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For what it is worth, GMO (05/31/2013) is predicting +6.2% REAL equity returns for emerging market equities over the next 7 years, the highest return of any asset class that they consider. They base their projections on the Gordon Equation and a return to historical average valuations for the asset ...

Probably a bearish slant on the markets with some arguments against "Buy & Hold". http://www.hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc130610.htm just a note – On Tuesday, June 11, I’ll (John Hussman) be joining John Mauldin, Kyle Bass, Mohamed El-Erian, Barry Rithholz and David Rosenberg in a free onli...

See Tobias's column today about AT&T charges on a 4-day trip to Barcelona http://andrewtobias.com/column/solar-power/ Yet I feel sure AT&T is working to find a way to charge us for it anyway. (Don’t get me started.) (Okay, okay, they wanted $494 for four days during which I made no calls and...

One of the biggest problems we are facing now, and certainly in the future, is dementia and Alzheimer disease. It is estimated that by the time we reach our mid-80s, 15% of Americans will have that diagnosis, and the cost is well over $5 billion and likely to rise. Everything that has been tried to...

Unfortunately, there is a limit to all good things. Note that the study just covers people 40 years and older. Compared to overall averages, life extension plateaus at ~4.5 years versus exercising volume. Your best marginal return of 800% comes in the first 15 METs (metabolic equivalents) per week. ...

http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2013/03/minutes-exercise-longer-life The relation holds up to 15 METs per week (see supplementary Fig S1 in referenced paper). Running for an hour gives you 9 hours of extra life. Brisk walking for an hour gives you 2.9/8 X 9 = 3.2 hours of extra life. Biking for an hou...

The question of buying a diamond comes up periodically on the Bogleheads. This is a good overall truthful article on the subject. Retail jewelers, especially the prestigious Fifth Avenue stores, prefer not to buy back diamonds from customers, because the offer they would make would most likely be co...

Thank you for posting this.

It is now on Charlie Rose site: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12812

Gordon, Congratulations; take a break and enjoy the view. Your next numeric goal is 115 and I hope that you make that too. Best regards, Tom

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Breuning

My son owns a computer business and they only buy Mac Minis now. He told me that the new iMacs are glued together and you can not get into them anymore to replace things like bad hard drives. The advantage of a Mini is that you can still open them and easily replace a defective hard drive or even up...

Another factor to consider in the real world is the difference in AFTER-TAX returns between Berkshire and the S&P500. Since Berkshire has a policy of no dividends (see page 19 of this year's annual report for a re-explanation and illustration), it's after-tax returns exceed the S&P500 even i...

If you have more than ~$300 (single) or $600 (filing jointly) in foreign income, you can save yourself a lot of trouble on your taxes if you have your foreign stocks in a tax-advantaged account. You are supposed to file a separate Form 1116 for each country that you received foreign income from, onc...

I had the same worries that you did about K-1s and Passive activity with regards to Turbotax. The free version works just as well as the Premier one. In fact, I find the free one is more transparent and actually easier to work with because the Premier version overlays a lot of layers purportedly to ...

I have an Aprilaire with an outside thermometer and it works well. Once a year or so, the temperature will drop rapidly outside and we will get moisture on the windows because the humidity could not drop as fast. Otherwise, there is no condensation. I only turn it on for January and February in Upst...

I have been using the free Sophos antivirus software and have not had any problems so far. Also I use the free extension WOT to prescreen web sites when doing a search. Red, Green and Neutral Lights appear next to each website when you do a search. The classification is based on other people's exper...

Nice clear article; I have always liked the way former University of Chicago professor, Cliff Asness, thinks and writes. Thanks for posting.

I too have poured gasoline down their nest hole around dusk and then threw a brick over it. It eradicated them every time. However, once I had a big nest under a pile of logs and was notified by our town building inspector to move the pile because it was in a potential flood abatement area. So I cou...

MathWizard, What kind of leaves do you have in your gutter? Vacuuming gutters may not work with large leaves, e.g. maples, oaks, etc. if this video on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTr06vcmPtU is accurate. The person has a 6.5HP shop vacuum and 2.5" diameter GutterClutterBuster tubes l...

This site shows a shopvac and an extension that they sell taking leaves out of a very high second story gutter. They recommend a 6.5HP shopvac to use with their pipes. https://www.gutterclutterbuster.com/product.php Our brand new Extensions are 4 1/2' long. With the Gutter Clutter Buster® kit, a 6' ...

Someone might not know that Andy Tobias also runs a website that is updated daily and which usually contains some of his current stock speculations. He seems to be a closet speculator rather than a closet indexer. He seems to be well connected in NYC to the hedge fund crowd. http://andrewtobias.com/...

My mother is 97 and still living in her own house near St Petersburg Florida. She is healthy but she has become frail and lost her confidence so she feels that she needs someone there 24 hours a day. An agency (Bayshore) provides unskilled caretakers/companions at a cost of $11,000 per month or $132...

Too low interest rates provide no incentive to loan; double digit portfolio returns were an artifact of the age of credit expansion; inflation ahead. http://www.pimco.com/EN/Insights/Pages/The-Lending-Lindy.aspx When yields are too low, and acceptable risk spreads so narrow that top line interest re...

Does the color of the new printing on the Vanguard site bother anyone else? I feel like I'm reading an ancient deteriorating palimpsest. I have never seen that the new orange-brown print color on any commercial website before, probably for a good reason. http://i46.tinypic.com/2cor149.png

We developed a problem with our drains getting blocked with some type of black gooey gunk. Mechanical means only temporarily cleared the problem. Long sections of the pipe would get blocked with this goo that started on the pipe walls and grew inward. It kept coming back. Sinks would back up and ove...

http://www.pimco.com/EN/Insights/Pages/Secular-Outlook-Implications-for-Investors-2012.aspx Will our Boglehead ideas on beta-driven indexing and diversification across asset classes work in a new world with bimodal rather than normal distributions of returns? PIMCO does not think so. At a minimum, ...

http://men.webmd.com/news/20040114/hard-water-protect-against-heart-attacks Hard Water Helps Hearts For years, researchers have been puzzled by seemingly unexplainable differences in the frequency of heart disease across Finland. For example, heart disease rates have been 40% higher in the eastern ...

Zoe Harcombe claims the the conclusion, “physical inactivity seems to have an effect similar to that of smoking.”, in Lancet is "not credible". http://www.zoeharcombe.com/2012/07/inactivity-killing-as-many-as-smoking-really/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed "I...

I have a pressure-treated pine wood deck facing south with a white house wall behind it so the deck gets a lot of sun exposure. When the 20X12' deck got to be about 25 years old, the wood surface had deteriorated and was cracking and splintering. So I decided to replace it and ran into two problems....

In the May 2012 Consumer Reports, there is a review of the repair records of AC and heat pumps from a survey of 40,000 readers. You can read it at your local library or buy a subscription. There was a big difference between AC installations done by new home builders with a 19% failure rate compared ...

To add to Victoria's choices, another amusing way to look at this research is ask the same question that we do about our investments. Where is the optimum point on the Efficient Frontier for a portfolio consisting of mixtures of standing and sitting? If there is no risk to standing and a reported ri...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303343404577516853567934264.html?grcc=6c417d49e2650df647768819ed0bfef6Z3ZhpgeZ0Z6Z61Z3Z2&mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_health The meta-analysis comes just two years after Australian researchers found that people who said they watched TV for more than four ho...

http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/4/e000828.full Sitting more than 3 hours a day increases total mortality by 45% or equivalently reduces your life span by 2 years. Almost as dangerous as smoking. Sitters are sure to experience cognitive dissonance :happy . Is it true? Who knows for certain but as t...

The principal risk with long-term products from Genworth will be Genworth's financial survival. GE Capital packaged all of its questionable insurance subsidiaries into GNW and sold it to the public in 2004 at ~$20 share after failing to sell them privately to other insurance/financial companies. Sha...

After two years of standing on my wobble board at my computer, I'm still around at 71. So maybe the cardiovascular benefit is true? Over the longer term, the main observable effects are that your posture, both standing and when you do sit, e.g. in a car, noticeably improves. And any twinges suggesti...

Does anyone know how to protect one' s assets from these filial liability laws? It appears that we may have unlimited liability for medical and nursing home care for both parents AND adult children. The PA case resulted from an auto accident, not aging. Where are your parents or your kids located? I...

DeBeer's annual diamond sales are ~ $5+ billion. So sales over the 1994 to 2006 period total about $60 billion. The settlement is for $295 million

On average, you'll get back 295/60,000 = 0.5%. So if you bought a diamond for $1,000, expect to get $5 if you bothered to file a claim in 2008.

Tetractys, You're right. There apparently is a Risk IQ filter on who lurks around the Vanguard site. The poll shows us doing much better than the 38,000 other people that took this test. Or does it show some other psychological behavior , e.g. a reluctance to post a bad score? :happy ("High&quo...

How can it matter whether you "evaluate your opportunity every time?" if it's a negative-sum game you are going to lose money anyway. I think that the author was talking about horse-race betting and poker (have not read his book); although the former is a hugely negative sum game (-20% in...

Nisiprius, Thanks for the suggestion; I inserted a poll at the top. Stone

Note: this has nothing to do with conventional IQ. Risk Intelligence: How Gamblers, Weather Forecasters, Doctors, Investors, etc. Assess Probabilities. - Slate Magazine http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2012/05/risk_intelligence_how_gamblers_and_weather_forecasters_asses...

There is an interesting fat-tail figure (Fig 5) in this Pimco Paper on how large a portfolio loss that you can afford to lose versus your chronological age (only a ~12% loss at 65). What should occur once in 300,000 years according to a normal distribution of stock market returns actually occurs alm...

I've used my original Flowbee for 15 years after I got tired bothering my wife and waiting sometimes days for her to give me a haircut. It only took a few times to perfect the technique so that the haircut looked good. Now I can do it in 10 minutes from opening up its box to putting it away. We have...

Since derivatives, e.g. SWAPs in this case, are a zero sum game, stating the obvious, JP Morgan's LOSS of $2 billion is someone else's GAIN of $2 billion. So we should be seeing some extraordinary gains in the near future from either other banks or from hedge funds. Therefore financial stocks minus ...

https://www.creditkarma.com/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505145_162-57419809/a-better-free-credit-score-service/?tag=nl.e713 " It's been my observation that those "free offers" to obtain your credit score often end up being anything but free. In fact, one such offer took me weeks to ...

Just in case someone might not know about it, Sophos, one of the major PC anti-virus makers, has a anti-virus version for the Mac which is free. It updates in the background and you are completely unaware of it unlike some bothersome PC protectors. A possible advantage of using an established PC ant...

Its reputation was built on stellar returns achieved with long-term bets on undervalued asset classes. Current market conditions, however, pose two unanswerable questions for Grantham, Mayo, van Otterloo (GMO) – leaving the firm with an uncertain strategy for its equities and fixed- income allocati...

Bogle seems to be backtracking to his much earlier view of foreign investments. My memory may be faulty but I recall that he saw no need for foreign stocks or bonds a decade or so ago. Then, in more recent years, he allowed that foreign stocks would be good diversifiers up to some point, say ~20%. h...

I have been using it for my taxable IRA distributions. You select the withholding rate that you want. You can do everything on the website after you have signed in. Withholding on my taxable IRA distributions did not apply to my other taxable accounts. I have never tried withholding for my regular t...

In addition to trying to time the market, Hussman also selects the stocks in his portfolio. These stocks (purple line) have handily outperformed the S&P500 and the Russell 2000. Maybe he should just let market timing alone :D ? http://www.hussmanfunds.com/pdf/hsgperf.pdf http://i42.tinypic.com/2...

I had a similar problem with Safari with PDFs on Vanguard for years and did the usual messy workaround with Adobe plugins. Each year, I would have to search my memory to try to remember what I did the year before. The easiest way to avoid problems on a Mac with the Vanguard site is just to download ...