Both Fidelity and Vanguard say they offer free trades for treasuries.  But are these trades really free, in the sense that aren't there markups somewhere when you buy and sell?  For example, let's say today I buy 100 30 year treasury bonds through Fidelity's bond trading desk (not auction).  Let's s...

craigr wrote: I just made this a blog post with some more information:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160324133 ... portfolio/

Great blog post.  Thanks Craig!

I have rebalanced a portion of my gold holdings from IAU to GTU and, recently, back again. I did not wait for the 30 day wash rule because I believe them to be substantially different. Hope this helps. I think IAU and GTU are definitely substantially different.  They aren't even taxed at the same l...

Are you talking about a Roth IRA or one that is tax-deferred? If the latter I don't see why you would be so worried about its value relative to your taxable accounts. The IRA could very well end up costing you more in taxes than the taxable account. It's a traditional IRA right now, although I am c...

We all saw how quickly bonds collapsed when the Fed announced they may be tapering off of QE this year.  If Harry Browne were alive today, would he still say we should keep 25% of our assets in treasuries, or do you think QE is so far outside of what Browne thought could happen, that Browne would ch...

Hi everyone, I want to tax-harvest both my gold and treasury losses.  My gold allocation is 80% GTU and 20% IAU, and I own actual treasuries.  I do not want to own TLT due to third party risk.  I am also reluctant to sell any GTU right now due to the huge discount it is selling at, 5.8% as of yeste...

Hi everyone, I want to tax-harvest both my gold and treasury losses.  My gold allocation is 80% GTU and 20% IAU, and I own actual treasuries.  I do not want to own TLT due to third party risk.  I am also reluctant to sell any GTU right now due to the huge discount it is selling at, 5.8% as of yester...

Hello, HB said that since treasuries are guaranteed to earn taxable income every year, people who have taxable and non-taxable accounts should put treasuries in the non-taxable account.  But given how the value of treasuries have been inflated by QE, I'm afraid that my IRA could get decimated if I p...

This is an extremely off the cuff calculation, but it gives you a starting point. Say you have a $1 million portfolio. $250K TLT.  ~3.4% SEC YIELD = $8,500 ordinary income. $250K SHV. ~0% SEC YIELD = $0 ordinary income. $250K IAU.  No dividends or interest. $250K VTI.  ~2.0% SEC YIELD = $5,000 call...

Thanks.  That makes a lot more sense.  Please excuse my ignorance.

I was looking at the PP performance stats on Crawlingroad.com at https://web.archive.org/web/20160324133409/http://www.crawlingroad.com/blog/2008/12/22/permanent-portfolio-historical-returns/. I was curious about the average performance of each asset class, so I averaged each column.  It seems to sh...

Hello, I have not found much information anywhere regarding the taxes I should expect to pay with a 4x25 PP in a taxable account.  Since the portfolio averages around 9.5% per year, what should I expect to earn, after taxes, assuming the highest tax bracket?  If the PP continues to average around 9....

Here is the Wall Street Journal's T-Bond and Note page.  Updated at 3PM Eastern time.  It can also display historical data. The data is in a simple HTML table, easily extracted if you are so inclined. Thanks you for the link.  I think this would actually be doable (at least until the new treasuries...

Another idea is to take the value of your bonds on the day you buy them and divide that amount by that day's closing price of TLT and plug that number of shares into your spreadsheet and then just plug in the latest price of TLT to see the approximate value of your bond holdings. That's definitely ...

this might help. http://gyroscopicinvesting.com/forum/bonds/how-to-value-direct-bond-holdings-on-google-docs/msg20819/#msg20819   i found a good bond calculator spreadsheet here someplace when i switched to direct holding, but when i tried to find the one i use by searching i came up empty,  readin...

Hello everyone, I recently set up a PP with Fidelity and I bought 30 year treasuries for my bond allocation.  Unfortunately, Fidelity only updates the bond prices once per day, so when I check my portfolio during the day, it shows me the bond price from the previous day, not the current bond price. ...

I recently started looking at 529 plans, including the Vanguard and Fidelity plans, which all basically look like varied blends of stocks and bonds.  I live by HB's philosophy that you can't predict the future, and it's very possible that over the next decade, both stocks and bonds could do poorly (...

I think the problem with Hard Assets Alliance is that they are a US company.  That means if the SHTF, they are probably going to have to go along with whatever the government wants.  They possibly will not be able to send wires outside the US.  I'm not sure if they could lose the ability to send the...

I know this is open to debate, but I have researched this a lot and I believe there is quite a bit of evidence that IAU does not have all of the gold in its vaults, and they may be operating with fractional reserves.  I do not think these conclusions are being reached due to paranoia, but rather due...

Thanks for the great feedback!  I'm thinking I could diversify by putting around 50% of my gold allocation in GTU, 25% in the Perth mint, and 25% somewhere else.  I'm thinking about Kitco, perhaps.  They have what sounds like an extremely cheap program with their pooled storage accounts.  The premiu...

Thanks Pointedstick.  Do you have any suggestions regarding how I can get the gold from the bullion dealer to the bank in order to place it in the safety deposit box?  I would be very scared that someone would follow me from the bullion dealer and mug me when I arrived at the bank, etc.  The idea of...

Thanks for all of the great feedback.  The reason why I wanted GTU, in particular, is that it is supposedly safer than IAU and GLD.  There is a lot of information online indicating that IAU and GLD may not have the gold they are supposed to have.  They lease their gold to others and some people say ...

Hi, I have $6 million to invest in a PP due to a recent sale of a business.  After doing a lot of research and reading in this forum, I decided that GTU was my best option for "paper gold".  But it appears it might be hard to buy my 25% gold position ($1.5 million) in GTU because GTU's dai...