It has been a bad eight months for the permanent portfolio. Well, a good month and then a bad half. VPU (the Vanguard utilities sector etf) closed at $146.16 when I posted last. Today, it closed at $152.34. It paid 3 dividends since, totaling $3.163. With reinvestment, that is a return of ~6.4% in e...

Your concern can be split into two: 1. 51% attack and 2. non-inflationary asset with a security model based on economic incentive to mine for rewards (that grow ever smaller as time goes on). You can take them together, but they are whole topics even when they're separate. Regarding 1, the idea of ...

The network shouldn't be secured by goodwill, it is designed to be incentive compatible. What kind of attack on the blockchain are you envisioning here? If I understand you correctly, you are trying to argue that there will be a security problem if the incentives for mining a block is less than the...

There is probably a practical matter of acquiring enough physical computing power and electricity if you're talking about challenging the existing hash power of the bitcoin network. It is more likely to be able to acquire hash power from existing mining pools which is no different to the problem of...

I've been looking into the cryptocurrency space for a while and haven't found a good answer for the concerns raised in this paper: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24717/w24717.pdf Specifically, if a proof of work cryptocurrency ever became a store of value, it would become valuable...

You might want to backtest beyond a period of only generally falling rates (which we have had for the last 35 to 40 years) since utility performance was drastically different (and drastically worse) during periods of rising rates and rising inflation (like the mid-1960s to 1980) than it was during ...

A Pile of Numbers I was looking around for different kinds of risks to take. That's the core idea behind any alternative investment, that you'll be taking different risks than normal stocks and bonds, which should improve your average returns. Theoretically, if some identifiable segment of the stoc...

The long end of the yield curve is normally bid up by fund managers trying to do exactly this trick. This is the duration equivalent of the AQR's low beta anomaly. Fund managers are leverage constrained, so they want the most duration per dollar and will pay a premium for it. For instance Lever_to_L...

Most of the discussion here has been centered about 2x or 3x leverage. That's too much for me. Sharpe ratio calculations don't adequately account for rare events, since they assume Gaussian distributions, so 2x or 3x is almost certainly too much leverage. But it does suggest that some amount of leve...

Ran the numbers since 2007. I didn't include 2006 and earlier because 30 year bonds weren't sold in part of 2006. The yield curve has moved around quite a bit in that time, but the average is 72% of the interpolated 25 year term yield is captured by the 10 year. The data has a max over 100% and is s...

Had an idea on STRIPS. If you consider STRIPS to be equivalent to buying just the Duration and Roll Yield of a bond fund, then I need to make up the Term yield of a half cash, half LTT fund with just G. Each dollar in the G gets me 60% of the term yield, so 25/31 G, 6/31 EDV replicates the term yiel...

So I thought about this some more. Yield curve data from here https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=yield The yield curve for treasuries at the start of the month was 02/01/21 0.06 0.07 0.07 0.08 0.08 0.11 0.17 0.42 0.76 1.09 1.66 1.84 If ...

I like the idea of 75% G 25% STRIPS. If there was an N fund I'd throw a bit in there just to make this a GSTRINs allocation. I think this is what I'll end up doing. The TSP options are good but limited, so I want to make efficient use of my IRA and HSA space. If only the TSP had a long term bond or...

So my question is whether it works as Cash, LT Bonds, or something else? The G fund consists of short term treasuries which is used as a substitute for cash. So your allocation is 25% Gold, 50% Shares, 20% Cash, 5% Bonds (EDV) Perhaps consider increasing your Bond allocation if you wish to implemen...

I've been reading this forum for a while and want to implement a Permanent Portfolio/Golden Butterfly investment style strategy. I have a few questions about specifics. I'm a US federal employee and have access to the TSP. That includes the G-Fund (https://www.tsp.gov/funds-individual/g-fund/) which...