Tomas Vykruta Data Daily

This report is an analysis on hurricanes, surprisingly I am not seeing the explosive growth that documentaries show. I took the raw list of hurricanes from wikipedia to make landfall in US 1850-2018 and did an analysis. This is a “strength” study. Each hurricane gets points which is the square of its category, so cat 5 = 25 points, cat 2 = 4 points. It’s an annual study where we sum up the points of all hurricanes happening within one calendar year. There is no clear pattern of exponential growth in strength. In fact in 2005 strength appears to be all time low. This is the same study b y decade  where we sum up the points of all hurricanes happening in 10 year periods. You may think the exponential scoring is unfair, so we can try a linear. Here, the points assigned to each hurricane is equal to its category. So two cat 3 hurricanes in one year = 6 points. This is a color coded study showing counts by hurricane category. Here I added a polynomial trend line. Over 20...

If you're going IFR to linden in real IFR weather, think twice about this. If flying is inherently dangerous, and if approaches to minimums are the most dangerous part of flying, then this particular approach is a compound. This approach should n ever be attempted by new IFR pilots with weather near minimums . If you're a seasoned IFR pilot, keep reading. Newark Approach will force you to cancel IFR between the FAF and MAP. The MAP is the first opportunity to maybe see the runway. That means you're always cancelling IFR before you have visual contact with the runway, and you cannot go missed. Recall that VFR minimums in Golf daytime is 1sm vis and clear of clouds. That means in daytime, as long as you have 1sm vis and can remain clear of clouds, legally, you can cancel IFR and continue the approach legally VFR pilot nav. Visibility is the most important thing. It's 2.3nm from BAUTZ to the runway. So if visibility is less than 2.3nm you know you won't be able...

Is the market in a bubble? Is a stock market crash coming? Aggregate macroeconomic data is not showing any sings of weakness for previous month. Would be interesting to see sentiment analysis of "stock market bubble is about to burst" discussion around 2013 compared to now. I recall there was a lot of worry back then that market was at all time high. If you recall, around 2013 a lot of investors and analysts were talking about moving to cash positions anticipating recession. Seems silly in retrospect, that was so long ago. 2013 was year of IPhone 5 and the beginning of Obama's second term.  The data below represents 2004-2018. above: Google Trends on "stock market bubble",. you can clearly see in 2013 (red circle) it becomes a hot topic as S&P reached pre recession high. This can be thought of as a "pessimism grap h". above: S&P 500 2004-current, notice the discussion correlates with S&P hitting pre-recession highs. ab...

These are the shortest runways in Caribbean. They come with their fare share of crashes like this Aztek in Saint Barts. Notice the wheels don't make contact until the departure-end 1000 foot white markers . The go-around should have been executed long before that, at the approach end 1000-foot markers . 11. Edward Bodden Airfield, Little Cayman – 998 metres or 3275 ft 10. Mustique Airport, Mustique (St Vincent & the Grenadines) – 992 metres or 3255 ft 9. Virgin Gorda Airport, British Virgin Islands – 945 metres or 3100 ft 8. Salt Cay, Turks & Caicos – 822 metres or 2697 ft 7. Auguste George Airport, Anegada (BVI) – 762 metres or 2500 ft 6. Union Island (SVG) – 752 metres or 2467 ft 5. Middle Caicos Airport (TCI)  – 750 metres or 2461 ft 4. Gustaf III Airport, St Barths – 650 metres or 2133 ft 3. John. A. Osborne Airport, Montserrat – 600 metres or 1968 ft 2. Codrington Airport, Barbuda – 500 metres or 1640 ft 1. Juancho E. Yrasquin Airpor...

The problem with the Total Stock Market funds such as VTSMX (and with many other similar funds) is they are dollar weighted, not % weighted to large/small/growth/value. From vanguard's site: " Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund is designed to provide investors with exposure to the entire U.S. equity market, including small-, mid-, and large-cap growth and value stocks.  " It's true there are small value stocks in there, but by % of portfolio, those represent only a small fraction. For this reason I buy equal % large growth index and small value index, and do another % assignment to the emerging markets side. It's surprisingly tricky to figure out what % of the US stock market, by dollars, is Small Value. This may be representative way to determine what % is small value: Vanguard small value   VISVX  net assets: 1.95 billion Vanguard large growth VIGRSX: 86.4 billion vanguard large value VIVAX: 74.2 billion That means if you b...

Fun behavioral finance exercise. I give you choice of 2 investment opportunities. You give me $10,000 and I give you.. 1. $600 back every year, but 1 in 2 chance I lose half of your $10k in the 3-5 years. Tough luck. 2. $350 every year without risk, and you can take your $10k back any time. Which do you choose? (we'll come back to this) The stock market is at an all time high, but so is FOMO. If you're a rationally sane person, and your view is something like: "the market COULD go up a lot more.. but it's already very high, so we might be coming up on a recession, and definitely slowing growth." You're savvy, far above average, and take a holistic view. You don't watch the stock tickers daily and over-react to headlines. You wait for something significant, like a geo political event. Meanwhile you're stuffing S&P and AMZN. You have some bonds (80/20?), but you're concentrated into the market a lo...

WOW! Trump's new tax plan (2018) is taking money from single people and giving it to married couples. When did IRS become a federal marriage counselor? Take a hypothetical NYC Wallstreet earner who declares $350,000 a year taxable income. 2017 single earner keeps $206k 2017 married keeps $215k 2018 single earner still keeps $205k 2018 married earner keeps $235k! by getting married, in 2018, $30,000 tax savings. That's enough to buy a brand new luxury car _every year_, or $2500 monthly payments on a mortgage $1M home! $30,000 in _after tax savings_ is a huge amount of money in america. What the fuck? (above) tax savings for single earner. almost no savings at all! (above) Tax savings  for married earner. almost 5% lower effective federal! (above) Taxes in 2017 and 2018 for married earner. (above) tax savings for 2017 and 2018 single earner (virtually no savings).

I've spoken with numerous financially savvy people in past few months who think the long term capital gains in New York are ""somewhere 15% to 20%?". It's actually 31%-33%. If you had significant gains in, say, a company's stock, and you have a high active income, you're going to get CRUSHED when you sell. For a 400k annual active income earner your effective long term capital gains tax is 33.64%. For rich trust fund people who don't work and earn W2 income, they pay 22.45%. But of course they wouldn't be dumb enough to declare Manhattan as their home base, they'd be in Miami, Florida where the long term capital gains tax is 12.75%. Life isn't fair. don't be mad. But don't be dumb and sell your stock thinking it's a tax efficient  diversification strategy. **Take a year off work, move to Miami, and dump it there. **I'm not sure if the feds let you do this, if you earned it in NYC, they might still t...

I'm pulling all my money out of Wealthfront today. I was always pleased with Wealthfront's simplicity and performance, and today took a close look for the first time at actual performance. I was shocked to see how poorly it's actually performed. Besides poor performance, there are other reasons I'm pulling out too. Wealthfront was marketed heavily to facebook/googlers and I took it for granted that it was a great modern product, better than what the banks offer. Assumptions are the termites of relationships. 1. performance is abysmal. If I kept it in S&P, did nothing at all, In 5 years S&P is up from 1600 to 2800 or a whopping 75%. In the same time my Wealthfront portfolio did an abysmal 30%. I have a 10.0 risk score selected. 2. interface is terrible. the website heavily dedicates UI to encourage you to transfer all of your money to Wealthfront by drawing retirement graphs and showing how the more money you transfer the better off you'll be (...

Airplane maintenance is very expensive, there is no way around this. This does not mean your mechanic gets a carte-blanche. The most important advice is to not argue once a bill has been issued, the discussion must happen before the invoice, ideally, before the work is done. Mike Busch, my favorite airplane guru and mentor, recently published a Q&A on this topic. Worth watching. I have one additional tip for SR22 or IO550 owners specifically. Continental publishes a warranty-labor allowances table. You can call them directly, or look it up on their website. These are not the recommended  hours, these are the maximum allowed. It's perfectly normal to reference this guide before the work is done, and ask the mechanic if his labor hours will not exceed these amounts. If your mechanic is offended by this notion, get a new mechanic. Remember to allow extra time for decowling and recowling. It's your plane and your money, don't let other people make decisions on yo...