It's been interesting to me to see people on this forum talking about needing to be comfortable with the possibility of 20% drawdowns in order to be in the PP, when there's never been a drawdown more than a quarter that large since the early 70's- until now. The worst-case 20% drawdown refers to an...

So, Clive makes a single negative prediction on the PP — a few years ago, mind you — and now we are supposing he's "right" simply because 'cash is king' at the moment and the PP goes down a little bit? Please... Clive is just a guy with a computer who spends every day obsessing about thou...

A very savvy friend of mine who invests in both the PP and a conservative slice-and-dice portfolio had this to say about what's happened lately with gold and Treasurys, in particular: "In a manipulated market, old rules about asset diversification may be meaningless.  The Fed created a bubble a...

I had the same question as I sold bullion for the first time this year. I haven't been able to get a response from the holding company/vault. Does anyone have definitive info on this?

We're U.S. citizens who live most of the year in Mexico. Just read the gold chapter of the excellent new PP book and it has me thinking that going through the hassle of opening an account at Everbank to hold allocated gold might be worth it, though until now I thought that having our allocation divi...

Thanks everyone, and especially MediumTex for what is even by your very high standards a tour-de-force (with just the right amount of tour-de-farce) post. I owe you and Craig R. a huge debt of gratitude.

hoost wrote: If I'm not mistaken, I think that was Kevin K. from this forum.  It may not have been him, but I'm pretty sure it was someone from this forum.

Yikes! No - not me! I'm a huge fan of Craig's and am fully invested in the PP.

This provocative article certainly raisies questions about a couple of key components of the PP that I don't think Harry Browne, wary as he was of both Wall Street machinations and the government, could have anticipated: http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/06/05/collapse-at-hand/ Not sure what the ...

Thanks Craig, that's really helpful.

I've been mulling over Craig R's post on diversifying across brokerages and find his arguments compelling (much as I hate complexity!): http://crawlingroad.com/blog/2012/05/13/institutional-diversification-a-great-idea-to-limit-risk/ For better or worse (I have no complaints) I'm with Schwab now. I ...

Thought this article by Rick Ferri was interesting in several respects, starting with the decline in the number of publicly-traded companies. I wondered what the many brighter-than-mine minds on this board would think of using Ferri's 3 ETF portfolio as a broader and presumably more representative s...

That's a timely re-post Craig of an article that every adherent of fancy slice-and-dice portfolios should read. Just underlines the huge debt I owe to you and to Harry Browne. Everyone else is out there looking at what's happened in the past (often for asset classes without enough years of trading h...

As one of several people I know who moved from a supposedly sophisticated slice-and-dice portfolio of supposedly non-correlated asset classes that all tanked in unison in the '07-'08 meltdown to the PP I thought this article in Saturday's NY Times was quite interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/1...

Thanks for the great graph and info Gumby. If we are indeed entering an unprecedented era where "full faith and credit" of the U.S. carries an asterisk with it I would think that flights to safety are likely to become more complicated: natural resources stocks, precious metals (including b...

I hope you're right MT, but there are clearly plenty in Congress willing to be voted out of office over this. 71% disapproval rating according to a poll published today. The other question is will Treasuries remain the investment of last resort, or will that role fall to some combination of gold and...

I trust I'll be corrected if I'm wrong here, but it seems to me Harry Browne never anticipated the possibility of the U.S. defaulting on its debt. In my case the timing for this particular soap opera couldn't be worse, because I'm going to have to liquidate some assets (all of which are invested in ...