The roi is unfortunately not the same if you earn your money in euros and need to pay your taxes in euros. At one point one has to do a forex trade and that will be a loss for the euro investor
Only if you convert it at a loss and are unable to wait for USD to recover. If (and it is, admittedly, a big assumption) we assume that USD and EUR are broadly stable currencies over the long term, then short term changes in the ratio don't matter for long term investors. You're buying a share of productive capacity, the currency it is listed in doesn't matter.
It's reasonable to assume they're broadly stable, but being broadly stable doesn't mean a drop will "recover". There's no specific ratio that the currencies are being pushed to. Permanent changes in the baseline can and do happen.
> You're buying a share of productive capacity, the currency it is listed in doesn't matter.
But I don't own a fixed percentage of production, I own a fixed number of shares and the number of shares can change. If the number of shares doubles, then my investment is worth half as much.
> But I don't own a fixed percentage of production, I own a fixed number of shares and the number of shares can change. If the number of shares doubles, then my investment is worth half as much.
How is that related to currency changes? That can happen anyway regardless of the currency.
It can happen in other situations, but the fact that it always happens with currency fluctuations is what's important here. When the dollar loses value, everything I own that's anchored to dollars loses value too. "buying a share of productive capacity" implies a counteracting effect, but there isn't one, because the amount of productive capacity represented by each share shrinks too.
yes, but could one also argue that due to currency weakening, the S&P's growth can simply be due to the weakened currency?
If I can say something has an "absolute" value of X, but I denominate it in USD, which is normally 1:1 to X, then it's value in USD in X.
but if USD drops to being worth half an X, but its absolute value hasn't changed, it will now appear to be worth 2X in USD.
so why can't one argue, if the dollar weakened by 15%, but everything else being equal, one would expect dollar denominated stocks to appreciate (in dollars) by the same amount? And if the dollar would strengthen, we would expect the stock price to depreciate?
Because the SP500 is a better indicator of the market than USD. Also if you look at the global dollar index, it is right at par historically.
The companies in the 500 are mostly global companies, if the USD shrunk so much they would either be losing money, or it doesn't matter because the US market is so strong it dwarfs the others.
> The companies in the 500 are mostly global companies
Isn't that saying exactly what the parent comment mentioned? Since those companies are global, the growth of the S&P 500 which is USD denominated will track the devaluation of the USD as the underlying companies haven't lost value, the dollar has, and the S&P 500 would track that as growth in percentage to balance it.
I don't understand why they would be losing money since as you said they're global, and more untethered to the USD than the S&P 500.
This is clearly the USD Global index dropping a few basis points, which is an active strategy. Look at the USD Index over 15 year period, there is nothing wrong with USD today.
I'm not arguing if the S&P is a better indicator of the US economy than USD or not.
What I'm asking, to me it seems if the USD drops in value, but everything else stays the same (i.e. GOOG hasn't lost any real value if measured in any other currency for instance). I'd expect GOOG to rise in USD terms (as its value has stayed constant).
Why wouldn't this be true (yes, there are a bunch of assumptions/complexities, and perhaps those assumptions/complexities break the argument), but at a very simplistic level is what I said wrong?
The USD and EURO being nearly on par was the exception. And given the current admins stated goals, I’m not sure we’re going to see the USD strengthen anytime soon. In fact, it’s more likely to get weaker.
> If (and it is, admittedly, a big assumption) we assume that USD and EUR are broadly stable currencies over the long term
Yeah, er, that's a very big if. There's no real reason to assume that, and history doesn't really bear it out.
If anything in the near term you'd probably expect the USD to weaken further vs the Euro; Trump seems _very_ keen to install a fed chair who'll cut rates even where not supported by inflation and employment numbers, whereas the ECB is more disciplined and less subject to political interference.
You're the one making a big assumption: that this is a short term movement in the dollar.
Trump has made it clear he wants a cheaper dollar to make US exports more competitive and JPM is forecasting another 10% drop in the value of the dollar this year.
Just because the dollar and euro have been roughly level for over a decade doesn't mean that will remain true, currencies often go through pretty fast changes in relative values every few decades as their financial and geopolitical positions change.
The pound drop around 2007~2009 is a good example of one such sudden but long term price shift.
New Balance and Brooks make shoes in "wide". I like them very much. Also their normal shoes are wider than Nike or Adidas. In the past, like 10 years ago, I used to wear adidas shoes and they fit. Now, the new ones are way too tight. I think they made them narrower, probably for fashion reasons...
I could imagine being a car mechanic or a welder. Repairing my car is a little hobby of mine and I could imagine doing that full time, if programming work would stop paying my bills.
For me, in Germany, it was always cursive from the beginning to the end of school. We learned to write in the first class of elementary school. I still only write cursive and cannot write any other style, by hand. And only with a fountain pen. The style I was taught is called "Lateinische Ausgangsschrift". At a catholic elementary school in NRW.
If you are interested here is an overview of the different cursive styles: https://www.schulschriften.de/html/schreibschrift.html
I'm now really confused. I've also been taught this type in german elementary school. But since after school cursive was thought of as children / school handwriting and not something adults should use in professional settings. Also the use of fountain pents was considered childish.
Well, I was never taught otherwise. However lots of the other kids later in high school had developed another way of writing. So me writing cursive, now, as a grown man, is a little strange. I still write with the fountain pen, because it is much nicer to write. You need almost no pressure and that is good for your fingers, if you need to write for a longer time.
No never. They taught us some type of preletters in cursive, in kindergarden, as a stepping stone to real cursive. We never wrote print in elementary school. However, the kindergarden and elementary school were catholic institutions. Most probably they are more conservative than the average in the country.
I honestly don't understand that, as well. I am a real engineer on paper and now do full-time software development. The funny thing is, "real" engineers mostly think that programming computers is like doing magic. Meanwhile, many software developers think that "real" engineers are somehow special..
That is largely due to a difference in complexity.I would say that the level of complexity of a blueprint of a house is on par with a 20-30 line python solution of a leet code easy excercise to a programmer. If the one reading the blue print is an engineer and the one reading the python code is a programmer. A crud app is more like the blue prints for a vacuum cleaner or something like that.
I have read "Mastering the Market Cycle" by Howard Marks, once, and liked it in general. The topic is the market cycle itself with focus on investing. It is not about specific companies or technologies, though.
I have lived in a foreign country for about 3 years. My wife is from there and I speak with her in that language every day. I also took courses until the B2 level. My communication in that language amounts to easily more than 5000hrs. I am fluent, but no native speaker would call me native and that will never happen. My wife learned my language in school since elementary school up to graduation. She lives in my country since about 5 years. In her job she has to talk to people for basically 8hrs a day in the local language. She is fluent but nobody would call her native. Instead people wonder where she is from because they cannot match her accent to a particular country. Most likely we will never have native competency in the foreign language. So if you make it to native in 5000hrs, you are way above average.
I wonder if there's some kind of plateau you reach in a learning a language that way. Like, what if you started working with a hollywood dialect coach?
I’m bilingual since a child but didn’t really use one of the languages much after age 12 to about 30. When I do speak the second language I can fool locals into thinking it’s my first language, but it takes exactly 1 mistake or mispronunciation and they ask “oh are you actually English?”. The bar is that that high for passing native fluency in another language, if you somehow could fake the accent perfectly as well (there is absolutely no way).
Yeah there's definitely a gap between functionally fluent and being mistaken for a native that requires some intentionality and effective study that is unlikely to be crossed accidentally/passively or by focusing on the wrong things/methods.
Some combination of learning the phonetics of the target language, 1000s of hours of comprehensible input, singing to music in the target language, and doing impressions of native speakers are all things that can help.
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