u/KMPItXHnKKItZ

Look at this absolute gem of a post over on Bogleheads:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bogleheads/comments/1viy46n/retirees_love_dividends_but_the_stock_market/

Just get a load of this crap from the article (excerpt): "Stocks are spitting out a smaller share of their returns in dividend income, a challenge for those who lean on steady cash flows to cover daily expenses. The trailing 12-month dividend yield on the S&P 500 is now hovering around a generational low of just over 1%, after trending downward for much of the past two decades.

Such yields no longer outpace safe alternatives such as Treasurys or certificates of deposit after taxes. That prompted 75-year-old retiree Steven Yedlin to adjust his approach to dividends. He had been reinvesting his dividend payouts back into the market, but stopped doing so automatically. Instead, he is putting the extra cash flow into high-yield money-market funds or gifting it to his children".

Imagine being so wealthy and having so many dividends that you just hand the money out like candy. This literally proves our point that dividend investing is a solid strategy, yet the Bogleheads act like this is a "gotcha" article. They look at only the S&P500's dividend yield and no other fund, and they claim that treasuries or money markets are somehow better? LOL.

It may seem tiny, but for me as a relatively low income freelancer, that's not bad.

Right now I mainly just scalp SPY 0DTE options (1DTE when the market gets closer to closing to avoid volatility and rapid time decay), I wait for either unusual break outs or spikes up or big news events, buy calls and then sell as soon as it looks like it's done going up or about to reverse. I use a mix of the Robinhood app and Legend to do this and I watch the chart from anywhere between open to close the whole time if I am not too busy. Last year I made $800 in a week doing this mainly with Google and Coreweave when they were on their previous rampant bull runs, and had some nice little under-1-minute $100 Google call wins and my best one ever that was a $300 30 minute Coreweave call win, but I had to take a break from it since I ended up losing -$1,500 soon after when I dumbly bought two calls, one on Nvidia, and one on Coreweave, while Nvidia were announcing their earnings last May or whenever it was and then just let them ride down to oblivion. I could have made +$190 on that but then lost my $800 from my previous trades + $700 more on that dumb earnings play. But that was because back then I knew little about risk management and I knew absolutely nothing about the volatility and delta crush of earnings calls. So I chose to take a year off to take a step back to learn more and clear my head and instead went for long term investing, managing to invest $25k into SPY (own 34 shares now), and $7k into SCHD, (own 209 shares now).

But I was really missing trading and since I am doing a lot better financially now I decided to check it out again but this time be a LOT safer and more conservative, cutting trades if they are at even a -$1 loss IF the candle looks like it is not going to play nice, and taking gains even at +$2 profits if the candle is being too stubborn to keep going up, but then doing it over and over again to build up little wins to stack them and make a bigger profit for the day/week overall, instead of going for that one homerun trade but then risking taking a huge loss. I am glad to say that my strategy worked out. I actually could have made about $150 more this week since yesterday when SPY was being really volatile I saw the call that I was about to buy shoot up by +$100 in the blink of an eye and I placed a buy order when the candle was only about halfway through that but it was rejected since it was being so volatile and I think that it temporarily exceeded my buying power since I hadn't yet deposited more money, but that turned out to be a good thing since it turned out to be a false signal and it sharply fell shortly thereafter. Another time I just flat out missed a chunky little 1 second +$50 gain by selling too early but at least I did not lose anything this week! Literally no losses at all, I can hardly believe it. I placed 20 trades this week too but that is because as I said I was going for micro scalping and selling as soon as it hit +$1 or dropped -$1 since I was trying to control my risk instead of sitting there and watching the red candles sink me. I timed it really good too, almost all of my exits were perfect, it was only my entries that were a tiny bit sloppy/rusty, but that was since I was trying to play it really safe.

Anyway, it feels good to be back to trading!

Now all of them say unavailable even when I tap accept immediately. It doesn't even work anymore.

https://preview.redd.it/cue2bqjkardh1.png?width=2737&format=png&auto=webp&s=9515790226531b95111b9a91e58f00988c2d289d

Is the ability to filter orders! There are days where I will get those orders that say "you have offers to preview" sometimes literally every few seconds. Those are always the worst of the worst orders that nobody wants too. I'm talking about the ones that are 50-100+ miles round-trips or 40 mile one-way trips. These orders often have no t i p s for unreasonably large numbers of items and very long drives that would take you all day, and oftentimes go to some pretty awful neighborhoods where your chances of being carjacked or robbed while delivering are just as good as your chances of getting a reduced tip!

It makes it so that I either constantly have to pull my phone out of my pocket and put it back in every time that I get a notification, or leave my phone unlocked with the Spark app open sitting on a stand on the table because I have to look at it every few moments to see if it's a good order, since you never know if it's going to be a good one or not unless you look, which destroys my phone's battery.

They should let us filter which orders that we are sent, like for me I would only make it so that nothing under 15 buckaroos and nothing outside of my city would be sent to me. That would get rid of about 99% of the spammy, bad, nonsensical and disrespectful orders that are sent to me!

Walmart Spark team! If you read this forum, let's make it happen!

I had a 5 star rating for almost four years straight until lately some a-holes have been rating me less, bringing me down to 4.99, then 4.96 only a month or two later, and now 4.95 a week after falling to 4.96. I haven't been doing anything different, I give the customers stellar service, I always wait for them to answer about items that are out of stock, substitutions, I never assume what they might want etc., I always help people bring the heavy things like water or bags of soil to wherever they want in they yard or apartment with a smile on my face, I have the workers grab things that are not on the shelves from the back for me so that I can usually get the customers about 97-100% of what they have ordered (rough estimate), I am pretty fast, and I am always extremely polite and always leave a message that says "have a good day" after I drop it off. I even somewhat regularly get increased t i p s and paper-currency t i p s, which as we all know is extremely rare on this platform, yet my rating keeps slowly but steadily sliding. Could it also be that I am doing more deliveries, so now my total delivery count is averaging my rating down? I just don't get it. Has anyone else gone through a slowly slipping rating but then actually had it go back up? This is extremely frustrating and angering because I feel like I am being blamed for things that are completely outside of my control like long wait times for curbside pickups, items out of stock, traffic, etc.. And because it seems that most people only bother to leave a rating when they are unhappy, at least a lot more so than people that give 5 stars, it seems that this will take forever to go back up. When does the rating stop sliding? Until it falls so low that I get deactivated? This sucks and is utter BS.

Is this happening to anybody else lately? This is the third order that has canceled on me within a week. It's happening on both curbside and shopping orders now where while you're in the middle of working on it, even when you're actively scanning things, the order will just cancel out of nowhere. It happened earlier on a three stop pick up shopping and I was able to snag one of the orders that popped back up as a "you have orders to preview" offer, but just now as I was working ona three-customer shopping order, all three of them were canceled one after the other right as I was in the middle of scanning things. I told the Walmart employee who was looking for something that I was trying to get for a customer in the back and she told me that they've also been having trouble with their system. Has this been happening to anybody else?

I have the digital card on my Apple Wallet, when I tap 'manage' it says "No physical card needed", and says that I am good to go but I still get this pop-up every time that I open the app if the app has been closed for a little while. Tapping skip does nothing but skip it that time only for it to show up again within the next few hours. I am trying to figure out how to acknowledge this so that it goes away forever, since it is so annoying when I go to turn on my available/unavailable and this thing delays that process by a second by interrupting me before I can go online or offline, and then pops up so that I have to tap on it before I can go available/unavailable. Anyone know how to get rid of this pop-up?

https://preview.redd.it/e5bl8ovmuk9h1.png?width=1206&format=png&auto=webp&s=eca7a7a4a279e815df4e457336616cdd4064adbd

New driver here. We can only pause for 10 minutes every two hours? Is there any other way to take longer breaks? I've tried going unavailable but then it threatens to drop my block. Why is Grubhub so unflexible and strict with this? I have to miss out on so many orders and shred my acceptance rate because of this. UberEats and Spark let me go online and offline whenever I want, and Doordash gives infinite 35 minute pauses. What is up with Grubhub trying to act like we're actually on the clock at a 9-5 as a w2?