Show HN: In a single HTML file, an app to encourage my children to invest

It remains to be seen what's going to happen over the next few decades. It's entirely possible that it'll all get wiped out (the substantial gains, not all value).

While the market was a very good bet for the last 50yrs, its not a guarantee.

Especially in the current climate you should be fully aware that it's significantly more risky to start investing today vs 10 yrs ago.

(Riskier doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad idea. It should just be a conscious decision under the acknowledgement that the upward trajectory is not certain. Especially in current political climate - and that "hodl"-ing doesn't necessarily mean you'll eventually get back what you invested, if a downturn manifests)

I've made a similar deal with my kids: Around 7 years ago I set up a "kid retirement" plan for them, where they couldn't touch the money until they were 18, but any money they put in I would match, and I'd also give them 10% APY with monthly compounding. My daughter aged out of it a couple years ago, she got something in the $100 range. Her brother still has a 18 months left, and I just recently rolled his over into the custodial account, he's got over a grand in there currently.

My daughter I just recently set up a ROTH for her and told her I'd match anything she puts into it, and stressed she should put something into it now from her savings, and then put some of her paycheck into it, anything is better than nothing. So far she's declined the free money. I'm going to set one up for my son, once he's at the point of having an income to justify it. She's very smart, but in some ways she's very stupid.

My understanding is that, if the market generally continues on the rate of return it's averaged throughout its history (that is, if you're not a doomer), then the single most important thing is showing up to play.

People who try to time the market or wait for a perfect time or pick the exact right blend of stocks, on average, don't do as well as people who pick a boring index or mutual fund and forget about it for 40 years.

Don't know about Switzerland, but most US brokers offer some kind of "target retirement date" fund, which automatically shifts from higher-risk assets to lower-risk as you approach retirement. VFIFX is one from Vanguard, for example. Pick one you like (just ask a coworker what they use, if you pick a big-name brokerage it really doesn't matter which one), shove your extra cash into it regularly, and forget about it. Then cross your fingers the market isn't actively crashing when you plan to retire (this is unlikely, but it does happen a couple times per century).

If you start to get into truly high wealth amounts (USD$500K+) you might consider hiring a wealth advisor, who can probably do better even after accounting for their fees.

All the choices you have to make can be very daunting. I was very lucky to have a colleague at work who gave a talk at the right time in my life with some plausibly right choices.

In the UK I started out using https://www.charles-stanley-direct.co.uk/ and later moved to https://www.ii.co.uk/. I initially invested in https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/investments/vanguard-life... which is a fund which is available on a bunch of platforms. These days I recommend https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/ to some people as an easy and low fee way of getting started with Vanguard funds in the UK.

I don't know what the best trading platform options are in Switzerland - it looks like all of the ones I'm familiar with are not relevant to you.

The key thing is you want to minimise two types of fees: * Platform fees * Product fees

For example Charles Stanley Direct charge 0.3% platform fees, and https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/ charges 0.15% platform fees.

Vanguard LifeStrategy® 100% Equity Fund charges 0.22%.

The bottom line is that there are lots of good choices, and the main thing is to make a choice and get started. You can always optimise/improve your choices later.

I'm also in Switzerland, currently my approach is to invest in Vanguard VOO (tracks the S&P500) via Interactive Brokers. There is a way to setup auto transfer and invest every month

As a caveat your money will be in dollars and in American companies, which might not be what you want, but it's worked for me well so far

Read "The Four Pillars of Investing". Basically index funds, diverse whole markets, leave it alone and watch it grow.

I did this at 22, and that seed money has grown a ton.

Your bank probably has an investment platform, you can just use it, it doesn't matter. My portfolio is 70% XEQT 30% CASH.TO—don't bother with anything else.

For the plattforms, that also blocked me for a while. But it is easy now. You just get one account at a platform that offers a free broker account and supports buying the etf you want without extra fees.

Typical options in Europe: Trade Republic, scalable, Consors Bank.

Then the usual: Around 10K where you can access it directly, a small amount in an investment with percentage (scalable and trade republic both offer that, limit there is or was 50k), rest in one broad ETF like one that follows the FTSE all world (vanguard or invesco offer that, one is bigger, the other asks for less fees).

No affiliation, and I dont know whether being outside of the EU changes things. And yes, there is the risk that we are in a huge bubble now and it popping would at first significantly lower the money put into the etf. But you certainly do have access to vanguard etc.

Have a look now and at the latest this weekend you have this solved, hopefully forever.

It is one of the most common reasons people invest though so it's entirely relevant

I don't think you even need to wear a tinfoil hat to reach this conclusion. Knowing about the origins of the modern outcome-based education systems in the West (we borrowed from the Prussian education system which replaced the classical education system based on the Trivium and Quadrivium) I would assert that your claim is spot on.

Probably, because everything would collapse if everyone was an "investor" and fewer people did actual work to keep the world going.

How couldn't it be? If the finance industry made things clearer then more people would benefit from it.

While I certainly had the _concept_ of compound interest taught to me at some abstract mathematical level, the application to real life practical financial scenarios was definitely not done [1]. Economics as a whole was an optional subject.

I think schools and curriculums could do a whole lot better in representing this important facet of life. More broadly, I often feel that "applying all that math you've learned to real things" is a subject that could be taught.

[1] Seriously, having applied math questions like "Johnny earns X per year, with a cost of living of Y. Assuming inflation of Z and average yearly returns of R, what percentage should he be putting away, starting at age 25, so that at age 50 he essentially gets the equivalent of his own salary each month?" would likely cause some lightbulbs to go off in the kids' heads.

> that's most adults' level of financial literacy too.

The vicious cycle! We have to start somewhere..

Where do you send your money to invest? What is a stock? This is the type of information missing.

The Rothschild bloodline is responsible for helping to orchestrate every modern war since the Napoleonic Wars, by loaning money to both sides of the conflict. Major General Smedley D. Butler wrote about this in War is a Racket. I personally, don't give a damn what Mr. Rothschild would be fine with, or the rest of his disgusting family.

Narrative: You are teaching about the intricacies of finance and the stock market.

Reality: Dump everything into Nvidia / S&P 500. Number go up.

Different as in much worse? It's not that you're wrong but, just to be clear, the problem with investing as the only place to keep up with inflation means that markets will detach from value, and become a giant Ponzi scheme.

There is no such thing as "growth detached from value" lasting forever.

What is going to happen specifically when billionaires decide the show is over?

That's the first thing I thought when opening it. Sure looks like a "make me an app" response that Claude would output.

I mean nothing wrong with that, I needed a silly calculator thingimabob too yesterday (for some CRC checks on a piece of text) and Claude quickly cooked something up for me.

But I'm not writing blog posts about it, releasing the tool in the wild, and claiming I wrote it. Blegh.

In my opinion this can't even be labeled as a single HTML file, because it loads external files to complete the app. But back to the question, a "plain html" file doesn't load any external resources and is usually semantically described.

I have a "plain Python file" that only imports TensorFlow.

When people talk about a single plain HTML file, it implies that all markup and code is contained in the file and no libraries are being used

If you can run the app without any other files and without internet then it’s plain and a single file.

It's a valid point lol. "A single html file" for me is a Ciechanowski page, not something that needs many gigabytes of bloat to compile.

It’s just a static hosted page they run on the family iPad. There’s no server at all!

I should really clean it up and make a blog post about it. But wanted to share it here because this project reminded me of it :)

py = Paraguay, for those like me who didn't know

stay vigilant Lebanon was granting 12% rates and everything was fine and “covered” by central bank until it wasnt

> 11% is a safe interest rate on my country

11% may be the safest bond you have access to, but that doesn't make it _safe_ in absolute terms.

the issue is your local currency will lose its value over time

My decade in the making habit of only reading HN comments is finally paying off. Nowadays when I do randomly skim an article it's almost always slop.

And can they take loans with negotiated interest rates and lock-in periods? Or invest in more risky products such as derivatives with a corresponding chance to lose all money? So much potential... ;)