learning about investing with the 1%

10Feb13

It's a rainy sunday afternoon, I'm drinking instant coffee with condensed milk out of a bell jar and reading through TIAA CREF's prospectus. While I generally suscribe believing the stereotype (demonization) of those working on Wall St, I decided I should educate myself a little on the process and this system.

What have I learned:

There are 8 main Accounts (if I open an IRA it would be investing in these products)

Bond related products seem more stable than the others (fixed income definition)

There are a fair amount of risks associated with each investment, I mistakenly didn't read through them yet.

The Social Choice Account is an interesting idea, investing 60% in companies that meet some cool criteria, environmental, ethical worker treatment and others. However the other 40% is invested in fixed income, which I think could include companies that don't meet the social criteria, so what's the point?

I thought taking text from PDFs was hard, all but the horizontal tables copied pasted well. I getting off track by thinking of writing a perl script to mine it.

I want to know if any of the accounts invest in student loan backed money, I have a suspicion that might be the next mortgage backed security.

Questions to ask the rep next time I call, 

There's alot of risks, I could read all of them, but could you just tell me?

With Bond's, I get paid interest while I'm waiting to for it to mature, or the interest is packaged with the maturing bond?

What's the definition for fixed income?

I would say this incomplete post fits in well with my theme of naive novice learning just a little.

Blog Redirection

I applied to 5 PhD programs, I have heard back from 3, interviewed at 2. I don't know what my chances are of getting in. I'm a little bit scared, excited, doubtful, hopeful and nervous. In the likely?unlikely? chance that I'm not accepted to a program I want to go into, I have a backup plan, MOOC grad student. It's funny that I am almost less nervous about being rejected from all the programs than going into grad school.

Short story short, the message of this blog might be changing from unorganized rage against the system, to either working inside the system to promote positive change OR working outside the system to promote positive change/more inclusion.

28jan13: Stuff I'm currently learning, TEs

Man, I haven't been posting for a while. Is this going to turn out to be a good place for taking notes? I guess we'll find out. For my last journal club I presented a paper on endogenous retro viruses. I have been reading up on them and discovering that they (and TEs {transposable elements}) hold very interesting genetic implications. A large part of eukaryotic genomes (and even more in plants!) is made of TE sequences, figuring out their role in evolution is going to be tricky. In some papers I was parousing last night, I found/learned that it's theorized that TEs played an important role in speciation by moving regulatory elements around the genome. When they hop around the genome, randomly inserting them selves in new places, they can interrupt genes and cause new isoforms. The high level of sequence homology also means that TEs might increase opportunities for recombination. In conclusion: TEs are a very interesting topic in genetics, and I think they'll end up earning someone another Noble Prize, after Barbara McClintock.