Who will take care of your physical gold when you are 90 and possibly in a nursing home? It will be sitting in the bank safe deposit box waiting to pass to our heirs via our wills. This is a valid concern. Think about what if the fees go unpaid, and the property within is considered abandoned, beca...

The funny thing about tabloid journalism is... there is always a seed of truth in it. Back in the 2007 or so, I was seeing many really seedy, tabloidish banner ads in Yahoo! Mail soliciting investments in shale oil. Exactly the same as those "one weird trick" adds you see today for... what...

Article:

The Global Run on Physical Cash Has Begun

I'm going to buy US Savings Bonds up to the legal annual limit.

The 3% position in $SH is just to insure my spouse's equity holdings that I can't get into and change, in her retirement plan. So truth be told, we're not net short 3%, we're net short 0%. But if we start a waterfall decline below 1800 on the S&P, I'm thinking of putting in more, How much is a m...

I am not a subscriber

I think what Mel meant at the time was the PP doesn't track the broader market indices. People use "tracking error" in different contexts, it can be confusing. An investment portfolio can fail to track it's own relevant indices, I think that's the real tracking error. Why apply an irreleva...

Saudi Aramco laid off a bunch of people at its Houston R&D center down the road here. They are trying to conserve cash. They are getting stressed.

Harry Dent suggested yesterday the next step in the demographic downturn will be the affluent cutting their spending.  THe top 10-20% (the folks with the most cash) will now slow down.  He picked Nordstrom, Tiffany's, Sotheby's, and others for example. THe near- and intermediate-term futures may ha...

I made a large IAU ETF buy in my IRA based on gold momentum considerations. If it sticks, I will gradually convert the IAU in the IRA to physical non-IRA, on spot price dips.

We only maintain the current inflation expectations if oil goes to zero. Another classic case of recency bias and linear extrapolation error? Is the gold detecting future increasing inflation? How will the markets react if we show a year-on-year increase in oil price... in a year? http://i779.photob...

The stampede for the exit someday will be horrifying. When, we have no idea. I would think for there to be a "stampede", there would have to be other safe havens for cash that are immediately obvious to a lot of people. The Swiss yields are just incredibly low, but why can't they stay tha...

I was trying to understand the dividend too. If they have constantly maturing and new zeros, and the average maturity of the fund is 25 years, I would assume the longest zero is a 50 year duration, right? I couldn't find out if this was the case. Zeroes don't pay interest. All of your gain is from ...

The stampede for the exit someday will be horrifying. When, we have no idea. Probably when people now age 17 earn their MBAs and start running things. They will have no context.

To them Nirp Zirp will be normal.

I am not trading these just research

I theoretically trade once a month

DGZ, GLD, SH, SPY, TLT, and TBF.
Long and short gold, stocks, long Treasuries

Dual Momentum... hold the top three assets out of the six

Jan 1 2011-Jan 31 2016

CAGR 6.94%, MaxDD -7.01, Sharpe Ratio 0.88

Regular PP:

CAGR 3.95%, MaxDD -2.98, Sharpe Ratio 0.66

It really makes you wonder.

Dual Momentum is pretty simple. Let's say you have a list of assets, has to be at least two. You go long in the asset if and only if it is best performing of the list, and that performance is better than the risk-free rate (90 day T-Bills). "Performance" is measured by totla 1-year return....

BEAR MARKET WITCH'S BREW

TLT, IAU, Cash, and SH ! The Evil Twin PP !

If you use SH S&P500 SHORT ETF, in a Dual Momentum pairing with the S&P500 SPY LONG ETF, and just swap back and forth between the two based on the simple DM trading rules, you have better CAGR, Sharpe, and MaxDD than buy-and-hold SHY alone! That's just amazing to me, and completely surprisin...

Should I get the 9 mm or the .40 S&W?

NewToThis, are you using a Roth IRA on the side?

I still like a bit of gold as insurance, and it appears that allocations up to about 10% haven't harmed returns over the past 30-40 years.  If the apocalypse does occur, even a 10% allocation to physical gold will make one richer than all one's starving friends. Weird things can and do happen. They...

Libertarian666 wrote: Really the first question to answer is "why is physical gold unacceptable?"

I am not a gold owner now, but I did shop allocated storage options, the prices got ETF competitive above a certain account size, like $100k, for less risk of a swindle.

I hear your argument about correcting for over-exposure to mega-caps, but that just makes me want to take my existing stock allocation and divide it between LCB and SCB, not double the size of my stock allocation. This is what draws me to the PP. But I cant help from wanting to juice the returns! H...

Interesting, over the last 10 years, a PP with small cap blend has had higher CAGR than one with large cap blend or small cap value.

What about a PP with 25% SCV?

(Took a quick look... I like it)