This is awesome! It can also answer non-PP questions.  For example, consider someone that refuses to own any gold and cares only about CAGR.  A simple filter on the Gold column and a sort on the CAGR column and we have their ideal asset allocation: 63% stocks, 37% bonds!  Eerily familiar... I'd love...

Another con to I Bonds is that it's harder to keep track of their appreciated value in a spreadsheet.  I just punted on this issue and pretend they're still worth whatever I paid for them. You could speculate that EE Bonds with their 3.5% guarantee over twenty years are superior to I Bonds.  I perso...

Cool, glad we got to the bottom of it. Now back to the important question of how to spend almost no money so that we can live on our hypothetical $1m PP portfolios.  I recommend: - walking/biking everywhere you can instead of driving - learning how to cook so well that you don't really want to go ou...

@PointedStick, no, that would give us a difference of a year or so, not a decade. @Clive, so your Pot column is inflation adjusted but your Withdraw column isn't.  You either need to inflation adjust both columns or neither. Neither: Pot Withdraw 0 $1,000,000.00 $30,000.00 1 $1,010,000.00 $31,200.00...

You have to expand the $30,000 by inflation to maintain the same purchase power. $30,000 the first year withdrawn for living expenses, $31,200 the next assuming 4% inflation, $32,448 the next..etc. Works out close to 21.5 years to drawdown to zero when the investment return = 0% real. Death spiral ...

Clive, could you share your math on the 21 year bankruptcy please? Suppose the net PP reward was 0% after paying for taxes and inflation and everything.  You still have an inflation adjusted $1m.  And your expenses are still an inflation adjusted $30k.  This should last $1m/$30k => 33.3 years. I und...

For an unbiased, real-time take on who is going to win, check out intrade.com That site lets participants wager real dollars on events like who will win the Presidential election.  I've found it to be accurate in the past, and any time you find it to be inaccurate, you can put your money where your ...

I will personally be psyched if the PP has a 3% real return over the next 70 years.  My understanding is that it's had a 3-5% real return up until this point. I once wrote a program to figure out the real return (real CAGR actually...) necessary to survive a certain number of years given a starting ...

Wow, I've tried to explain the "super-maxing" aspect of the Roth for years, but people always get bogged down in the math and miss my original point about how you can tax-defer more money via Roth (it effectively has a higher contribution limit).  Yet you guys got it right away!  I don't k...

There is a major advantage to Roth accounts that is rarely mentioned and only applies if you max your contributions.  You can tax-defer more money via Roth! Suppose 33% tax rates now and in the future.  In that case $10k saved in Roth is equivalent to $15k saved in Traditional.  But the contribution...

My hope for the PP is that it returns 3% after taxes and inflation over the next 50 years with relatively low volatility.  I wouldn't be shocked if it turns out to be more like 0-2% after taxes and inflation though. If on the other hand, I could get a guaranteed 3.5% by paying off a 3.5% mortgage, I...

It's not the taxes at sale that bother me so much as the forms and calculations that you have to deal with every year. [quote=Bogle Head Forum]GLD, IAU, and SLV are all taxed as a "pass-through entity", which means they pass along their costs of operation to you, and you get to take an ite...

@stone, almost all my savings are taxable, and I've been too lazy to deal with the tax hassles of the gold ETFs in a taxable account.  Or are they not that bad? 

Probably what I should do is get myself squared away with 4x25% now using ETFs, and transition from the ETFs to physical when convenient.

Equities 21% Bonds 21% Gold 17% Cash 41% I've got to be the laziest person at rebalancing my PP. My thought process goes like this: "I should buy gold first... but I don't want to pay state sales tax at the local dealer... so I should choose an online dealer... the *optimal online dealer*... th...

Looks like the contribution limits for electronic I Bonds and EE Bonds was raised from $5k/yr to $10k/yr!  I Bonds.  EE Bonds.

$10,000 maximum purchase in one calendar year.

I'm sorry but I'm not going to be able to continue to field questions indefinitely, and at this point I think I would be mostly repeating myself anyway. If you want to continue your education on algorithmic trading, this would be a good next step: Rise of the Machines: Algorithmic Trading in the For...

I don't know about other people's trades, but I don't consider any of mine to be a martingale or a bet against fat tails. We could have liquidity through regulation/force/compulsion, or we could have it through open competition by market participants.  I believe open competition will lead to better ...

I do not understand why business/industry do not see the value in rewarding their most talented and productive engineers. In my dream world the most lucrative thing you can do is work in education.  Too bad reality doesn't work that way! Fortunately, I can create my own reality by first saving up a...

As far as liquidity goes, it seems to me that the algo traders provide liquidity until it is actually required. As the algos get smarter and smarter, they will have to bail less often.  There is a big incentive to be able to stay running through these events. From what I can see, much financial act...

I'm also rather curious about the nuts and bolts of the tools you work with.  How complex do these systems get?  Are you sitting down and working with a much larger set of libraries in a big, complex system or do you just sort of plop down in front of a blinking cursor on a brand new Perl script ev...

Personally, I took the drop out approach.  I liked working in finance, but the long hours and pressure were a little bit too much for me.  I took a well paying job in healthcare, one of those corporate jobs that allows you to do a few hours of real work a day, and leave at 5, every day. Yeah, that'...

inefficiencies get created inorder to be exploited... One last thought: I can't even imagine how expensive it would be to create that big of an inefficiency in the modern market.  And how ridiculously awesome you would have to be at profiting from inefficiency to justify trying to create it. If you...

...also feed into amplifying it... fairly dodgy... gaining from other people and at the same time also causing the market to be more mispriced... Is it not true that a lot of trading activity is just such volatility amplifying momentum trading?... quote stuffing...trade ahead of the tape or whateve...

akratic, What draws you to the PP? I tend to think that PP people are those who believe that it is hard or impossible to reliably pull money out of the market by using any kind of trading system, while algorithmic trading seems to be premised upon the opposite assumption. I'm glad you are here, but...

If you had to recommend a course of study or books to read to begin learning, what would you recommend? I asked the same question when I started, and the answer I got was that this stuff isn't in books.  Now that I know some stuff about algorithmic trading, I would have to agree.  There's some over...