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.
