Re: Any upside to TLT at this point?
Posted: Thu Dec 22, 2011 3:33 pm
Quoted above because nobody was giving Tex any love on his well thought out post.MediumTex wrote:You guys...doodle wrote: Amp,
I did exactly what you are doing when rates hit about 3.8 on the 30 year, down from about 4.5% where I bought in at. I moved everything into a five year ladder. It has been a tough number of months for me as I have watched rates continue to plummet. I haven't jumped back into LT bonds yet but I was tempted a few times when yields got back into the mid 3's a few months ago.
I look at it the same way as you. I am trying to avoid a big principal loss if rates rise. For the meantime, my 50% of assets in a five year ladder is yielding a little under a percentage point less than a 30 year / Tbill split. which spread over the whole portfolio means that my cash flow from the portfolio has been reduced by about .5%.......which is acceptable to me.
Time will tell how this strategy turns out.
My greatest fear with the portfolio is that two of the assets...gld and LT bonds have been going up for many years. In addition when interest rates begin to rise I would expect both of these assets to come crashing down.
You're making things harder than they need to be.
Just buy the package and remove a huge burden from your mind. It's hard to do, though. I know that.
This business of endlessly trying to outguess the markets almost never ends well. The PP is intended as a remedy to that, not a new opportunity to do it in a different way.
I don't buy the PP because I think rates are going to continue falling, or gold is going to continue rising, or any other asset-specific reason. I buy it because it works as a package. If you aren't willing to accept the basic premise that it is a package and only really works as a package, you can easily drive yourself crazy trying to apply old habits to a new allocation method that really can't be improved upon through speculative tweaking within each asset class.
It's not that I care that people choose to step outside the PP lines. What sort of bugs me is that people seem to consistently step outside the lines and then report back that the tweaking didn't work out very well, but then they start talking about their new tweaking plan, as if it is going to work out better than the last one. I just don't understand the logic that goes into that kind of decision making. It's like Wall Street has put some people under a spell that causes them to make bad investment decisions that they perceive to be good decisions when they are making them. As much as the PP is designed to break this spell, if you don't follow the strategy you can't enjoy the freedom and peace of mind that it offers.
People worry about gold or LT bonds crashing. And I guess I just don't care that much. For one, it is not likely to happen at the same time as each asset is being bought by people to alleviate their own specific fears and those fears are not the same (some think deflation is the bogey man, others think inflation is going to be it). But even if both these camps decided tomorrow to sell like mad, where are they going to put all that money? I guess they could keep it in cash, but with rates at 0% that is unlikely. So will it be stocks? Probably. If that is the case then it is likely that the Permanent Portfolio will be fine as stock prices escalate.
Sure it could have a choppy year, but compared to other portfolios I see out there I think it will still come out looking pretty good.