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Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 12:07 pm
by stuper1
$14M in the bank, and you still come on here to make the rest of us miserable? Come on, man, have a little decency. If you're going to come on here, bring some kind of uplifting quote about the rewards of working hard or living in a great country or something.

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 12:10 pm
by Libertarian666
stuper1 wrote:
Fri Jun 15, 2018 12:07 pm
$14M in the bank, and you still come on here to make the rest of us miserable? Come on, man, have a little decency. If you're going to come on here, bring some kind of uplifting quote about the rewards of working hard or living in a great country or something.
No, all he has to share is bile and spite.

I've blocked him for that reason. Maybe if no one responds to his vitriol, he'll take the hint and leave.

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 12:14 pm
by buddtholomew
Libertarian666 wrote:
Fri Jun 15, 2018 12:10 pm
stuper1 wrote:
Fri Jun 15, 2018 12:07 pm
$14M in the bank, and you still come on here to make the rest of us miserable? Come on, man, have a little decency. If you're going to come on here, bring some kind of uplifting quote about the rewards of working hard or living in a great country or something.
No, all he has to share is bile and spite.

I've blocked him for that reason. Maybe if no one responds to his vitriol, he'll take the hint and leave.
I've blocked you...funny how you respond to all my posts (hmm).
I don't make you miserable, you decide to be miserable on your own.
I am an immigrant and old habits die hard when you arrive in the US with a family of 6 and 8K total.
I don't owe any of you shit and will be as cordial as you are to me.
Read or don't read my posts I don't care.
It's for me anyway.

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 1:52 pm
by stuper1
Ok, Budd, time for you to inspire us a bit with some of your backstory. Trust me, you owe us this after having to read your griping for years. Tell us a little more about you and how you were able to amass $14M. Where did you immigrate from, how old were you, what was your career path, what were the keys to your success, anything else?

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 3:17 pm
by barrett
Yeah, I'd be curious to hear the back story as well. I don't really mind the griping though as I think we all have a mini budd sitting on our shoulder thinking about what could have been.

A few thoughts...

budd, you are familiar with the sunk cost fallacy, correct? Maybe you are just a Boglehead through and through and should just go to something like 60/40 and call it a day. It seems like that would ease your mind a bit and you haven't really lost all that much by holding 7.5% in gold. Sure, it might be a lot in dollars, but I would think relatively little in percentage terms.

One could even argue that at 7.5% you are at the very low end in terms of holding a slice of an asset that can really drive your portfolio forward when it is time for that asset to perform. Maybe ask yourself what the impact to your portfolio would be if gold were to, say, quadruple in price over a five or ten year period while stocks were struggling to keep up in real terms.

Gold is kind of supposed to perform like crap when stocks are on a tear as they have been for nine years now. But most of us around here are at least somewhat concerned about sequence of returns risk (having recently retired, with a decent nest egg but not a huge abundance, I know that I am). It sounds like you have amassed enough money that you could withstand a pretty extreme stock/bond downturn and still be OK. In my case, I just figure that with me being on the bubble with about 25X expenses (and hoping to live another 30-40 years), I'm likely to see gold do well, and carry my portfolio, another time or two in my lifetime. Of course I might have to wait another ten years for that to happen but I'll be OK with that as long as something in my asset mix is doing well.

I believe Machine Ghost once wrote something on here along the lines of "Stocks are the engine of the PP and everything else is just some kind of hedge." My own version is "How high of a stock allocation can I have before I start to worry about a stock market crash?" For me that number seems to be somewhere around a third. When I add everything up (LTTs, Cash Gold & Stocks) across all accounts, I look at my roughly 33/67 allocation as a conservative cash-heavy Boglehead portfolio with, hopefully, better inflation & deflation protection.

Again, just some thoughts.

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 3:40 pm
by Cortopassi
Barrett, well said.

Budd, I’m with stuper, I’d like to hear your story. Sounds like quite a ride.

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 5:47 pm
by Dieter
Cortopassi wrote:
Fri Jun 15, 2018 3:40 pm
Barrett, well said
+1

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2018 6:58 am
by dualstow
I found the wiki page with all the backstory you need. Just took a bit of googling.

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2018 7:56 am
by buddtholomew
dualstow wrote:
Sat Jun 16, 2018 6:58 am
I found the wiki page with all the backstory you need. Just took a bit of googling.
Haha, nice DS!
Nohing magical...
UCLA, AEC, Biotech, eCommerce industries as a Director of Business Intelligence/Big Data
Married a Dr.
Inheritance
Save 20-25% annually.
Invested in 2008/2009 and biotech was bought out in 2011.
Lucky and hard work!

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2018 8:06 am
by ochotona
barrett wrote:
Fri Jun 15, 2018 3:17 pm
One could even argue that at 7.5% you are at the very low end in terms of holding a slice of an asset that can really drive your portfolio forward when it is time for that asset to perform. Maybe ask yourself what the impact to your portfolio would be if gold were to, say, quadruple in price over a five or ten year period while stocks were struggling to keep up in real terms.
I wonder if Budd's gold slice is too big for a $14 M portfolio. It all depends on what is his "amount that he can't afford to lose". If he's trying to keep 7.5% and it makes him miserable, that means his implicit PP allocation is 30%, or $4.2 M. It seems high to me, if I had $14 M I think I'd consider my "can't afford to lose = PP allocation" to be $2 M. Maybe Budd has just too much gold. Maybe he should be at 4%.

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2018 8:21 am
by Libertarian666
ochotona wrote:
Sat Jun 16, 2018 8:06 am
barrett wrote:
Fri Jun 15, 2018 3:17 pm
One could even argue that at 7.5% you are at the very low end in terms of holding a slice of an asset that can really drive your portfolio forward when it is time for that asset to perform. Maybe ask yourself what the impact to your portfolio would be if gold were to, say, quadruple in price over a five or ten year period while stocks were struggling to keep up in real terms.
I wonder if Budd's gold slice is too big for a $14 M portfolio. It all depends on what is his "amount that he can't afford to lose". If he's trying to keep 7.5% and it makes him miserable, that means his implicit PP allocation is 30%, or $4.2 M. It seems high to me, if I had $14 M I think I'd consider my "can't afford to lose = PP allocation" to be $2 M. Maybe Budd has just too much gold. Maybe he should be at 4%.
I don't think it is gold that he has too much of.

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2018 9:50 am
by dualstow
buddtholomew wrote:
Sat Jun 16, 2018 7:56 am

Nohing magical...
UCLA, AEC, Biotech, eCommerce industries as a Director of Business Intelligence/Big Data
Married a Dr.
Inheritance
Save 20-25% annually.
Invested in 2008/2009 and biotech was bought out in 2011.
Lucky and hard work!
Very interesting! I've always been curious, too.

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2018 10:05 am
by buddtholomew
dualstow wrote:
Sat Jun 16, 2018 9:50 am
buddtholomew wrote:
Sat Jun 16, 2018 7:56 am

Nohing magical...
UCLA, AEC, Biotech, eCommerce industries as a Director of Business Intelligence/Big Data
Married a Dr.
Inheritance
Save 20-25% annually.
Invested in 2008/2009 and biotech was bought out in 2011.
Lucky and hard work!
Very interesting! I've always been curious, too.
I’ve always followed the book career wise and saved as much as possible at the expense of spending frivolously.

Continue to battle emotional demons (fear of loss is the major one) as I had it all, then lost it when we immigrated and now have built a future for my family once more. They would be fine without me as both my wife and I come from a good background with both sides (father and father in law) Fortune 500 CFO’s.

Like I said nothing really magical, just well rounded, a good saver and most importantly lucky to be employed since 1996 without any disruptions.

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2018 4:50 pm
by stuper1
Thanks, Budd, for telling us more about yourself. What country did you emigrate from? How old were you?

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2018 5:33 pm
by buddtholomew
Hey Stuper1, emigrated from South Africa at the age of 12 and landed in the San Fernando valley (Southern California). There’s really no secret to my success other than fear of failure and loss. These traits are very powerful but carry a lot of baggage. :(

Anyway, thanks for your interest and I hope I haven’t been too much of a bother. There’s no one else for me to vent to other than on this board but I do need to take a deep breath and count my blessings. Thanks for making me realize that.

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2018 8:04 pm
by Xan
Budd, congratulations. $14M is an amazing achievement.

If I were you, I'd look at things like this: consider that you have $7M, an amount that just about anyone could live off of forever without worrying about. I'm quite confident that a $14M PP would never dip down to $7M (not in real terms, anyway). Then look at the amount above $7M as a bonus.

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2018 9:00 pm
by dualstow
Wow, I was way off. I was thinking Greece, because all the Greeks I know can write native-like English, + you know, the Greek physique.

Do you have more of a British accent or Afrikaans like the guy in District 9? (I need to hear the proper accent in my head when I read future posts).

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2018 2:32 am
by Kriegsspiel
budd is from the land of the Krugerrand and doesn't like gold.

:-\

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2018 4:14 am
by dualstow
O0

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2018 8:54 am
by buddtholomew
Kriegsspiel wrote:
Sun Jun 17, 2018 2:32 am
budd is from the land of the Krugerrand and doesn't like gold.

:-\
Diamonds >:D

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2018 8:59 am
by buddtholomew
dualstow wrote:
Sat Jun 16, 2018 9:00 pm
Wow, I was way off. I was thinking Greece, because all the Greeks I know can write native-like English, + you know, the Greek physique.

Do you have more of a British accent or Afrikaans like the guy in District 9? (I need to hear the proper accent in my head when I read future posts).
I can still fake a South African accent but when a child comes to a new country the last thing they want to do is look like a foreigner. I assimilated very quickly and now you would never tell the difference linguistically between me and my children (although I say tomato sauce for ketchup) haha.

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Tue Jun 19, 2018 8:49 am
by Cortopassi
I don't want to hear it Budd, how gold is not carrying its weight today. We all are hating gold right now. Even the gold bug sites I peruse are hating gold and sick of it, and rarely talking about backing up the truck, gold is on sale BS like normally. Traffic, by number of responses to posts, is also way down.

I would think that signifies a major bottom here.

But what do I know? :o

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Tue Jun 19, 2018 10:48 am
by buddtholomew
Hey, come on, look on the bright side it’s down less than equities across the board. I was going to post and then decided not to as I’m sick of hearing it in my own head as well. Portfolio is doing fine today so far.

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Tue Jun 19, 2018 10:52 am
by dualstow
I ditched the SGOL in my IRA yesterday. Leave it to me to wait until it sinks down to breakeven. ($50 profit).
It was not NOT part of my pp gold. That gold I have left alone.

Re: The GOLD scream room

Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2018 2:26 pm
by ochotona
I wonder if $1150 is a possibility? It would hurt, but also help. I think the gold play is a very long-term thing, years long. Gold will shine when we run into really severe budget problems and can't honor our debts, and the can can't be kicked forward any longer.