vincent_c wrote: ↑Fri Mar 12, 2021 10:25 am
doodle wrote: ↑Fri Mar 12, 2021 10:14 am
The PP might not be the winningest strategy, but it is familiar to me, has served me reasonably well through a number of hard times in the market and I trust it.
Fair enough.
If there are any PP nerds left on this forum that really want to get down to the nitty gritty of things you can reach out to me. I know a lot of people have left the forum and there's been a struggle to keep up with the intellectual discussions.
doodle wrote: ↑Fri Mar 12, 2021 10:14 am
Honestly, sometimes a boring diversified portfolio (even if it does lose money for a couple years) can help preserve sanity in an environment where it constantly feels like you are going to get sideswiped by some unknown surprise.
I do think that it is a mistake to think that the PP offers any kind of safety in the sense that you aren't going to get sideswiped.
I think there is a general sense that the PP been debated to death and this was given as one of the reasons why there has been increasingly fewer intellectual discussion. But I have read much of what is on this site and I believe we've only scratched the surface.
When someone is ready to engage, I'll just say that I am willing to defend or challenge the PP and take either side of the debate.
In the fitness industry they say the best exercise program is the one that you will actually do. I'm sure there are all sorts of strategies one can come up with that might make "logical" sense but once you start getting into strategies that require constant monitoring...options, futures, momentum etc. you automatically lose almost anyone that has to actually work for a living or like me isn't really motivated heavily by squeezing every ounce of efficiency out of their money...I have enough to satisfy my needs and don't need much.
That said, I do think the current environment might be tough on the portfolio in that rising rates could put the squeeze on a number of it's assets simultaneously. Of course, that's all conjecture and experience has taught me to expect the unexpected. I think covid was the latest example of that. This portfolio provided me a very lucrative rebalance opportunity from treasuries to stocks. No model could have predicted that. And as much as we can try to predict the events of tomorrow we have no idea what is going to happen. What if one of these variant covid strains suddenly has a death rate closer to 2% for general population and evades all our vaccines? What if China starts to exert it's presence on world stage more forcefully? What if the Biden keels over and dies? There are so many unknowns that are impossible to predict.
Personally my reaction at the moment has been to keep my cash balances a little higher and lower exposure to stocks and bonds a bit and to slowly sell off winners and buy losers...
Remember the wisdom of Lou Mannheim, from wall street....
Quick buck artists come and go with every bull market, it's the steady players that make it through the bear markets...
https://youtu.be/XCSOsFe42P8