All any of us can do is to do our best and we’re going to end up with whatever we end up with. People have been retiring that way forever. That they have. But several things are different now. First, people are living longer while getting substantially less healthy. That means far more time spent n...

Ron Paul's discussion: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s filing papers to run for president yesterday has thrown a massive monkey wrench into the 2024 US Presidential campaign. Suddenly it looks like the seemingly-ailing President Biden will have a real challenger for the Democratic Party nomination. But ho...

Looks like Tyler beat me to it somewhat but yeah, the "average" balance is well above the median balance: Quoting directly from Vanguard's "How America Saves for Retirement: 2022" report (at https://institutional.vanguard.com/content/dam/inst/vanguard-has/insights-pdfs/22_TL_HAS_...

I think the writing is on the wall that the wealthy (including the traditional middle-class) are going to increasingly vilified and made to do penance for whatever inequality happens to be the focus of concern. I definitely agree it's not justified or helpful to villianize the wealthy. But I wonder...

B. Means that the if the employee is really adding, say, $30 an hour in economic value to the company should the employer really be only trying to get away with paying him, say $20 an hour in pay and benefits? If an employee is truly so useless that he's asking for more than he's worth then fire hi...

Oh, and as for a place that is really "run by unions" Illinois doesn't hold an even barely flickering candle to Scandinavia . There was an instance back in 2019 where Finland's postal service tried to move just 700 workers into a new contract and new collective bargaining unit that effect...

I thought it was interesting to see what union membership looks like around the world. In the global context, I'm not sure I'd call either the US or Illinois union heavy, at least in terms of membership. If unions have significant political influence that may be a different story. BTW, I was surpri...

2. Unions becoming less and less powerful and less people being represented by them as--from the mid 70s onward--the government and NLRB turned more and more of a blind eye to union busting tactics by companies. You should move to IL. You would love it here. The unions pretty much run everything he...

Excellent response D1984, seriously. I always enjoy informed, well articulated push back to anything I write. It's how we learn/expand our knowledge base. Won't argue with the basic premise of what you wrote...at the end of the day we simply recovered to the early 70s with the data I showed. I also...

And folks here's the deal...both parties are completely lying out of both sides of their mouths economically...what you see here is average hour wages (non-management types) divided by the CPI. Even if you think CPI is crap, it's still been the same denominator for the most part. Economically folks...

Appreciate the posts that are going. Let me take a quote and swap out some words. When secular individuals and organizations attempt to blend their beliefs with political machinery, it seems that it ends up looking mostly like politics and like they are forcing their beliefs on others. Putting the ...

I've been reading a really quite boring finance book lately and came across a chart/section of the book that essentially stated long bonds and commodities cycle opposite to each other...so I said to myself...hmmm...what if we try something like QQQ, TLT/EDV and DBC in a hold two momentum or some ot...

Tyler, glennds, Thanks for those tips! Using both Acrobat Pro (with its page crop/cropbox features and --in the few situations where cropping was untenable--print-screening the whole screen, pasting to Paint, copying into another Paint window the section of plain yellowed page needed to paste over t...

For the week , ytd Pp down 12.0% Fidelity insight income model down 10.1% Wellesly down 9.31% Were you not going to provide the results for both the week and year-to-date? I'm only seeing one amount for each, which I am assuming is year-to-date. Thought I would add the butterfly in Golden butterfly...

Since you know how to use Photoshop, why don't you just bring your PDF file into Photoshop, make the corrections, and then Save As PDF? And if not Photoshop, I think most of the free image editors will import a PDF and provide some method of doing the same. If that won't work for you, I seem to rec...

I was photographing (with a smartphone + computer and PDFing app) some pages from some old academic finance journals and said books were so old and beat up that they wouldn't properly have all their pages lay flat. Many times I had to use a pencil to hold the page down while I photographed it (else ...

I need to remember where I got my data and see if I can run those numbers again...just by the math of it (using PV monthly returns) I'd be a bit surprised if daily data didn't at least show low 20%s. The site I (and many others) used to use was peaktotrough.com but that stopped updating years ago. ...

A Keynesian and a Monetarist walk into a bar.... Naa, Austrian. Aggregate prices can't rise without money printing. Otherwise, something has to fall in price in order for something else to increase. There are two important qualifiers you need to add to this statement; otherwise, it is not 100% corr...

Joypog, something doesn't look right. There's no way the PP would be returning a CAGR of 12.59% for that time period. It should be closer to 6% or a little less. Hmm I reran the test and here are the settings and results. I'm a n00b with PV, so I may well be wrong. Is there a setting that's off? I ...

I have RSP on the brain today (equal-weight S&P500 ETF). A GB with 40% RSP beats a GB with 20% ISV and 20% VTI, but the limiting factor for my backtesting (portfoliovisualizer.com) is when GLD started. It makes sense, RSP is not an implicit growth strategy (unlike cap-weighted ETFs) is therefor...

It was a serious response since I wasn’t sure what to make of your response. I was on the fence as to whether it was satirical. O0 But I am quite serious about buying up the ammo. (It would then have to be safely guarded or destroyed). If enough dedicated rich people kept buying it up, we’d see few...

Thanks Xan! I'm always a bit self-conscious about pushing paid products on forums, as I dislike spam just as much as the next guy. But I really appreciate your support, and I hope you guys find the new stuff useful. Hi Tyler, I was wondering....is there any chance of any of the PortfolioCharts back...

I admit this qualifies as a shameless plug (and I promise not to make a habit of it), but another option is to try one of my new standalone backtesting tools . You'll have to supply your own source data, but the individual PP asset histories aren't too hard to dig up and you also have control over ...

Cool story. Did you buy that portfolio yet =) Hahah good question! Last weekend we started moving money into position, but we're going in over 10 months. We got to our crazy cash position due to our hyper-conservativeness and see no compelling reason to suddenly change.... And yeah, it was fun tryi...

Tyler @ Portfolio Charts offered some typically insightful thoughts in response to an earlier question in these forums about the possibility of adding international stocks to the PP or GB: "Q: One additional question: Have you considered a slice of international, for diversification? I realize...