... imagine you suddenly need to use cash at the same time that five-year treasuries sharply decrease in value. How mature is that ladder? How many of those treasuries can you really sell in a pinch without much of a loss? Can you give an example of such a situation? Because as a PP investor in the...

Harry Dent is now selling a -70 to -90% stock market decline narrative. -90% would bring us back to July August 1987. https://seekingalpha.com/article/4302114?source=ansh I think the PP would do well -- or at least it would do no worse than (most) any other strategy and, therefore, do well in relat...

A general question, not addressed to anyone in particular: Isn't a treasury money market fund just a treasury ladder held by someone else on your behalf? If so, there's not magic to it. You can set up your own and cut out the middleman. And set the duration/maturity however you like. Personally, I h...

...just be aware that your portfolio averaged over time will be cash-heavy. So to compensate, you can rebalance cash to 15% and the other three assets to 28%. This is such a wise comment, Tortoise. I hope everyone takes it to heart. Having said that, personally I'm not a fan of adding to cash until...

I'm not sure I understand your question, boglerdude. I would suggest a limit order, priced at or a few cents above the current market price. Certainly I wouldn't sell with a market order and risk being taken advantage of. To see the premium/discount curve, check out this link . The low this year was...

I think that's exactly how the stock market works. Whatever the last sale was, that sets the market cap. Even if it was just one share. And, as you say, the next morning the mistake gets fixed with the first trade, so there's no way for us to take advantage of it.

I'm in the same boat -- waiting for the PHYS premium to turn positive. The expense ratio is something like 0.48%. A bit too high, but I was hoping to take advantage of swings in the premium (buy negative, sell positive). I'm still clueless as to why anyone would sell when the premium is negative. Ho...

This might be easier: gold. Same lady, same strategy and history. She invests $100,000 in gold in taxable account, Scenario (1). She never sells for 40 years. There are no dividends. The gold goes up in value to $2,000,000. I think that, long term, gold has done almost as well as stocks, so it might...

For some light relief, on to Scenario (2): Trad IRA. Same history. $100,000 invested, and a tax break. Her bank balance is $0. She earns 2% in dividends and invests it all -- no taxes along the way. The portfolio grows to $2,000,000. After 40 years, she retires. Withdraws $100,000 from her Trad IRA....

OK, I'll do one more, for long-term treasuries. Same situation and history for the lady investor. But now she is investing $100,000 only in LTTs. For a coupon yield, I'm going to pick 2%, close to what it is today. The investor buys the LTTs in a taxable account, Scenario (1). Again, she reinvests a...

Now, in retirement, she wants to live off $100,000. At 2%, the dividends earned this year total $20,000. That means our investor has to sell $80,000 worth of stock. That amount has a tax basis of $20,000 (25%). So the capital gain of that $80,000 is $60,000. OK, I spotted one mistake already, but i...

Scenario (3) : Roth IRA. Same background as before. Our investor puts $100,000 into a Roth IRA. She gets no tax benefit for doing so. She pays 24% on that money earned before investment. We can consider her to have a bank balance of -$24,000. Over 40 years she reinvests the dividends, averaging $10,...

Scenario (2): Stock investing in a Traditional IRA. Same background as before. Our investor places $100,000 over 40 years into a Trad IRA. She gets a tax break on that money. She's in the 24% tax bracket, so there is a saving of $24,000 relative to the previous example. We can consider her to have a...

This topic is so fundamental to PP investing, I think we need to reach a definitive consensus. I need some numbers to understand the complexity, and I would love it if you all would correct me if I make a mistake below. Thanks. Let's consider a PP investor, who invests in the four assets, but let's ...

I hear ya. It's true that we don't have a lot of data for rising rates. But we do have a full decade of truly skyrocketing rates. And during that time the PP still stayed right within its normal band of returns. Personally, I don't think the PP was driven by falling rates any more than it was drive...

Assume I was investing $400,000 total. That would be $100,000 in each investment. Now assume that at a future date I now have $140,000 in bond value and $86,667 in each of the other three investments. I am now supposed to sell $40,000 worth of bonds and buy $13,333 of each of the other investments....

Pet Hog, I'm not doing any kind of quantitative analysis because I don't think that would improve results over random picks. Broadly, I'm going for what I think are solid "value" stocks that have a record of increasing dividend payouts, have a relatively low P/E (or at least not too high)...

WHOA! Unexpected! If you equal-weight the Dow 30, and rebalance annually, it's really kick-a$$. I had to omit DOW and V because they don't go back far enough in time. You've inspired another backtest, Ochotona! The 30 components of the DJIA on January 1, 2000 were: Alcoa Inc. AlliedSignal Incorpora...

Kriegsspiel, I have no fixation with randomness. I'm wondering if a small equal-weighted portfolio might match or out-perform a market-cap-weighted index. I can't buy every stock in, say, the SP500 (I'm not that rich), so the challenge would be buy a subset and get similar (hopefully superior) retur...

Does anyone here know if an analysis has been done of the price correlation between gold and LTTs over at least the past few decades? I'd be interested to see if the correlation has always been high or if it's increased in recent years. Lately, based on my own observations of daily closing prices, ...

I guess, Sophie, that my motivation is a lot like yours. I want to cut out a level of bureaucracy and get closer to direct ownership of the shares. I felt my PP was much more bulletproof, and I was more in control, once I ditched TLT and started buying 30-year treasuries at auction. I haven't owned ...

I went looking for historical Wilshire 5000 component data, but came up short. I'm sure it's out there somewhere. Found historical SP500 component data on the iShares IVV page. Taking their listing of the components of IVV from August 28 2014, let's see how a simple every-sixteenth-stock selection s...

The n^2.09 portfolio, with mega-caps and micro-caps avoided. The first three columns are n, n^2.09 (ignoring fractions), and n^2.09 + 5 [e.g., Facebook, the first company on this list (n = 1) is actually 6th on the list of richest companies] 01 0001 0006 Facebook (532 billion) 02 0004 0009 Johnson &...

Given the positive results, I'm going to model one more portfolio, based on the n^2.4 concept. I haven't started the model, but here are the rules. (1) Because the micro-caps are difficult to model (often with few data because they are new) and because they are volatile and I might not want to hold ...

True, but the Dow is a piss-poor representation of the market and not something that you want to emulate! The only good thing about buying the Dow and nothing else would be that you could look up from your meal at the screen of a sports bar and see how your investments are doing. No spreadsheet nee...