Gyroscopic Investing

I know a lot of PP folks hang out here, so I'd like to get their insight/views on why Permanent Portfolio is getting hit so badly this year and when they think the tide will turn.

I was looking at starting a PP investment early this year, but I decided against it to focus on deleveraging and avoiding the bear market we're now experiencing (and that I expected we'd see much earlier this year). I'm glad I waited, but now I'm thinking of getting in.

From here...
http://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com ... hp?id=2440

"Big losses" is a bit misleading, but it's true that things have been flat for a while.

I can't speak for anyone else, but when you have markets as volatile as they have been lately, flat works for me.

The ERE discussion is 5-10 months old.  The post you quote started the discussion last summer.  Doesn't appear anyone on that link is discussing the PP currently.

Ariadne22 wrote: The ERE discussion is 5-10 months old.  The post you quote started the discussion last summer.  Doesn't appear anyone on that link is discussing the PP currently.

Oh wow. Good catch. It showed up in my PP alerts that I get emailed daily. I did not even look at the date. The subject seemed perfectly reasonable given the recent collapse in gold.

Ad Orientem wrote: I can't speak for anyone else, but when you have markets as volatile as they have been lately, flat works for me.

Absolutely.

That's the whole point of the PP.  I don't have to sit around trying figure out if the stock market has topped or if I should be panic selling my gold. 

I don't mind if it has a slow year from time to time.

There's a second page to the ERE thread that picked the discussion back up on Monday. The PP is pretty popular over there, so the talk is pretty normal.

And I agree - when the markets are schizophrenic, flat is perfectly fine to me. 

What's funny is that despite all the nervousness in that 2012 thread, the PP wound up performing just fine in the end on a calendar year basis: etfreplay.com says 6.6%, which is about 4.6% real, which is about normal.

So far the 2013 PP is down about 1.7% this year but if you really think about it, that's nothing. Stocks were down almost that much today alone. And we still have 8.5 months to make it up to have a positive calendar year!

I think people are looking at individual assets in isolation when they speak of "big losses."

This seems like a great opportunity to begin a pp for the first time.
And, of course, it seems like a time when virtually no one will be interested in starting a pp.
(shrug) Their loss.