Frugal & ns3, I used WiseOne's data provided in the early pages of that thread, I just removed the "bond" component. I took data from 1972 up to 2013, so, yes, it includes the 70s and 80s when cash was yielding a lot. Yes, that might be out of sight forever, but a 2200% gain after expe...

I just tried to see what happens with a bondless (hence, 33% cash) PP, results are even better. I ended up with 22 million $ (rather than 16) at the end of 2013. Even a 7,5% withdrawal rate would have survived 40 years without eating the initial capital (although it would seriously have been on the ...

That's a great chart ! No wonder stock bugs on the forums seem to be from USA, by the way. You guys seem to have avoided bad times, up to now. I wonder what a treasury bond market drop would look like, though. In some places, it clearly dropped 100% with governments defaulting (which seems to have n...

I know the stock market and the bond markets are different... Obviously. But a lot of the price movement around stock earnings is similar to the price movement around long-term bond interest rates. If stocks were quoted by their 10 year and 1 year trailing earnings yield (PE ratio flipped), rather ...

My own implementation of the PP (1/3 cash, 1/3 gold, 1/3 stocks, eurozone) is down 3% this year, or 4% in real €. I have a bigger allocation to gold (wohoo, 2nd biggest bear market ever for 1/3 of my portfolio !) than the official PP, so this is a very good return for the strategy IMO. I'm quite hap...

MediumTex wrote: Come on fellas.

I hate reading stuff like this.

Then I guess you should use the "ignore user" feature

Oh man, why did you accept such a deal

In practice, does it change anything if you automatically reinvest dividends ?

citizens "you have n years to change your old Lira notes for the new Euro notes". The deadline was supposed to be 2012, something like that. But, all of a sudden, in the middle of 2011, a law was voted, that said : "oh, we were supposed to give you euros against your liras, remember ...

AFAIK, it never really happened in the US, and you can still pay with bank notes emitted before WWI if you like, right ? That's not the case in many parts of Europe, especially where the € has been introduced, since new banknotes (with a very different design) are often produced and are supposed to ...

EU (where I live) is a real laboratory for "political risk". Many things have been tested yet, besides the obvious continuous tax rate raises : partial default on government bonds (Greece) default on banknotes (Italy, although it was on a small scale) annihilation of any bank account balan...

Rien, I'd like to know what you're thinking about when you talk about default-free cash. Banknotes can be defaulted on, too. That happened a lot in many places in Europe.

Yes, I think the political factor has to be taken into consideration and it is not taken into consideration at all in the "academic" 2X2 grid. If the government (or a supra-national organization, like, say, IMF, or ECB for us European citizens) wants to steal my property (there are many wa...

Sure. Gold is too valuable IMHO to be substituted by anything else, even physical real estate. But I think buying too much gold on leverage is pretty risky, too. The hard part is finding the right balance... Do not use leverage if there is any possibility, no matter how seemingly remote, of getting...

Sure. Gold is too valuable IMHO to be substituted by anything else, even physical real estate. But I think buying too much gold on leverage is pretty risky, too. The hard part is finding the right balance...

As a side note,  Bill Bernstein's latest book, Deep Risk, seems to add some interesting thoughts on this debate:  (1)  inflation is the far more likely economic risk scenario in modern times, (2) Gold has had more deflationary rather than inflationary protection, and (3) (I think he said) a 30 year...

I don't know if that's of any use to a US purchaser (they are a UK dealer), but I buy all my online coins from coininvestdirect.com . They have a very good service as far as I can tell and they can sell 20F coins (or others) one by one.

I shave only once in a while, because the process of shaving is painful (I have thick facial hair I guess) and takes time. But after a while, I usually get fed up with it for various reasons and finally shave.

Yes, if I was investing in LT bonds, I would hold them directly.

That's an interesting topic. I think the "one-size-fit-all" of the PP is a little problematic. For example : someone with a government job ; not necessarily US, I'm talking about what I know : in France, they are very safe ; you cannot lose it unless you make a bad mistake or unless France...

The good part I think though is that equities actually stay in your name, in my current broker at least. I need to find out if the 100k covers cash and equities combined. In France, equities (from EU only) are insured too (and that's another insurance, so that's 100k for cash, 100k for equities). E...

5th condition : stagflation because of high energy prices (peak oil, etc.). Then, either energy commodities or forest land.

As for me, I hate it when websites open a new tab without asking for the permission. I'd rather do it myself, and open links in another tab if I want to, and in the same one if I prefer.

So hard to satisfy everyone

1. Who would want to borrow gold? Other than miners, who could theoretically repay in kind, and bullion banks, who don't repay at all, there aren't many possible borrowers. Short sellers might want to do that. I borrow gold, I sell it high, and buy it back low (hopefully) to pay back my golden debt...

There's a new law in France that has been put into application : the postal services shall not be used anymore to send precious metals, especially gold & silver bullions. There is no real justification for that and the law is not well known yet (many professional bullion dealers do not seem to h...