for good.
I don't know that accusing the current ruling party (I'm not familiar with UK politics so I'm not for or against this party) of irrational policy that results in the hard-working natives to pay more and more tax money to support all those freeloading foreigners, without including any substantial argument to support that claim, or alternatively linking a source, is a good fit for an HN discussion
And the status quo is in no way the responsibility of the previous government which continuously spewed anti-migrant rhetoric while doing basically nothing to reduce total immigration?
The Tories are definitely also responsible, and I hope this is the end of the Tory party. They are even worse than Labour in that they have been basically defrauded the voters by claiming to be conservative but being anything but. Labour at least made it clear to their voters they plan to run the country off a cliff at max speed, which is why they won by default and have no mandate.
Don't give in to the temptation to write this off as a trite statistic. If the aviation industry never existed and all those miles were done by road, that's more than 170,000 additional deaths in the US since 2009 [1].
You may argue that not all aviation traffic would convert to road, and I'd agree - so to look at it another way, aviation has created a huge uplift in human potential by enabling more travel than ever with zero (or negative) direct human cost.
Those miles would have never been done all on road so that comparison falls really short. People wouldn't drive coast to coast multiple times a year on business trips, just as they do the same with flying.
But an analogy with hours travelled via plane/car/train/bus would be interesting
If you look at per-trip statistics, trains are six times safer than flying. Per-mile, planes always do much better. Cars just honestly suck for safety, cost, and externalities.
Unless something very different in the US is available to what I can get in the UK, I think this is very dangerous advice.
If I put £100 in a savings account with 4% interest, I can withdraw that £100 (plus interest) at any time.
If I buy put £100 into government bonds with 4% yield and I check back in a year's time, if bond yields have increased (say, due to increased base rate) then the "balance" I can withdraw is _less_ than £100, since the underlying bond is less valuable!
Putting money in bonds exposes you to market volatility, which banks shield you from (which is why they get to take a cut)
Edit: a money market fund appears to absorb this volatility for you by balancing their bond portfolio, but ultimately you are still relying on the fund being well managed. The failure mode here isn't the govt not paying the coupon on the bond - it's the fund not having the liquidity to pay you if you withdraw. I don't understand enough how money markets are regulated to understand the risk, whereas banks are required to have deposit insurance in UK & US.
Since bonds are always reaching their promised payout terms upon their maturity, you can manage that risk through proper alignment in maturity dates.
You can purchase multiple bonds that are spread around their term duration. E.g. buy now 1-year bonds, and repeat every 3 months. After 4 such cycles, you will now always have bonds reaching maturity every 3 months.
Or just buy shorter term ones to begin with (if the interest is still appealing), and move to longer term ones once you have enough maturity diversity for the advice in the previous paragraph.
This works if you never need to liquidate early. For most people such a need to get their cash out occasionally happens. Regardless of how you stagger your bonds, if you need to sell before maturity, there is a chance they will be worth less.
Bond ladders are almost exactly the same as CD ladders. Bonds and CDs are almost exactly the same thing, mathematically.
The tax treatment is a tiny bit different. T-bill interest is exempt from state/local tax. CD interest is not.
Default risk is the tiniest bit different, but not by much. With the CD, there is some probability that the bank will fail, at which point you then need to wait for the gears of the FDIC to slowly turn to pay you your CD insurance. The FDIC actually doesn't have that much money, so in a sufficiently large bank run the Federal Reserve will have to backstop it. On the other hand, you can just buy a T-bill directly from the Treasury, which is also backstopped by the Fed. So there are some additional middlemen in the case of the CD. Maybe that's good -- more failures in a row are necessary before you get to the Fed. Maybe that's bad -- there are more parties and more bureaucracy involved in the unlikely event of a bank failure. I think you might as well go straight to the Treasury for the high rate and better tax treatment.
(Or I'd plow it into the S&P 500 because T-bills ain't never gonna outpace inflation, no matter what they say the numbers are.)
It should be clarified that the advice is to purchase short-dated Treasuries, which have negligible exposure to short term volatility (and are typically the place people park money in times of distress).
Also, an important note is that none of the major banks in the US pay 4% or anywhere near that amount on deposits. Think 0.01%.
Long term bonds, as you correctly point out are extremely sensitive to changes in interest rates.
In the current (rather unusual) situation, where deposits pay nothing and short term Treasuries pay reasonably well, this advice is sound.
You can get 4+% at US online banks. Short term CDs have been over 5% for the past year. You have to skip the brick and mortar banks with high overhead.
I was with Vanguard for many years. Fidelity has too many things I like to split between two brokerages. Using 4-week treasuries on auto-roll is close enough to VUSXX for me. You really can't go wrong with Fidelity, Vanguard, or Schwab if all you need is a brokerage. But Fidelity has a much broader set of products that it offers compared to Vanguard.
That's if you're only judging by APY. Vanguard has an atrocious app, and is missing many 'bank-like' features that Fidelity provides - I've enumerated some in a sibling comment. I don't think Vanguard even has a debit card, unless that's changed recently.
If you want to pay $330/year on $100k or $1650/year on $500k to Fidelity so they can pay themselves 0.42% expense on MM fund (atrocious if you ask me) but have a pretty app, that's of course your choice as a customer. I'd spend it on something else.
There is also something to say about diversification across finance orgs. I am not sure having all the funds for banking and investing using the same org is healthy. Diversification helps with SIPC/FDIC/FCUA coverage too.
I think most people know that Vanguard has lower expense ratios than Fidelity. What you give up are products and excellent customer service that some of us find worth paying a bit more for.
I don't use an MMF as an investment vehicle. It holds my daily cash. I can't use Vanguard for that sort of thing, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. Excess cash (e.g. emergency fund) is in an auto-roll 4-week treasury ladder.
I was previously a Vanguard customer. It's not like I don't have experience with both Vanguard and Fidelity. I understand the trade-offs.
High APY ( ~5% ). Keep in mind this is a MM account that works exactly like checking. I don't have to worry about the money in it - don't have to reinvest money earned myself or sell to spend money - it's all transparent. When you spend money, it works, and you'll just see it removed from your MM balance. I mention this because Schwab has a similar account, but makes you manually buy and sell holdings instead as needed.
In above account, you can also make selections here to not need to pay state tax on earnings, but that doesn't apply to me anyways. Nice for people in high tax states, though.
Paper checks in a checkbook. This is something you'd assume is standard but actually hard to find at online banks today.
Debit card with ATM fee rebates worldwide. I don't travel worldwide much anymore, but there's only 3 or 4 banks total that do this and it's a nicety.
Instant P2P between accounts. I often send my wife money for various reasons. This is another one that's surprisingly not standard at a lot of banks.
Free same day wires. Very straightforward, no hassles here, though I've only used it three times.
Customer Service. When you call them, someone in the US answers within a few seconds. They'll talk investing with you, goals, or general troubleshooting things. They also call to check in about twice a year which I find annoying, but some people might like it.
Money guarantee. Luckily I haven't had to use this yet, but any money stolen from hackers/fraud is supposedly 100% covered by Fidelity.
Currently trying to figure out where to start with an IRA (probably Roth) after learning about it recently and seeing it's something I probably should have started like over 15 years ago...
Which would you suggest between Schwab and Fidelity? Is it something I can/should easily do by myself as a financial layman? I have no experience with either of them, though I am slightly leaning towards Schwab since they have some tie-ins with American Express whom I like.
Trying to read up on this is almost worthless because past a certain point it's all just snake oil peddlers wanting me to part with my money (eg: all the Vanguard fanbois).
There's a lot to consider here that may be worth talking to an advisor at both. Traditional, Roth, or Backdoor Roth? Look at investible options, fees associated, etc.
As for Schwab vs Fidelity, your money is in safe hands with either. Might want to call and talk shop with both, and choose whoever you feel gave you better answers, all other things equal.
Vanguard has low fees, but it shows in every facet of their existence. I don't hate it, but I'll make marginally less money perhaps for better experience. YMMV.
I RTFM'd courtesy of the IRS and banks I trust since personal finances is a pretty important subject and worth spending some time and effort to learn it myself, even if I ultimately toss all the paperwork at my CPA to deal with come April.
I'm more than likely going for a Roth IRA given my income (well below threshold) and a strong desire to just keep things simple. Traditional IRA with tax deductions sounds nice, but it's also overhead and effort I just don't want to deal with regardless of potential tax savings (and I need to pay the taxes eventually anyway); the old saying that time is money.
It's great and much appreciated to hear from someone who's not marketing at me that Schwab and Fidelity are more or less objectively the same. That means the deciding factor is simply which one I'm more biased to, which means Schwab (aforementioned AMEX tie-ins).
Fidelity has the better website (but Schwab's site is not nearly as bad as Vanguard) and has had fewer weird financial problems in recent years than Schwab. That said, either one will work. I've got everything moved over to Fidelity right now because I like having my free cash in a decent money market fund, and I somehow found that more difficult with Schwab.
If you hit the limit of what you can put in a Roth IRA (good choice) and still have money to save, I Bonds through treasury direct are something to consider.
Doing more research, everyone seems to agree Fidelity is the most handy when it comes to using a brokerage like I would a bank. Their 2% all-around cashback Visa credit card is also admittedly nice. They outsource the banking aspects, though.
On the other hand, Schwab has an actual bank as a subsidary if I do want to use them also for banking, which is great for feeling reassured as a client/depositor if I want to diversify my current banking with US Bank.
Schwab also has those AMEX tie-ins, which is again reassuring because I really like and respect AMEX. Yeah it's just marketing, but damnit if it isn't effective. :V
Though either way I'm not concerned with the finer points of brokerage-banking or investing right now because I'm not sure if I will get into the whole investment money games beyond a Roth IRA. Maybe I will, but I can worry about that when I get to that point.
I understand the concern regarding banking. I keep "cash" in my Fidelity account in one or the other of two Fidelity money market funds that invest in US Treasuries. That's as safe as a bank, after a fashion (if the treasury starts defaulting on t-bills, everything including banks' FDIC insurance is going to go down the tubes). There was an extra step with Schwab that I found a little irksome - your free cash in one of their accounts goes into a sweep account that may or may not be FDIC insured (I don't remember), but it doesn't earn much interest. Moving that money into a money market fund that invests in treasuries was an extra step.
But they're both good choices. I remember when paying $15 for a stock trade was considered innovative. But the most recent Schwab website changes I experienced, maybe a year ago before I switched everything over, were a step backward.
I have the Fidelity 2% card and it's great.
I would have stayed with Vanguard forever if their website didn't suck and their brokerage services didn't also suck. They really were a leader for a while.
One feature I found rather unique at Fidelity (I too have recently migrated there as my "one stop shop") was free outgoing domestic wires ($100 minimum). Being able to "teleport" money within an hour to another pre-registered account (before 3PM ET on biz days, in my experience) facilitated switching to Fidelity while still keeping old bank/CU accounts minimally active without having to engage in a lot of thinking ahead about balances (and worrying about EFT/ACH hold times) at those now peripheral accounts.
The only reason I currently have a Fidelity account alongside my Vanguard account is Fidelity also offers a 2% across-the-board cashback credit card that auto-redeems points straight into my money-market account (albeit at $50 intervals).
if savings rates in the UK were as bad as they seem to be in the US then I admit I would be tempted.
However, a shock at the wrong time can cause those "safe" T-bills to suddenly be much less than what was paid for them. Something similar happened to Silicon Valley bank - it wouldn't have been a problem if their depositors hadn't all demanded their money at once, but these are the scenarios that banks are regulated to avoid.
You've a mis-understanding of how funds like FDLXX are managed. In a T-BILL only fund even a decrease in past asset value doesn't matter because they are by law managed to 1$ of net asset value. That is they most hold 1$ of _current_ asset value for every 1$ deposited _at all times_.
The only situation where the value of the fund can be less than what you put in is the collapse of US currency, which savings account insurance can not protect against either.
> The only situation where the value of the fund can be less than what you put in is the collapse of US currency, which savings account insurance can not protect against either.
I don't think so: suppose the company offering the fund was mismanaged and failed to comply with the regulations. Maybe not likely, but definitely more likely than the "collapse of US currency."
that phrasing is a stupid and annoying passive agressive way of calling someone out, but it's when the person saying it gets it wrong, it's really embarrassing for them.
Specifically, Wells Fargo, Chase, and Bank of America still offer "savings" accounts with APYs of around than 0.05% APY as in way less than 1 percent.
The criteria is and I quote: "none of the major banks in the US pay 4% or anywhere near".
US Bank is the 5th biggest and 2nd oldest bank[1] in the US and currently has a money market savings account with 4.25% APY[2][3] for balances over $25,000 depending on your location, if they are not major then neither are any of the others.
If you don't know US Bank, as was the case with another commenter, that is not my problem.
But if your claim is that the other commentor doesn't actually live in America, based on the evidence of them not knowing about US bank (or any of the many other places that offer a HYSA), you'd have to give evidence that all Americans have heard of US bank's HYSA. Instead of doing that, you're trying to make it seem like I've never heard of US bank (I have, thank you), (or any other place's) HYSA, which doesn't address the question, which is: does someone not knowing about HYSAs expose them as being non-American? Now, I bank at a place with an HYSA, so I'm aware of them, but if you talk to people in America, you'd be surprised how many of them don't have an HYSAs or even know they exist, because I named the pathetically low APYs at the 4 largest banks. What makes them large is the number of Americans who bank with them and their assets. So we can safely assume that, of banks, the sum of the number of Americans banking with the first four is larger than, by your comment, the fifth largest bank. Thus, it seems like most Americans probably actually don't know about US bank's HYSA, because otherwise they wouldn't be the fifth largest bank, but instead be any rank higher.
By the by, for those who don't have $25k in cash to sit around (which is a whole other conversation), if you look around, there are places with HYSAs that don't have that minimum, so I'd suggest putting your money elsewhere.
But let's pretend you're right and that I hadn't heard of US bank's HYSA. Instead of claiming that not knowing about that must also make me not a person of the USA, but also that it is my problem, which is a very American way to respond to something, so bravo there if you wanted to give the impression that you were), you shifted the conversation away from your earlier claim that not knowing about US Bank's HYSA made them not American and instead goaded me by trying to make projected ignorance of their offering my problem, and not a trait inherent to non-Americans. Good luck with that.
No, it's a fact that Chase, one of the major banks, offers nowhere near 4% interest. The GP made a snarky reply that "US bank" offers 4% interest, without even naming the bank.
That depends on whether you need to sell the bond before its maturity date. Supposing it is a 1 year bond, if you hold it for the full year you get your £100 back. If you need to sell early, then you might get less back if rates have risen.
A money market fund operates differently from holding individual bonds and aims to provide you with the ability to sell at any time without a loss --- but the monthly interest paid out will fluctuate according to market rates.
The whole idea of the yield curve is that you (generally) get compensated for that risk with higher rates. That is why (outside of crises) the yield curve is upward sloping. It follows that if you buy shorter dated T-bills or bonds, the liquidation loss risk you mention is low, and you’ll still usually make out better than with the bank because you’re not paying any middleman.
The distinction to make isn't between CDs and bonds. They're actually just-about identical instruments. The key issue is the duration of the bond or CD. Longer duration bonds (and CDs!) expose you to more interest rate risk. If you buy and then rates go up, then nobody will want to accept your bond/CD on the secondary market at the old face value; you'll need to sell it for less, so the rate they get from it is on par with the new prevailing one.
With CDs some of these dynamics are more hidden, because most people cannot access a secondary market for their CDs and do not see what they are worth on a given day. They just hold to maturity. But --
-- you can also just hold a bond to maturity, and
-- if you buy your bank CD through a brokerage account (e.g. Fidelity, Schwab), then you can sell it early on the secondary market, for whatever a buyer will accept.
So there's less difference between bonds and CDs than people suppose.
(There is also the issue of default risk when the issuer of the bond is a private company or untrustworthy government. But I would say that US Treasuries and FDIC-backed CDs have similar low default risk, and you can make an argument that the T-bill is actually safer.)
One difference between CDs and US Treasury bonds is that interest on US Treasury bonds/notes/bills is exempt from state income tax. So if you live in a high income tax state, you need to account for taxes when comparing yields.
Governments have a lot of vested interest in preventing that from happening, but it's not a guarantee on the level of FDIC.
EDIT: Just realized I misread the article, and they are talking about money market funds, not money market accounts, which are different things. I did not realize brokerages allow money market fund assets to be treated essentially as cash balances, which is basically what a money market account does.
If you prefer to buy something FDIC insured, you can buy CD’s through your brokerage. You can pick them from whichever banks pay the most interest and you can also sell them early on the secondary market rather than paying an early withdrawal penalty.
I haven’t done it, but here is what Schwab has in their FAQ [1]:
> While we can't guarantee there will be a market for it, we'll help you sell the CD at the current market rate by requesting bids on your CD and contacting you with the highest one. If you decide to sell, you'll receive the bid price plus any accrued interest. There are no guarantees that you'll get what you originally paid for the CD.
If you have £100k then it is worth 'spreading' it in various assets, including what the article talks about.
There is also a 'recognised practice' that slowly/over time you move some of your stocks/indexes/etc. positions into bonds as you grow older/getting close to pension. Unless you got enough ££££ in the bank and you plan to leave your portfolio as inheritance, in which case leave it where it is.
Also a UK consideration which may apply in the US: in the UK, you really want to have all your savings in an ISA wrapper, because then you don't have to pay income tax on the interest.
If inflation is rising along with interest rates, treasury inflation protected securities will drop a lot less on rising rates than just plain treasuries.
Money market funds and short term t-bills are basically always liquid at face value, unlike longer term bonds. They fall below investment value maybe once per 50 years and that usually lasts a couple days.
US money market funds fall under strict regulations (including around liquidity and redemption) post global financial crisis to preserve their net asset value at $1 (to prevent “breaking the buck” or losing value). Can you be more specific as to what mismanagement looks like?
Depends on the money market fund. There are US treasury only funds like FDLXX, basically the only situation it would become unable to meet it's cash flow obligations is if there where no buyers for US treasuries at face value.
And frankly if that's the case I wouldn't be betting on FDIC or equivalent insurance actually working anyways.
But even "less" secure ones are heavily regulated to be kept at 1$ of NAV and SPIC backed.
Just buy the short term T-bills directly and hold them. They're as liquid and you don't have to worry about any risk besides US government default. Why pay a fund even 5 basis points simply to build a ladder that you can build yourself?
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I have some experience with accounting software and its use in various types of business (not just startups).
Xero (rather than Quickbooks) is dominant in the UK and it has a lot of problems. However, I think you are addressing a fundamentally different market. Quickbooks and Xero are both targeted at the long-tail of small businesses - think tradesmen, cafes, hairdressers, etc. The main thing they accomplish for those customers is basic book keeping and business functions (like invoicing, payroll, etc)
Your software seems much more aimed at small companies which want sophisticated tools to generate financial insight. This is not a criticism, just a comment that this is a different and potentially smaller market.
However, one way you could capture the "long tail" of small businesses is by winning over the high-street accountant. If you could let them prepare annual accounts with 10x less work - even if the customer book keeping is a mess - then every accountant will recommend your software to their clients.
Anyway - great to see something new in this space. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss further.