It seems to me that Trump's tariff tantrum has exacerbated and accelerated some already-extant macro trends that taken as a whole make it highly likely that the U.S. is no longer going to be dictating the terms of world trade and cannot count on being the sole reserve currency of choice. While Harry...

Timely update from one of the smartest guys in the room (always):

https://disciplinefunds.com/2025/04/19/ ... eading-15/

I doesn't take much time to manage this... Stockcharts.com, PerfCharts option, you can pull off the 1, 3, 6, 12 month total returns for all of your tickers in a few minutes. Trade once a month. The hard part is sticking to it, second-guessing yourself, letting the short-term ruin your long-term pla...

As everyone knows, I get in and out of positions using momentum, as defined and used in the paper A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation . Let's consider the two basic fixed-income safe-haven assets... T-Bills (SGOV or BIL) and the 10-year Treasury (IEF). If we compare SGOV to any non...

Since I posted the link to the CNBC piece on Dalio, I feel obligated to also share this great post by Ben Carlson on Dalio's track record with market predictions:

https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2025/0 ... al-crisis/

Two bond-related posts (amidst the blizzard): This one from Bloomberg gives the lay of the land for Treasuries: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/treasuries-suddenly-trade-like-risky-assets-in-warning-to-trump?embedded-checkout=true And this one about Ray Dalio's warnings offers a b...

From over 4+ years ago. Don't know if anyone ever put it here, though. But now here it is! https://seekingalpha.com/article/4378268-3-risks-of-the-permanent-portfolio 3 Risks Of The Permanent Portfolio Oct. 08, 2020 8:32 PM Summary What's changed since the strategy was created. Why 2020's great per...

No idea if 30 year bonds make sense for a non-U.S. investor since I don't know which country's bonds you'd be using and what they're paying. Here are current yields in the U.S.L https://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates-bonds/government-bonds/us I think Larry Swedroe's oft-cited rule of thumb - 20 bas...

I highly recommend subscribing to Cullen's newsletter (and reading his book & perusing his website). One of the smartest guys out there for sure, and when it comes to monetary policy there's no one better. I've often said he ought to be running the Fed, but knowing as much as he know he'd probab...

Well friends Tyler @ Portfolio Charts has truly outdone himself with this new, ultra-timely offering: https://portfoliocharts.com/2025/04/09/how-to-succeed-in-the-worst-stock-markets/ Like many others who frequent this board I'm a great admirer of Tyler's work. Here you have so many of his virtues o...

I'd do what coasting suggested to you: use the Portfolio Charts site, select your home country and go from there in choosing your assets. I have no expertise beyond that - sorry.

Smith1776 wrote: ↑Sun Apr 06, 2025 12:47 pm And here I thought this post was about a literal bunker haha.

That's how we keep all of the Boglehead's riff raff off of this board. They think we all live in bunkers stocked with AR-15's, gold bars and MRE's.

So yeah as mathjak said the original PP called for a Treasury money market fund not short-term Treasuries but Craig Rowland blessed the latter as a permissible tweak as long as one kept cash on hand for immediate needs. But for most of the years since folks "discovered" the PP - i.e. right...

Sometime in mid 2009 I transitioned from a supposedly conservative (40% equity, small cap and value tilted, globally-diversified DFA fund) portfolio that had been thoroughly backtested and was projected to be subject to at worst an 8-9% drawdown but which lost ~23% during the GFC to the PP. I did so...

It all depends of whether the investor is accumulation or living off of the assets. If they are eating the assets or within 5-10 years of doing so, absolutely variance matters. Variance is a major factor in portfolio survivability in retirement. People have a super hard time transitioning their min...

Yeah there's a good-sized thread on that paper on Bogleheads. It seems to me that it can't be said often or loudly enough that behavioral pyschology needs to be taken into account at least as much as portfolio construction and market history. William Bernstein is of course one of the masterful write...

Getting back to the Cullen Roche piece on international vs US returns I posted upthread I was curious to see how small-cap value performed during the six "regimes" of US vs. Int'l he did a chart for. Here are the results (via Portfolio Visualizer): 1973-1980: US 4.78%, ex-US 8.22%, US SCV ...

Shouldn't we expect the notion that freedom leads to prosperity is already priced into these markets? In other words, perhaps we can expect higher returns in these ugly EM markets to compensate for the additional risk that we're all aware of? That's only true if you think markets are efficient! The...

It's more than just currency. Perth Tolle is the index creator for the FRDM emerging marker fund . I actually know her here in Houston. Her work suggests that less free, more autocratic, more oligarchic / State Owned Enterprises countries have poorer returns to investors. Since inception the FRDM f...

Good post by Cullen Roche today on this topic: https://disciplinefunds.com/2025/03/26/why-is-international-investing-working-again/ So fundamentally owning international is a currency play. Makes complete sense to me while also underlining Tyler's point in the quote I shared upthread that for a U.S....

Admittedly this is definitely crossing over into politics but historically one of the main reasons cited by Bogle and others for owning mostly or entirely U.S. stocks is less corruption, stronger financial regulations and more government checks and balances in the U.S. vs. other countries. Since a l...

I saved an old exchange between Desert and Tyler of Portfolio Charts about this very topic: "Desert wrote: One additional question: Have you considered a slice of international, for diversification? I realize that past returns show it's always been a return-reducer (with the exception of very h...

Not his intention of course but here we are:

https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2025/0 ... -and-gold/

Another angle on this which has arisen in other discussions I've had is the question of just how much inflation-protected income does one need - taking into account that Social Security is effectively an inflation-adjusted annuity backed by the government. Of course this is only compltely relevant ...