I agree it would be confusing if we all started talking about "My PP", and I'm not planning to do so. I think everyone on this forum will understand "PP" as 25x4. Sophie, good point. Harry was very clear that "investing" means accepting market returns, whereas a VP was ...

I have heard about Stoic philosophy before, but never checked it out in detail, so perhaps now is a good time to read up on it. Thanks for the advice, Kriegsspiel. I think it's great to see that there are other people who have been so influenced by Harry. MediumTex and Pointedstick to the point wher...

I have recently had somewhat of a change of mind regarding the permanent portfolio after reading Harry Browne's "How I found freedom in an unfree world". When I first started reading about the portfolio in 2011, I thought it was a fantastic idea, but there were a couple of things that I di...

It has been discussed for a couple of years, but this week, a law which would make it legal for a "bail in" depositor confiscation in case of "emergency" has been enacted here in Japan. I've heard similar laws are being enacted throughout Europe and Canada, now that Cyprus has se...

This is a fantastic resource, and will also be helpful moving forward, because it can indicate when a rebalancing event has occurred. Would it be possible to make one request, though? Would it be possible to add a function for adding new money to the portfolio? For example "add $20000 yearly, t...

Thank you for the feedback regarding bonds. I will research it in more detail, now that I'm actually holding bonds (before, I was just tracking a potential PP performance. As for my VP, I'm holding some silver ETF and some individual stocks from Tokyo Electricity Co (which I don't count in the stock...

Did you just mean that you assumed the PP would return 6%....or were you also counting the 1972 to 1989 performance in your average as well? You're right. I was counting results from 1973. I also calculated a return under 2% average from 1990, but then again, I calculated an average of 4% since 200...

I know that I reached the same conclusion as everyone else here  ;) But, at first I had doubts whether it would work in Japan, which has had a radically different investing environment from the US for the past 25 years. However, I realized it's the rebalancing, not the performance of any asset. I sa...

I joined this forum last year with a lot of questions, and even doubts about the PP. However, I've been watching the performance of a potential PP portfolio during 2012, including other people's results. Perhaps my personal research had some different assumptions, but my historical results were a li...

Clive, thank you for your very detailed posts. You've given me a lot of good information to consider. Slotline, thank you for using the key word "OTC" which led me to find the secondary market for JGB. You're right, I was just looking at the primary market bonds, which don't fluctuate in p...

Wow, thank you for the very detailed reply! Ok, I understood about the bonds being essentially a slowly growing anchor in the portfolio. In Japan, we have two options (well, 3, but I'll ignore the 3 year bonds). I would most likely hold the bonds to maturity anyway, since there are large penalties f...

I have another question about the PP. Excuse the very basic question. I just want to check the meaning of the word. As far as I can tell, the word "bond" means the government debt that individuals can buy, right? But I guess it has a different meaning here? I mean, in the PP book, it's wri...

The thing is, the bonds and cash portion of a Japanese PP are very different from any of the English speaking country's one. I happen to know that in the UK, you can get around 3% interest just from shopping around for a good savings account, whereas in Japan, 0.1% is advertised as a "special h...

I'm sorry, I feel this has gotten too much into a discussion about general PP theory. Could I ask you to keep it on topic related to how it directly affects individual investors in a Japanese context? Thank you.

Yes, 10 year bonds are available to individual investors. Those are the longest term available. It's a good idea, so I'll have to do more research into it. Thank you for the advice and support!

Wow, I'm impressed to have got so much response considering the number of replies that other posts on this forum have! Keep them coming! Stocks: I think I'm fairly happy with my 50/50 split of Japanese and US stocks. They both have a lot of very strong companies that I'm confident can keep growing i...

I'll try to reply to all of the questions here, but some of them are quite complicated, so would require a multi-page essay, so I'll try to keep it simple! First, actually I'm not a native Japanese person, but I am soon to be naturalized, so I will be legally Japanese and permanently living in Japan...

Thank you for the replies so far. I'm interested in hearing other opinions too, if there are any. Choosing a different currency is attractive, but a little difficult. Every year it seems like the yen reaches a bottom against the dollar. Each time, it seems like a great time to buy dollars, but the p...

Hello everyone! I heard about the PP a long time ago, and recently I was convinced that it is a great plan. But I have some questions about it, especially regarding options in Japan. I saw the data that was posted on this forum regarding the historical performance for Japan, and it wasn't nearly as ...