

To challenge you slightly: what are your tax reasons for focusing on dividends? People commonly misunderstand the comparative tax implications of dividend vs total return investing. In most cases focusing on dividends is suboptimal both in terms of return and diversification.
Zooming out, there’s key pieces missing here: what are your goals with your investing? What is your current financial situation?
My blanket advice for generic scenarios would be:
- If your taxable brokerage position isn’t large, consider building an emergency fund of 6-12 months
- Pick a simple, diversified, and easy to automate investment allocation (eg. a three fund portfolio)
- Outline your goals, investments are a means and not an end unto themselves
- Sketch out a rough path from today to your goal so you’re not navigating blindly
I’ve used cursor quite a bit recently in large part because it’s an organization wide push at my employer, so I’ve taken the opportunity to experiment.
My best analogy is that it’s like micro managing a hyper productive junior developer that somehow already “knows” how to do stuff in most languages and frameworks, but also completely lacks common sense, a concept of good practices, or a big picture view of what’s being accomplished. Which means a ton of course correction. I even had it spit out code attempting to hardcode credentials.
I can accomplish some things “faster” with it, but mostly in comparison to my professional reality: I rarely have the contiguous chunks of time I’d need to dedicate to properly ingest and do something entirely new to me. I save a significant amount of the onboarding, but lose a bunch of time navigating to a reasonable solution. Critically that navigation is more “interrupt” tolerant, and I get a lot of interrupts.
That said, this year’s crop of interns at work seem to be thin wrappers on top of LLMs and I worry about the future of critical thinking for society at large.