Hey I'vre just learned a little more about this topic. Here in Europe (so this is for you, Frugal), all assets are stored at a central provider (Clearstream, Euroclear to name a few if you want to learn more about them). Assets are stored under your name but managed, in fine, by these providers. It ...

Ah America ::) French citizen here. There's a saying there that your Hummers and all other cars are a sign you have something to compensate for. Would you say a man like Putin is emasculated or that he doesn't care about his virile image ? http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41891000/jpg/_41891190...

According to this source https://books.google.fr/books?id=OgUEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA36&lpg=PA36&dq=armadillo+strategy&source=bl&ots=sokArTiQO7&sig=-1mg_ljsynyQ4jf9rYc0eAJBtbQ&hl=fr&sa=X&ved=0CF8Q6AEwC2oVChMI5oXF2f-yyAIVwaEUCh0PtAC_#v=onepage&q=armadillo%20strategy&...

You have, say, 200K in a PP and want to buy a 100K house. Take it the other way : if you already had your 100K house paid off and a 100K PP, would you take a 100K mortgage and invest that money in your PP ? If not, maybe you should avoid a mortgage. Because, technically, it's the very same thing : y...

As for me, that would be : land : rental real estate, farms, etc. directly owned businesses : dividend-producing foreign stocks directly owned reserves : 50% gold, 50% local currency (saving accounts, very short term bonds, actual cash, ...) That would mean 50% physical 50% financial, but also 50% l...

100% physical here. To each his own, but I don't really get the "I'm 100% ETF because that's more convenient". You are not supposed to ever sell your whole gold portion (except in armaggedon scenarios). So you can hold a stable foundation (say, 1/3rd of it you will probably never, ever sel...

1981 was a bad year for the PP (I think the worse ever), but the drawdown was limited by the cash portion of the PP. A 3x33 PP would have been decimated (something like a 20% loss instead of a 5% one, not including the high inflation of that time).

I'm not sure about bond funds, especially for a EU investor. After all, iShares could very well fail (or fraud) and take your money with them, at least as much as an FDIC insured bank could, but without that insurance (it is worth what it is worth, but a weak insurance is better than no insurance at...

Imagine how the world would change if we had 50% efficiency solar panels. I mean, just think about it! Impoverished countries in the Sahara could become fantastically wealthy practically overnight. And that's only 50%! My furnace is 90% efficient, and newer ones boast efficiency ratings of like 98....

So "normal" = growing economy and rising inflation "ideal" = growing economy and falling inflation "stagflation" = shrinking economy and rising inflation and "deflation" = shrinking economy and falling inflation How do these categories relate to HB's four cla...

Wow. Even a PP investor would have been decimated in quite a few occurrences, with almost only his gold left. Must be pretty hard to rebalance in those circumstances. Your bonds & stocks lost 90% and 95% of their respective values ? Why don't you sell 3/4 of your gold to buy some more ? Craig, i...

Or, the law could be used against you : "oh, those coins are worth 50$ ? So you won't mind if we take them and give you back 50$ notes, right ? Since you consider these coins are nothing more than legal tender ?"

Frugal & ns3, I used WiseOne's data provided in the early pages of that thread, I just removed the "bond" component. I took data from 1972 up to 2013, so, yes, it includes the 70s and 80s when cash was yielding a lot. Yes, that might be out of sight forever, but a 2200% gain after expe...

I just tried to see what happens with a bondless (hence, 33% cash) PP, results are even better. I ended up with 22 million $ (rather than 16) at the end of 2013. Even a 7,5% withdrawal rate would have survived 40 years without eating the initial capital (although it would seriously have been on the ...

That's a great chart ! No wonder stock bugs on the forums seem to be from USA, by the way. You guys seem to have avoided bad times, up to now. I wonder what a treasury bond market drop would look like, though. In some places, it clearly dropped 100% with governments defaulting (which seems to have n...

I know the stock market and the bond markets are different... Obviously. But a lot of the price movement around stock earnings is similar to the price movement around long-term bond interest rates. If stocks were quoted by their 10 year and 1 year trailing earnings yield (PE ratio flipped), rather ...

My own implementation of the PP (1/3 cash, 1/3 gold, 1/3 stocks, eurozone) is down 3% this year, or 4% in real €. I have a bigger allocation to gold (wohoo, 2nd biggest bear market ever for 1/3 of my portfolio !) than the official PP, so this is a very good return for the strategy IMO. I'm quite hap...

MediumTex wrote: Come on fellas.

I hate reading stuff like this.

Then I guess you should use the "ignore user" feature

Oh man, why did you accept such a deal

In practice, does it change anything if you automatically reinvest dividends ?

citizens "you have n years to change your old Lira notes for the new Euro notes". The deadline was supposed to be 2012, something like that. But, all of a sudden, in the middle of 2011, a law was voted, that said : "oh, we were supposed to give you euros against your liras, remember ...

AFAIK, it never really happened in the US, and you can still pay with bank notes emitted before WWI if you like, right ? That's not the case in many parts of Europe, especially where the € has been introduced, since new banknotes (with a very different design) are often produced and are supposed to ...

EU (where I live) is a real laboratory for "political risk". Many things have been tested yet, besides the obvious continuous tax rate raises : partial default on government bonds (Greece) default on banknotes (Italy, although it was on a small scale) annihilation of any bank account balan...

Rien, I'd like to know what you're thinking about when you talk about default-free cash. Banknotes can be defaulted on, too. That happened a lot in many places in Europe.

Yes, I think the political factor has to be taken into consideration and it is not taken into consideration at all in the "academic" 2X2 grid. If the government (or a supra-national organization, like, say, IMF, or ECB for us European citizens) wants to steal my property (there are many wa...