i am a UK Based financial services professional looking to work with firms that adopt the permanant portfolio - none of them do adopt this strategy, and when i try to explain it, it's a nightmare - god help us - lol Why is it a nightmare? Anything financial in the UK is a nightmare. Most of the peo...

I certainly won't. It still seems a very odd decision to me. The state giveth and the state taketh away I suppose and since you don't really have any choice when they decide to take stuff, you shouldn't worry too much about their rationale for giving you cash. Incidentally you can't buy things like ...

Got a letter from HSBC today. They've decided that since * Some of the investments on our sharedealing service are 'complex' and we didn't have the procedures in place to make sure they were appropriate for you * Some of the information we provided about Exchange Traded Commodities and Exchange Trad...

I think you're wrong about reinvesting the dividends - whether the ETF pays out a dividend or reinvests it is treated the same way. At least I convinced myself of that Googling earlier, but I can't find a definitive source for that now. In fact even an Irish domicilled fund is not going to be tax fr...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoodhill/2014/03/03/its-time-to-drive-russia-bankrupt-again/print/ The high oil prices of 1980 were not real, and Reagan knew it.  They were being caused by the weakness of the U.S. dollar, which had lost 94% of its value in terms of gold between 1969 and 1980. Reaga...

Hi, I'm trying to set up a brokerage account in the US with HSBC. One thing they mentioned is that dividend tax applies to non resident aliens. So I did some research and found this https://chinese.scottrade.com/documents/twformscenter/International%20Account%20FAQ.pdf • Am I required to pay U.S. ta...

I moved some cash from another investment into HSBC UK with the intention of putting it into my HSBC UK share account. Unfortunately HSBC UK have decided to add some restrictions to what share you can and cannot buy. Specifically 1) No ETFs based on commodities 2) No US stocks at all. Now before any...

I'd be curious to see a CAGR comparison of a 50-50 or 60-40 standard boglehead portfolio to the permanent portfolio from 1972 to present.  Anyone have those numbers available? I think this will do what you want: http://www.peaktotrough.com/hbpp.cgi Honestly there's not much in it, is there? From 01...

Are you ethnically Chinese Kevin? Any idea where you want to retire? Seems like you are answering your own question. I also think you should just invest in USD, you have GBP as a hedge, maybe chose chf or eur but not both, that just will make it complicated. There is a 1.20 eur/chf line set by the ...

AS for PP I am still on the fence. I am not sure it is the opportune time with the Stock market so high and bond yields so low. The only asset class that looks OK now is gold and cash. The point of the PP is that you don't need to market time. At any point in history some of the components are goin...

I have to confess I'm still musing over what currencies to set up my PP in. Consider the following http://i.imgur.com/QWTT7XO.png Over the last 11 years the USD has actually been fairly stable against the TWD. The GBP has depreciated and the CHF has appreciated. Now I think what this is telling me i...

Oh, I see.

Still it's a shame. I'd love to have asked him how he was able to backtest stuff so quickly. The problem with banning him is that we've got no way to know if his criticism of the Permanent Portfolio was rational like his backtests or irrational like his criticism of Craig and MT.

I remember thinking that most of his posts really had a lot of effort put into them - e.g. backestesting completely sui generis investment strategies. Then it seems that for some reason all his posts got edited down to nothing and finally deleted completely. Which is kind of a shame since - as I say...

frugal wrote: how many annual expenses (years) of saving you have now?

Rather more than I'm likely to live to be honest, assuming I stay in Taiwan.

Hi, Can you explain your ER experience? What's ER? At what age you started? What are your means of income? Tks The income all comes from software consultancy, i.e. contracting. Most of it is from outside the UK. Basically I worked as a contractor in places like Sweden, Netherlands, Germany, Korea a...

So, you want to make a UK-PP and US-PP in Switzerland? EU-PP no? Can you please explain. Well it's complicated. I'm based in Taiwan with some property in the UK. My intention is to stay in Taiwan and build a business here, but right now I'm living mostly off investments, mostly the rent on the prop...

I made the trip to Switzerland. It turns out that so long as you are not a US citizen UBS and Credit Suisse will give you an account, albeit with GBP 50K-100K minimum opening balance. Zurich Cantonal Bank offer accounts to UK citizens so long as they are UK residents. As soon as I mentioned being re...

In the UK the new governor of the Bank Of England is apparently a believer in NGDP targeting. Or at least he mentioned it positively for a while and then back pedalled http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-carney-speaks-out-on-ngdp-targeting-2013-2 I could see that an NGDP target of 0% would be like t...

I've got some free time back in Europe and I'm thinking of a trip to Switzerland. Now I've got some cash in a UK building society which I want to put in a Permanent Portfolio. So I need  UK/US Stocks UK/US Long term bonds UK/US Short term bonds Gold I could do some of the gold as physical gold in a ...

Now the usual way to do the cash portion is this http://boards.fool.co.uk/MessagePrint.aspx?mid=12716852 Stocks (FT All Share) Long Dated Treasury (20 year+ Gilt (Tr 4.25% 2040 current holding)) Cash (5 year Gilt ladder) Gold Gilts is the British way of describing government bonds. Still the same co...

I'm trying to set up a the bond part of a GBP based permanent portfolio. I've found good long maturity bond. I'm trying to set a bond ladder for the short term parts. Does anyone know the criteria for choosing gilts for a ladder? Do you even need to ladder, or can you just buy a bunch of 5 year bond...

Hey Kev The figures quoted from the Motley fool boards are accurate. The reason your results are different is your use of IGLT which has a average duration of 9 years, rather than for example the 47 years for the TR60 Gilt. Anything under 20 years or so doesn't have the desired volatility for the P...

Hey Jake How I've ended up doing it LTT - ISA'ed TR60s , TR46s (also some undated , should have read the small print)  STK - core holding VVEQ (Vanguard FTSE all share OEIC) , some VUKE (Vanguard FTSE 100 ETF) for convenience Gold - PHAU and Sovereigns (Don't like PHAU, but don't really like storin...

MediumTex wrote: Thanks for making the investment.  I hope that it has been an engaging 27% so far.

If I'm reading it past midnight it definitely is.

The book is as excellent as I expected it would be. If I had one criticism, it would be that it's hard for me to distinguish the fifty-er, the five shades of gray in some of the charts. Like the chart showing 30-YR treasuries on the rise. This is a tiny nitpick, and it's certainly not unique to thi...