{"id":18835,"date":"2019-04-18T19:16:58","date_gmt":"2019-04-18T23:16:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/?p=18835"},"modified":"2019-04-18T19:17:30","modified_gmt":"2019-04-18T23:17:30","slug":"its-always-exciting-to-get-my-quarterly-ameritrade-statement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2019\/04\/18\/its-always-exciting-to-get-my-quarterly-ameritrade-statement.html","title":{"rendered":"It’s Always Exciting to Get My Quarterly Ameritrade Statement"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t remember how long it’s been. 20 years? Probably closer to 15. I don’t know but my brief foray into investing however many years ago still comes back every three months to remind me how little I knew about such things. I tried to invest ethically, in companies I thought did something beneficial for the world. I put money into for-profit educational institutions, imagining that schools held accountable to investors might be more motivated than traditional schools. I considered putting money into privately-owned prisons, thinking that similarly, if held accountable to stockholders they would redefine incarceration with the real goal of prisoner reform and reentry into society. Or something like that. I don’t remember all my thinking from back then but everything I put money into tanked. I did not put money into prisons. For fun I threw $100 at a penny stock, for a chain of diners that had a few hundred locations around the country. I even lost money on that. I still get this quarterly statement from Ameritrade, the brokerage firm that over the years has probably spent 100 times the value of my account on these mailings. I gave up on this shit and followed the sage advice: Index Funds. Period.<\/p>\n

\"Quarterly

Quarterly Ameritrade Statement<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t remember how long it’s been. 20 years? Probably closer to 15. I don’t know but my brief foray into investing however many years ago still comes back every three months to remind me how little I knew about such things. I tried to invest ethically, in companies I thought did something beneficial for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18836,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-181-2","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/20190418_140852.jpg?fit=4032%2C3024&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-4TN","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18835"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18838,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18835\/revisions\/18838"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}