I was listening to a podcast yesterday and the interviewee made a very interesting case for the US eventually getting to the same/close to the same rates as Japan and Europe. Several points why but the big ones were better government finances and international money flows into the US as a result of ...

The possibilities are endless, but the more contracts involved, obviously the more you are paying in commissions and bid/ask spreads. For sure. Looking at correlations to other indexes the best stock futures contract match is the Russell 1000 to the S&P 500. But I already mentioned why that pai...

Summary post on our paper futures PP. We are net long ~16k for each asset for a 48K portfolio. Margin is ~6400. To absorb a 25% DD we would need 12K in cash and to absorb a 30% DD we would need 16K. So let's be conservative and go with 22.4K as our minimum cash amount which will put us at 2.14x leve...

Thanks for that explanation. I had to read it twice but it's very clear. Maybe I'm still totally off here but bear with me if you don't mind. If you hold nothing but futures contracts in your account, you don't own anything but cash and the rights to the cash gain or losses associated with the futu...

I'm not sure it's really fair to compare the returns of a 60/40 portfolio (without cash) to the PP when cash is yielding around zero. Has anyone run numbers on a 33.3/33.3/33.3 PP without cash (maybe there is an existing thread on this forum about this)? I'm also curious about what the optimal re-b...

I'm not sure it's really fair to compare the returns of a 60/40 portfolio (without cash) to the PP when cash is yielding around zero. Has anyone run numbers on a 33.3/33.3/33.3 PP without cash (maybe there is an existing thread on this forum about this)? I'm also curious about what the optimal re-b...

FYI: Overnight margin bumped up to 6,365. Futures do what is called mark to market on a daily basis. So for example, if you are long the ES futures contract (SPX) which trades at $50 per point and the ES goes up 10 points your broker deposits 500 in your account and if down 10 points they subtract 5...

Interesting ...I executed the above in my broker's paper trading account and it only used 3,850 in margin. 1000 of that is for the equity portion and 2850 is for the futures portion. I'm going to continue this paper trading experiment, but with only 3850 used in margin and an estimated trading cost...

I can't remember/too lazy to search for it but in a recent post someone suggested shorting a similar future against a long future to narrow down the total cash commitment required to do a PP with futures...so hat nod to "someone." ;) In any event, I did the basic math on this to see what s...

For what it's worth (not much), I would wave off a trend following PP. Gold is the only asset of the three that trends well. Band rebalancing (return to mean) is a much better approach for this particular portfolio. Having noted this, one could use a discretionary mix. When you hit a rebalance band ...

MG,

I have one small quibble on your DD stats for 1981...the hellaciously good returns the two years before. What was the max intraday DD not counting 1981?

It's true and is exactly why I go with a leveraged PP.

These guys aren't stupid (salesmen). They know they can't be too far off the bogey and continue to make a buck. Assuming this year remains awesome for PP, next year will show renewed enthusiasm for the PP while the previous three years there was little interest. However, if it wasn't for the 2011-20...

For my VP PP that I post on in the VP section I use SPXL and TNA 50/50 for the stock component. My rationale is very simple for this. As a general rule large cap performs better late stage bull and in bear markets and small cap performs better early stage bull markets.

On doesn't know in advance which will be better. All one can know is that in a flat/choppy market narrower bands will work better and in a trending market wider bands will do better.

The main point of rebalancing is to maintain a consistent risk profile.

Looks like a good map of it to me. Personally I think top and bottom halves are a bit silly. If one is going to commit to a factor then commit...like top 25 or 10%.

I don't know if I'm the 70% poster Sophie mentioned but I did write a 70% time in DD post a couple of days back. DD is anytime you are not reaching a new high. A good example was last year...almost the entire year was in DD. If you take the Nasdaq 100 it was in DD for what 15-16 years in a row?

I was looking at my historical spreadsheet and it definitely pays to be in the PP after a negative year. Pretty much a blow out positive return the following year. Thus far this year is tracking for a repeat.

One important thing I forgot in my first RSP post; if one believes in return to mean or buy low sell high for stocks RSP/equal weight does that. Cap weight does the opposite.

It is interesting how similar the effect is across RSP PP, Golden PP, and Platinum PP. (I'd like to see Tyler's lost money and made the average numbers for RSP.) The appeal of RSP is it's just the one symbol to trade. Costs are a little higher, though: 0.40% expense ratio vs. <0.10% for VTI/VB. Tax...

Tha, tha, tha, that's all folks! I'm out. This horse has been beat sufficiently.

Clearly I've hit a nerve here. :o I will just lay my opinion out very simply. Gold has unique qualities as an asset class. These can be accessed by holding phys or an electronic medium of same. Either way the benefit/risk accrues to the holder of it. In today's monetary system under extreme SHTF (li...

3 small things: So, you think that the folks at GLD (or whatever etf) would get to keep their gold if ours was confiscated? Past performance disaster is no indication of the future. I don't think a financial crisis will cause trouble with an etf. I think it's possible that there will be a scandal d...

So exactly what happened to GLD during the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression? And what happened to real gold during the Great Depression? Answers: Nothing, confiscated. We can have theory all day long, but the facts of the two actual SHTF scenarios conflict with the theory. Sans a ...

dragoncar wrote:

Kbg wrote:For the record...I believe people should do what is most suited to them as they see fit with their assets.

I believe everyone should send me their gold for safekeeping