Mayhaps should be in the VP forum, but another 1 year check-in on a PP-ish journey.
Background: 70/30 stock/bond slice & diced "Ultimate Buy & Hold" ish portfolio at the time of the market crash (moved from 80/20 a month before the market high -- lucky....)
Still lost ~42% by the S&P low in March 09.
Stayed the course and got back to where I started in late 2011 or early 2012, so I went to 60/40 and started looking if there were other options (I thought that stocks might be overvalued....)
Read up on the Permanent Portfolio, and liked a lot of it, but was concerned that Stocks/Gold/Bonds were all overvalued, and was concerned about negative tracking error having 25% in stocks.
So, in mid-August 2012 I changed the target allocation for ~50% of my retirement portfolio to replace Intermediate Treasuries with long, reduce stocks to ~40% of the portfolio, and get into Gold ("PPish-ize".) Resulting (with a few tweaks) in my current target allocation:
Stock: 42% (18% LCB, 8% SCV, 8% "IV", 8% ISC)
Bond: 20% (14% Vanguard LTT, 6% EDV)
Gold: 13% (well, 10% Gold - IAU, 3% Silver - SIVR)
Cash: 25% (15% ST Bond, 10% VG Prime Money Market)
Results so far:
* Markets agreed that LTT / Gold were overpriced (ouch)
* Market thought stocks weren't overpriced
* Decided I don't really like ETF, so using Mutual Funds as much as possible
Overall, I'm up 3% from mid-August 2012 to Mid-Sept 2013
+.3% for 2013 (that point 3, not 3)
I didn't go in all at once, and tweaked a little here and there, so it's NOT the performance of the above allocation.
(I also put a small, deep emergency-ish fund to PERM around the same time: -4% since Aug 2012.)
I realize that I don't get the PP "Guarantee" (more volatility), but less tracking error vs the stock market: I expect to do better during prosperity than a pure PP, while less bad than a typical Bogglehead portfolio in the next correction (albeit worse than a pure PP.)
My PPish journey after a year....
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