Do we have a thread for social and political cartoons? If not, here goes. I hope this shows up. If not, I will edit until it does. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rPNW!,f_auto,q_auto:best,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe06393f5-d1c...

This guy, Bill Bonner, is a libertarian political economist, author, etc. His style is detached naysaying. :) If you want to read critiques of Trump that might be different from the run of the mill stuff, check out his site, which I think is a Substack. I find it hard to disagree with him, almost ev...

Last election, we truly had two awful choices. I still feel that Harris would have been way worse, though.

And I was okay with Trump the first time. I heard it put this way recently, “The best things said about him are true, but so are the worst things.”

dualstow wrote: ↑Fri Jan 16, 2026 8:14 am Good lord, what has the ipad OS update done to my keyboard?
(Version 26.2)

Not to mention the email.

I just bought a new iPad and it seems like several steps backwards.

dualstow wrote: ↑Fri Jan 16, 2026 8:07 am I never dreamed my silver would more than triple. I just bought it for fun, not for the pp.

I have to think it will drop a lot at some point. This highlights the difference between it and gold. It’s kind of a penny stock.

I’ve got a lot of it but I don’t need the money so I’ll HODL.

I guess it sounds like typical Trump negotiation tactics.

Reading Wiliam Bernstein's 2nd edition of The Four Pillars of Investing for the third time. Just read this! "Unlike crude oil or soybeans, you can store a reasonable amount of gold, but as we just saw, it has about zero long-term real return. The same is true of silver, which over the past few...

I wonder what people debate in Switzerland?

Probably pronouns.

Crazy

What Smith said.

Harry Browne was a pretty smart guy, and if I recall correctly, he had decided that charting is of little value. I've always been skeptical of technical analysis, but I do see the attraction. I'm inclined to side with Harry on this one. You could say that I'm basing that on the chart of my investmen...

it’s only a problem if it goes down I can survive it going to zero. I don't know what that would mean for the world, but whatever. I for one would welcome our new insect overlords. I don't view it as a rebalancing item. When it comes to gold, I'm a hodler. (For Vinnie, that means hold on for dear l...

I try to remember that as "storage", it's cheaper than most or all of the vaulting arrangements. Of course, it's still paper gold.

what i find is when you have big positions to sell the spreads on gld are smaller than the cheaper etfs . it can actually cost more in spread difference than expense difference. gld is a more liquid for big positions. many times i had only a portion go in gldm and the rest went at lower prices I ne...

When I used to buy sector funds, such as oil and gas, emerging markets, REIT, etc., I always wanted to buy whatever had been beaten down. It worked pretty well. That logic would have me picking LT bonds. But these aren't sectors in the PP, these are broad categories that seem to have long term momen...

My stock-heavy PP did 21.6%. Allocation: Cash 18.4% LT Bonds 12.1% Stocks 43.4% Gold 26.1% I've mentioned before, I have essentially never rebalanced other than by addition, and not for a long time. I should start buying some LT bonds. This was the first year in a LONG time that my non-US stock fund...

I was introduced to the Permanent Portfolio years ago (not long after the Great Recession) after listening to some old Harry Browne podcasts. For the gold portion, I went with GLD due to its simplicity and invested in it for my Roth IRA and Brokerage accounts, not being aware of the tax implication...

dualstow wrote: ↑Mon Dec 22, 2025 1:52 pm I can’t sell gold, and I wish there was some group like AA that I could go to for this problem.

I can’t either. It’s all good.

What's driving silver now?

Smith1776 wrote: ↑Tue Oct 21, 2025 11:00 pm ChromeOS is probably my favourite Linux distro at this point

Being Canadian, you’re more used to having Big Brother watching over you.

Harry had thoughts on it, and as usual he turned out to be right. What does BND give you that you can’t get from a treasury fund with the duration of your choice? A little yield I guess. But the safety margin is not as good with BND.

BND is an all-bond index. I would say you are playing with fire, compared to a treasuries fund. Please look at what happened to corporate bonds in 08-09. Treasuries were the right answer then, and will be in the foreseeable future. I'm speaking from painful experience. When the time comes that treas...

Good timing for you two. I've never been able to sell at the top.
I think it has higher tops ahead. Probably not in the short term though. I wonder if this drop is due to profit-taking by Wall St.

I’m always bearish. If I followed my instincts, I’d have sold everything a long time ago. That’s why I like the PP so much.

Congrats Bird!

Everyone: Predictions?

A month ago $5000 would have sounded goofy. Now it seems like it will happen by the end of this month.