I'd like to establish an index fund that jumps through the necessary hoops to allow US expatriate citizens to invest from places like the European Union.
Last I checked, there is no fundamental legal barrier preventing this - just an enormous amount of compliance work that has to get done. But as we would be the only real option for 1 or 2 million well-monied people, I imagine we'd be able to start with a very eager customer base provided we could jump through those hoops. And uh, the actual algorithms for index based stock selection are pretty straightforward, too - I'm not Jane Street level clever, so that's an attractive point for me.
If anyone's interested in this hare brained scheme, let me know via the email in my bio. It's been a problem I've been rolling around in my head for a few years now. I have no idea how I would get started, but I'm pretty sure I could do it.
Another area I'd be interested in is automatic document conversion between the IEEE and EN standards.
I know most of you guys have never had to deal with these, but I've spent my professional life in high-regulation fields. Documents which adhere to these standards are table stakes for getting software sold to, say, the freight train industry, but neither is a subset of the other. They're more like parallel universes, one from North America, the other from the EU.
Getting them to play nice in an automated, LLM + human aided review way would unlock an enormous amount of value for software firms looking to work across these two markets. I'm one of only a handful of guys in the world who understands this well enough to see the value add, and I don't know how I would convince anyone to help me go to market with this either. So I broadcast it here, in the hopes that some other capable software engineer with more time on their hands takes it off of my plate. Please build this business!
If it's an index fund, what's the difference between this and a fund run in the EU that tracks a US market? Is it taxed differently?
I'm using 'index fund' broadly to refer to the cost structure - very low management fees, very "dumb" wide market tracking. Plenty of these already exist in the EU, for EU citizens, you are correct.
But yes, they are taxed differently. A US-domiciled fund is much easier for US expats to invest in without risking losing over 100% of their return (I am not exaggerating), but only if you can actually find one which will accept money from you while resident in the EU. None do, to my knowledge, An EU-domiciled fund would probably be classed as a PFIC and have to fill out reams of paperwork to avoid messing up people's taxes. One that US expats love is possible in theory, but no one has brought one to market yet because it requires dealing with a lot of US taxation errata.
What about ETFs in ireland that track the SP and other indexes?