Thanks for the replies. Yes, I have some cash sitting on the sidelines and from the responses, I think it makes sense for me to add the cash to the portfolio, buy up the lagging classes to the re-balance point and not sell anything. It seems that on an ongoing basis, re-balancing this way takes a ta...

Is it better to sell the performing asset class while it is at a comparative premium, or to buy the lagging asset class at a comparative discount while it is out of favor? This may sound like a rhetorical question, but there is a subtlety that I'd like to better understand. For example, right now st...

MT, I wasn't really suggesting anything, just raising the question (to which I don't claim to know the answer myself). I'm interested in your thoughts on this - do you feel the economy at present is expanding or contracting, and are price levels increasing or decreasing? I think that the economy is...

Over the last 40 years it has been that simple. Are you suggesting that the stock market might respond to one type of economic expansion differently than it would another?  Why would it?  If corporate profits are increasing, do we care why?  We may care a lot, I just thought I would ask the questio...

The PP is premised upon the following assumptions: 1. At a given point in time, the economy can only be on an expansion trajectory or a contraction trajectory.  It's possible for the economy to be neither expanding nor contracting, but such a condition rarely lasts for very long. MT, Is it really s...

The truth is that permanent open market operations merely change the composition of outstanding private sector assets and serve no role in helping to fund the US government.  It’s true that the government could use the Fed to fund the US Treasury’s spending, but that would involve a full blown reje...

On a related note, I have heard it said that an unprecedented amount of money is sitting on the balance sheets of major banks, including the treasury primary dealers, in the form of excess reserves. The Fed's money expansion strategy relied on the banks as a whole to put the money created by the Fed...

Your supply-and-demand analysis isn't wrong, but I think you're making an assumption that the Fed is creating artificial demand rather than crowding out demand from non-Fed market participants. If the Fed were to stop buying all the new bonds, what's to say that demand from private entities, foreig...

Your supply-and-demand analysis isn't wrong, but I think you're making an assumption that the Fed is creating artificial demand rather than crowding out demand from non-Fed market participants. If the Fed were to stop buying all the new bonds, what's to say that demand from private entities, foreig...

Sometimes I see statistics on the market that say things like: X is what your return would have been investing in SPY over a given period and X- is what would have been your return if you had missed the 10 best trading days during that same period. The main point being that the peaks and valleys hea...

Sure, but that applies to any falling asset. Unless you think it's going to zero, I think buying when it's falling is probably better than buying when it's rising. [/quote] Why exactly do you think buying an asset when it's falling is better than buying when it's rising? I'm not saying I disagree, ...

This is not a rhetorical question. I am interested in opinions on why the PP is down as much as it is at the moment. By way of background, I started my PP in October 2012, and inception to date I am down about 7%. I didn't expect a riskless investment but I didn't expect to be down this much either,...