TransferWise by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
This is a good company, first they truly helped reduce international transfer fees. They they continued to morph into a decent challenger bank.
Their Wise Interest account was amazing as of late 2023: wise.com/gb/interest/
Instant access with representative national interests and 0.29% fees.
Brick and mortar banks were way way behind in that regard!
E.g. October 2023, Wise was doing 4.87% interest after fees, while Barclay's best option was 1.16% above 5k pounds on the Rainy Day Saver (5% below). Ridiculous!
Personal finance by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
  • the American stock market gives 10% / year, which is about 2x over 10 years. It has been the sure-fire best investment on a 10 year horizon for many decades, and should serve as your benchmark.
  • risky diversified investments (e.g. ETFs that track a market index) are basically the best investment if you can keep your money in them in the long term (10 years)
  • risky investments can gown down for a while, and you cannot take your money out then. This effectively means risk is a form of illiquidity
  • investment funds have taxes, which eat into your profit. The best investments are dumb index tracking investments (like an ETF that tracks the stock market) that are simply brainless to manage, and therefore have lowest taxes. No fund has managed to beat the market long term essentially.
  • when you are young, ideally you should invest everything into riskier higher yielding assets like stock. And as you get older, you should move part of it to less risky (and therefore more liquid, but lower yielding) assets like bonds
    The desire to buy a house however complicates this for many people.
This is a good concept. For the ammount most people save, having a simple and easy to apply investment thesis is the best way to go.
Video 1.
All the financial advice you’ll ever need fits on a single index card
. Source.
Finance guru by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
A person who gives financial advice, notably personal finance advice. Some of them are questinable guru-like beings, and many are on YouTube.
The financial industry does not serve society nowhere near its magnitude (London of course being the epitome of that). It serves only itself. It just grows without bound.
Video 1.
Why I chose quant trading to retire early by Lit Nomad
. Source. Ciro Santilli was not sure under which section classify this video. It is worthwhile despite the title
Ciro Santilli once talked to a man who had been working on high-frequency trading for the last six years.
He was quite nice.
Ciro asked him in what way did he feel his job contributed to the benefit of society.
He replied that it didn't contribute at all. It was completely useless. More than that, it so completely useless, that it was even pure. A bit like advanced mathematics, but not even providing beauty for anybody outside of the company, since everything is a closely guarded trade secret, unlike mathematics which is normally published for the vanity recognition.
A great mind can work in the most useless branches of finance, without the desire to improve the world, nor make it worse. Not to compete, nor be afraid, nor anxious. A sand mandala.
Only being. Being, in the exact fraction of a moment where bid meets ask.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact