I was just wondering if the performance of the PP year-to-date is the worst it has ever performed, or has it had a period(s) in the past where it actually performed worse? I've been doing the PP for 9 years and my returns are anemic. My CAGR is around 5%. Because I am retired and living off of my i...

Looks like marginally worse than YTD October 2008 PV 3 Month Year To Date 1 year 3 year 5 year 10 year Full 3 year 5 year -11.30% -11.11% -10.04% 5.19% 5.91% 5.48% 8.55% 7.50% 6.53% Trailing return and volatility are as of last full calendar month ending October 2008 PV 3 Month Year To Date 1 year 3...

Due to our Cold War perspective, I think it’s difficult for us to think of Russia as an imperial power. Obviously it was in the Czarist days but it was in the Communist days as well…it will be interesting to see if we are watching a “re” continuation of the break up that started in the 90s? Must ad...

Thank you for the post! It was great. If one breaks down the PPs performance profile it’s definitely cyclical/exhibits return to mean behavior. I do think we will see some outperformance whenever this down cycle ends. Thanks. Europe will have a hard winter (energy prices are a lot higher than in th...

Russia is increasingly being seen as a pariah state, not to be trusted and whilst Europe will endure a cold winter this year, by next year much of resources will have been redirected to be sourced from 'anywhere other than Russia'. The EU will struggle through this winter, but then be much more prep...

Digging out some data involved limited TLT history availability so I opted to use a monthly continual rolling 10 year ladder (not marked to market) instead of a STT/LTT barbell for pre 2003 data On that measure the recent dip isn't as deep as the deepest dip since 1972, but is getting close. https:/...

Nominal drawdowns are misleading. Adjusting for inflation and relative to the end of 2020 the PP as of end of August 2022 was down deeper than -20% real (after inflation). And of course deeper if you're also drawing a income. British PP, yearly granularity of drawdowns https://i.postimg.cc/63xSHh35/...

Leveraging is inclined to scale the volatility, not the rewards. Compounded rewards are a factor of yearly average and standard deviation. Scale up both the average AND the standard deviation and that tends to just still yield the same/similar annualized (CAGR) https://www.financialwebring.org/gummy...

Noise about noise. The March 2008 drawdown (end October 2008) was deeper in nominal terms -12% Start End Length Recovery By Recovery Time Underwater Period Drawdown Mar 2008 Oct 2008 8 months Aug 2009 10 months 1 year 6 months -12.01% PV Feels like the present drawdown might excel that in both depth...

Exactly. I stick with 100% stocks because the kinds of historical calamities that wiped out stocks typically wiped out bonds and cash as well. It's hard to tell what gold would have done at the time, had it been a freely tradeable commodity without a fixed price, but I suspect it would have gone up...

Some support for investing in Gold! Is It Time to Invest in Gold? Stock market volatility has given investors gold fever. If you chase the rally, don’t overdo it. July/August 1999 was the more attractive time to buy gold. Dow/Gold ratio was high (stocks expensive/gold cheap), in the UK you could bu...

Cross link that may be of interest viewtopic.php?p=242237#p242237

likely differences in actual outcomes might be considered as just noise. That is my big takeaway with this months long exercise of looking at investing and picking an AA. After a point, fine tuning is just blowing kisses into the wind. Investor swapping around their asset allocation tends to on ave...

That really is the whole point of the PP, isn't it? PP investors tend to be self-selecting conservative, defensive stewards of their wealth for a reason. Stock heavy investors are more inclined to looking to have that and also hope to see substantial wealth expansion. They'll cite that in the worst...

50/50 is a general good choice/balance. A factor with stocks is that they include bond exposure, stocks on average borrow (issue corporate bonds/whatever) half their book-value, whilst share prices are broadly priced to 2x book value. So each $1 of stock purchase also buys into 25c of short bond exp...

That really is the whole point of the PP, isn't it? PP investors tend to be self-selecting conservative, defensive stewards of their wealth for a reason. PP investors are more inclined to look at investing as putting aside surplus capital today and anticipate that having maintained its purchase pow...

Do you have a mechanism for telling which asset is the "rat poison" ahead of time? For British investors, a third each UK home, US$ bills (hard currency), gold, for a century+ history sustained a 2.6% SWR, excluding imputed rent benefit. Historic imputed rent averaged 4.2% so 1.4% proport...

What if the PP held 50% in a 20 year Treasury Ladder instead of a Short/Long dated treasury barbell? Each year around 2.5% of the portfolio value matures into cash, and 2.5% of the ongoing portfolio value is used to buy another 20 year Treasury. Average maturity 10 years. In cash terms after the por...

One of the assets in the PP is almost always going to be rat poison, often for a decade or longer. Right now that is LTTs. There is nothing new under the PP sun. Take a PP, chuck out the cash element as that's just a portfolio de-leverage, rebalance once per decade, (maybe) eliminating what is the ...

Gold is a competitor to the dollar and also bonds , not equites A new retiree initially loading 50/50 stock/gold, non-rebalanced, spending gold first - as though cash/T-Bills, historically tended to see that gold last relatively few years, 7 or so (4% SWR), as per 1980 start date, or many years, 22...

Australian law has a history of permitting gold to be 'confiscated' at a pen-stroke, with no need for any Parliamentary Bill (Bill already pre-passed), in order to support the AUD (at a price set by the central bank). Never applied, instead past part confiscations include setting a 50% taxation rate...

I’ve been curious about the principles of moderation for this forum. For example, under what circumstances do the moderators take action? Regarding lost soldiers, anyone know what happened to vincent_c? Seems like he left and deleted all his posts. I’m curious if anyone knows why. I occasionally ca...

Others can decide if what i said was wrong . You are just argumentative and a dick . You clearly implied I said something that I didn’t. . Clearly don’t understand spending down to live is based on portfolio value not dividend spending Clearly like to harp on what you can construe as false but is s...

Momentum works, until it doesn't - such as when it repeatedly zig-zags in/out again. Counter cycles can often be observed in a broad range of assets. Gold/Silver ratio, Gold/Dow ratio ...etc. If looking to reduce exposure to the worst asset then a variant might be to equal weight domestic/internatio...

It's a risk diversifier. Some in-hand non-fiat currency/commodity. Whenever counter-party and/or fiat-currency risk arises, perhaps banks/markets closed due to a natural or man-made event, then holding some portable in-hand physical asset is better than not. When markets/circumstances are pricing as...