Notes From All Over -- Part 1 -- Sports, Jobs, And Investing Edition -- October 9, 2021

MLB playoffs: best site?

Sports: best sports on television right now, 12:00 noon, Saturday, October 9, 2021 -- 

• #6 Oklahoma at #21 Texas. At start of second quarter, Texas, 28, and OK at 14. Wow. Six touchdowns in first quarter. Technically the sixth touchdown at the opening of the second quarter. But.

Jobs, September, 2021:

• hindsight is 20-20, or is it 20/20?
• how were the analysts so far off?
• what did Steve Liesman miss?
• this was a great example of "group think" and trusting the (wrong) memes;
• in the big scheme of things, I track very few metrics
• but one metric that I do track would have predicted the "bad" September, 2021, jobs report
• again, it's a metric I track and post weekly: see this post.
  

Apple: thinking big

• Apple Car
• Hollywood: Apple building new regional headquarters in Hollywood;

Investing: re-posting -- see this post:

Roth vs traditional IRAs: see if you can find the fallacy in the argument presented by this writer -- "why I won't do a Roth IRA conversion -- even  if this is the last chance." Brett Arends is very, very knowledgeable and has been around for quite some time. How he missed this fallacy is beyond me. His argument:

• most of us -- including the writer, Arends -- are almost certainly going to be better off in a traditional IRA
• his fallacy: see if you can find it

This article really, really "haunts" me -- the writer is so off the mark. Roth vs traditional IRA? This is a no-brainer. 

If I only knew then what I know now.

The writer assumes lower middle class and middle class are big investors. No. Living month-to-month. The "investor class" will be much better off with Roth IRAs. 

Just wait until investors who got a very, very small tax break at the front end and then see how huge the RMDs will be at the other end, regardless of the tax bracket. At the front end, getting a tax break on a $6,000 investment; at the other end, being taxed on a $25K RMD.

Later, November 20, 2021: another really poor article trying to explain the disadvantages of a Roth IRA. This is not a disadvantage in the strict sense of the word "disadvantage," and for 99.99% of Americans it's not even applicable: the "disadvantage"? A married couple earning more than $207,000 / year cannot contribute to a Roth IRA. After that, the article is boring, tedious, irrelevant. For serious investors who want to leave a legacy for their heirs, the Roth IRA is a much better vehicle than the traditional IRA. Period. Dot.