Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with finance and financial

Would you guys recommend to buy MOTORS LIQ CO (MTLQQ)?

omaralarifi — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:32:31 -0800

Can I buy MOTORS LIQ CO (MTLQQ) AKA General Motors stock? If yes, Would you guys recommend to buy the stock? Whatever your answer I need to know the reason. Thank You

divorce-filter: protect friend from his wife financially

evanrodge — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:24:54 -0800

divorce-filter: protect friend from his wife financially, her secret bank accounts, hostility, etc I have a close personal friend who I think is on the verge of a divorce (although he doesn't think so) and I am getting all the warning signs.

His wife is hostile towards him non-stop- yelling at him over things he has no control over, picking fights at random times over past incidents. I'm pretty sure (very sure actually) that this fighting and hostility goes well above and beyond normal marriage quibbling. The reason I say this is because it happens every day, all year long. Also, the man in question is very quiet and intellectual and holds a well paying job. It should be noted that the she threatens divorce in several arguments that she can't win.

Where things get hairy is as follows: His wife is just about to finish her nursing degree. She has set up a bank account without him knowing to deposit the money she earns from her hospital work directly into. The reason my friend doesn't know about this is because his wife "handles the money" in the household.

My question is, how can my friend protect himself financially when the sh** finally hits the fan. I suspect that my friend will be left with his wife's school debt (as well as her other debt...) after the divorce happens. Also there is the issue of who gets custody over their two teenage kids. He is an excellent father who should get the kids, but courts almost always favor women.

Thanks ahead of time for any help you guys can offer.

Online banking, credit and investing through one package

Blazecock Pileon — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:30:11 -0800

What basic, personal accounting software do you recommend? I would like to track:

• income
• retirement accounts
• out-come, i.e. spending on credit cards and ATM debits

This would preferably be done automatically — the software will contact the banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions electronically and download as much information as possible. We're eight years into the 21st C. and it doesn't seem necessary to spend one to two hours a day manually tracking and entering the day's business-related what-have-yous.

I don't hold investments, but if I gamble I would like to start gambling somewhat intelligently. The software would track investment accounts — and existing retirement account components — automatically on a daily basis. In particular, I'd like to be able to view how parts of my retirement account are valued on a daily basis, which I can't do currently without manually tracking its history in an Excel spreadsheet.

I don't run a small business (yet), so that is not a requirement. If it has the capability to run accounting for a small business that would be a plus.

Another criterion would be that I'd prefer a non-Windows software package, preferably something native to Mac OS X. I can run Windows software within Fusion, but due to cost and integration issues I'd prefer not being permanently locked in to that option. I can run an X11 application, but with the tradeoffs, being able to run something OS X native would be useful.

With that in mind, are there software recommendations you have?

Personal Finance Software for Mac Question: Deluxe 2008 Edition

harkin banks — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:13:51 -0800

Mac switcher / Intuit hater question: Is there a good alternative to Quicken for the Mac? My wife just got me a new MacBook as a pre-Valentine's day present (yes, she's awesome.) There are obvious equivalents for all of the applications I have on my old desktop (running XP), except one: Quicken.

I know there's a Mac version of Quicken, but from what I hear it lacks a lot of the functionality of the Windows version. I also know that I could run the Windows version via Parallels, but that doesn't appeal to me for two reasons: a) the only reason for me to install Parallels/XP would be for Quicken, which makes the whole thing rather expensive, and b) over the last few years I've come to hate Intuit with the proverbial heat of a thousand suns just as much for their product-sunsetting, privacy-invading ways as for their insecure software. (Bastards.) So Quicken in either form is right out.

Our requirements are fairly typical, I think. Our financial life is not crazily complex, but we've got investments and a mortgage so I think we need something more than an spreadsheet or an "envelope-based" program (like Budget). Some budgeting and forecasting capability would be nice. Being able to download transactions from online banking is a necessity. Whatever I choose, I don't want to be locked into a proprietary format, so the ability to use or export to a common format is vital. (Ability to import our previous history from Quicken is NOT important. I haven't been keeping up recently, so our Quicken file is pretty out of date at the moment -- I would be OK with starting over in a new program.) So, what personal finance software for the Mac should we look at?

There's this thread asking the same question, but it's almost three years old, and the situation has probably changed. Mentioned in that thread are Liquid Ledger, iBank, and Moneydance. I also know about GnuCash. Any opinions about these four programs? Are there other alternatives I should look into?

My head's about to explode...

Zé Pequeno — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 17:20:43 -0800

Can someone please point me in the right direction to find practice test papers for Financial Accounting? (Balance Sheets, Income Statements, Statements of Returns on Equity, Cash Flow Statements, Depreciation, Ratios, etc. etc.) Assorted business schools worries inside. Coming from a liberal arts academic background, I'm starting to really feel the pressure from my recently-started international business masters and get the impression I need to study ten times as hard as my classmates, most of whom have studied the subject at undergraduate level. At the moment, I'm fretting over Financial Accounting. Please help me to understand this subject!

Extra points for whoever can help me with Corporate Finance...

I was never strong at mathematics in school. Though I'm pretty good at mental arithmetic, I found the subject boring and didn't pay attention in class. Now I'm faced with the daunting task of getting to grips with Corporate Finance and have some decent books to help me, all of which cheerfully claim that the author needs no prior knowledge of Finance, just a knowledge of algebra! At the risk of appearing extremely dumb... I can't remember any algebra! What do I need to learn in order to understand the nimiety of equations by which I'm beginning to feel very overwhelmed?

Investment options for the young and the restless?

killdevil — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 11:03:32 -0800

A friend needs to find a good place to park some money that will ultimately be used for house down-payment purposes. Help me come up with a few good investment options. My friend has around $100k sitting in a low-yield savings account. It pains me to see the cash left there when better options are legion.

Key points: the money will be invested for around 1-3 years. I think one or two good mutual funds would be a reasonable choice, but am not really an investor myself so I don't have specific funds or fund families to which I can point my friend.

Other options are welcome, of course, provided they are relatively conservative and are low-maintenance (i.e. they do not require active monthly monitoring; keep in mind that my friend is relatively young and is not an experienced investor).

Thanks!

Why Will Dividend Make Microsoft Stock Price Fall By Dividend Amount?

pwb503 — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 14:14:09 -0800

According to numerous reports I've read in the last few days worth of the Business Section of the newspaper, Microsoft's "stock price can be expected to fall by the amount of the dividend." That's the one-time $3 dividend that is coming sometime soon for those of you who don't follow this sort of thing. Anyway... I don't get it? Why is the stock price expceted to drop about $3 the day after this dividend? I like to think of myself as knowledgeble about the markets, and I understand that this dividend will remove $3 per share out of the bank for M$, but aren't stock prices valued more in terms of the value of the company and its holdings rather than simply the value of the money in the bank?

How much should Google's stock be worth?

rkent — Fri, 06 Aug 2004 09:18:43 -0800

Amateur economists, VCs, MBA students: what's a fair price for a google share? Based on what assumptions? Some background info to assist your calculations. Centrally from this NYTimes article:

24.6 million shares will be sold
The distribution structure will be Dutch Auction, where (basically) the top 24.6 million bids will get a share, but only pay the amount of the 24.6 millionth-place bid.
They hope to make around $3 billion, so that puts the expected share price at over $100.

I'll start the estimating with an extremely simple calculation, assuming that a stock "should" have a P/E ratio of no more than 20. Based on earnings of $105.6M last year, this puts the (backwards-looking) "correct" market cap at $2.1B, for a share price of around $85. So maybe the $100+ isn't so unreasonable if you expect the earnings to increase this year?

Where do SEC fines go?

Fupped Duck — Tue, 18 May 2004 05:35:52 -0800

So Lucent got fined yesterday, to the tune of mamny millions of dollars, byt the SEC for the criminal euphemism of Account Irregularities.
Like other high profile SEC investigations, why do they always mention the fine, but never discuss where the funds go?
Are they used to offset the defrauded investor's losses? Or does the gov't turn the investor's loss into it's gain by keeping the fine for its own purposes?

Quick real estate transactions

jdroth — Thu, 06 May 2004 11:23:32 -0800

So yesterday my wife — Ms. We're-Not-Moving — found a house closer to Portland that she loves. We both love it. The only offer we can make, though, is contingent upon selling our home, which we hadn't even considered until yesterday. Help! Does anyone have experience with this kind of thing? What can we do to make a contingency offer more attractive? What about bridge loans? Anyone have experience with those? I need advice on hurried real estate transactions (other than "don't do them").

Question on programming for financial modeling.

trharlan — Fri, 19 Dec 2003 07:35:26 -0800

Does anyone here do any programming for financial modeling? (more inside) I'm looking more at capital markets, factor modeling,and macroeconomic stuff, rather than cost projections and the like. In my quest to make myself more marketable to employers, I have decided it would be beneficial to me to be able to write sophisticated models in VBA for Excel, S-plus, or a related language. While my sata and quant knowledge are pretty good, my programming skills are limited to BASIC on a Commodore 64, so I'd be starting more or less from scratch.

My questions:
What language/ software package will have the most longevity?
What language/ software package will be the easiest to learn?
What are the best resources to teach oneself this type of programming?