Simultaneous purchases and rebalancing

[Mark Leavy]

Honestly, I just do my calcs. Decide what I have to move and then wait until noonish Eastern time to make my trades.
Anytime between 11:30 and 1:30 Eastern time. Make your trade and move on.

[pp4me]

I don't do enough trades to even give it that much thought.

Ditto rebalancing. In the early days I might have rebalanced at the end of the year to get things back to precise allocations but nowadays I just let things ride unless they get way out of whack - and then I just do enough to un-whack them. You can call it lazy or a good strategy. Maybe a bit of both.

Also don't remember the last time I had a loss in a taxable account to harvest. It's all VTI and cash now.

[flyingpylon]

It sounds like you're really micro-managing things. I don't think the point of the PP or PP-like portfolios is to worry about things like intra-day price movement.

In the past I have taken up to several days to complete a rebalance. And now it's more of an ongoing series of partial rebalances. It's not supposed to be stressful, it all works out in the end.

[Mark Leavy]

I think I understand where you are coming from.

That's one of the reasons that I do my rebalances around noonish Eastern. It seems like the price movements are more stable then.

Also, I've been holding my nose and doing market orders on products that are extremely liquid (like futures). I found that its easier for me to accept whatever slippage or shenanigans might happen (to get an instant fill) than it is to sit there and wait while a limit order goes unfilled.

And obviously, it helps to have all of your trades carefully written out ahead of time, so you can just punch them in and be done with it.

Since I've been using futures for my implementation (thanks!) I've been 'rebalancing' every three months during the roll.

I figure out how much cash I want to pull out to top off my living expenses and then what my new futures positions will be and make the roll.

And of course, thank you for the advice earlier on making the roll when the volume of the expiring contract starts to match the volume of the new contract. That was a great tip and helped me feel confident that I wasn't throwing away any more money on the spread than I had to.

[Mark Leavy]

Hey I hope you are using spreadtrader for the rolls.

It looks like I will be in September...
Thanks

[Kbg]

So first, my very long term brokerage has been IB. However, if you want to do a PP and aren’t “in to” investing a brilliant approach is to go with M1. It’s easy and it will invest incrementally in a very intelligent way.

[Vil]

If PP is not futures based - Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, at lunch time. First days of any month are normally more volatile... Or you can use early stages of any volatility contraction periods to enter... Who knows... I am always using limit orders, always- I can certainly wait and not becoming a victim of funds doing massive buying/selling... For me its like - you feel it once - you know it for life... I recall it pretty vividly since my former non-PP days with Post Italiane And funds do keep their calendars nicely varying .. But I really do not understand you guys having concerns with such liquid and stable markets as the US ones...