Bogleheads.org

Series I savings bonds, paper-format, almost as much as the law allows.

I haven't hit my rebalancing bands since October 2011, though I've gotten close a few times, so -- no, I'm not rebalancing now.

Leonard -- If you limit yourself to just one of Baker or Greene, I'd say get Greene. I got Baker's books in the early '70s, when they were all there was on jazz guitar. Baker is pretty strict with drills and reguar practice, which are good for you. What theory you get from Baker comes largely from h...

If you're secure with changing chords without stopping, playing while singing, reading music a bit -- these books will stretch you some: Mickey Baker's Jazz Guitar Lesson 1 is fingerings for fifty weird altered chords that you can move up and down the neck. Then, chord progressions. Then, arpeggios ...

Bonds. I-Bonds. You want to invest $30k in a 70/30 allocation. 30% of $30k is $9k, which is below the $10k annual purchase limit for Series I savings bonds. They're perfectly good bonds. They're secured by the full faith & credit of your rich uncle. Interest is better than TIPS and guaranteed to...

Swensen's Unconventional Success allocation: 30% Total US Stock, 15% Total Int'l Stock, 5% Emerging Market Stock, 20% US REIT, 10% Short Treasuries, 5% Long Treasuries, 15% TIPS. I'm 60. I have ~ 8 years' pay in the nest egg. I'm almost persuaded to go Bodie (TIPS ladder, delayed Social Security, in...

I had about six month's survival money in savings accounts, and was shifting it into Series I bonds. Then one day I turned 59-1/2, and my entire nest egg was accessible for emergencies.

I set up a pure Swensen allocation in 2007. That puts 15% of my nest egg in TIPS and 15% in nominal Treasury bonds. I'm not convinced it's best, but unless I see evidence that it's not, I'll stick with it. (I stuck through 2008-9, rebalancing into REITs and then stocks, and it was pretty scary, but ...

Hippie music and power pop, from one-hit wonders that did rather more of merit than that one hit. It's a Beautiful Day [White Bird, live, 1971] (long violin jam) The Incredible String Band [A Very Cellular Song (13 min) 1969?] (two guys who wrote trippy lyrics, played 43 different obscure instrument...

At 15, I was angry when the token science-fiction story in the English Lit anthology was not Heinlein, Sturgeon, or Clarke, but Bradbury's The Golden Apples of the Sun . A spaceship flies by the Sun to dip a ladle into it to find out what it's made of, and the Captain has to fix the air conditioner,...

Please tell him he has lots of Boglehead fans, and ask if he'd come to Bogleheads 12 in 2013? (I realize he's pretty busy, but it's not far away...)

Could we get him to come to Bogleheads 11? Or 12? He has lots of fans who'd love to met him.

An oscilloscope, arb generator, and power supply of my very own. (Next year, maybe...)

Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street , 2007 edition, pp. 253-255, lists dividend stocks as a near-miss attempt at outguessing the market. He refers to studies by Fama & French, and by Campbell & Schiller, saying that when you purchase stocks during high-dividend periods, they return high...

1994 Miata, bought in 2001 w/ 12k miles, now 141k.

Not cover-to-cover, but the parts that apply to me (or my Dad).

Prof1 -- No, the Bogleheads do not recommend any specific stocks or sectors. We think you should buy them all, in proportion to their weight in the market. That's what an index fund lets you do with a single purchase. This is because there are thousands of smart people in the market, buying and sell...

If y = f(x) is a smooth function of x, then at the maximum value of y ( ymax = f(xmax) ), the slope of f(x) will be zero. That means, you can change x (your allocation) quite a bit from xmax. and y (your risk or return) will stay pretty close to ymax. Besides, xmax and ymax are known impreciseley, a...

I e-filed using TurboTax on 29 Feb., and got a sheaf of Series I bonds on 16 Mar. (Prevously I've bought only Einsteins. This refund included Einsteins, Marshalls, Josephs, and a whole bunch of Kellers.) I didn't use TFB's procedure involving pre-payment with Form 4868. I just had a big refund comin...

This looks kinda like Options for Smarties: Mathematics for Finance: An Introduction to Financial Engineering 2/e , Marek Capinski & Tomasz Zastawniak, Springer 2010 I've had it in my to-read-someday pile for a while. Looks like it goes bangety-bang through the mathematics (less than 300 pages, ...

The Russell 3000 index is the 3000 largest-capitalization US stocks, covering 98% of the US market. Vanguard Total Stock Market tracks the Morgan Stanley Capital Int'l (MSCI) US Broad Market index . This combines the MSCI 2500 index with the MSCI MicroCap index, covering 99.5% of the US market. The ...

Here's the 2008 Barron's article Are You Rich? . It doesn't even consider $10M of investible assets as rich; that gives you a good working-class income (surgeon or senior law partner) without all the hours at the workshop. Beer & pretzels rich is $25-50M; wine & cheese rich is $50-500M; cham...

First, they came for the "shame" icon, and I did not speak out -- for I have no shame. Then, they came for the :sharebeer icon, and I did not speak out -- because I am indishputably sober. Then, they came for the :confused icon, and I did not speak out -- because I know it all. Then, they ...

SSSS wrote" I'm always surprised when encountering people who don't inherently understand the difference between "y'all", "all y'all", "y'all all", and "y'alls". They are very different concepts. The English language needs a good, distinct, monosyllabic s...

I'll be there. My first was #10. I had good conversations with Wm. Bernstein, Alan Roth, Mike Piper, Rick Ferri, Lauren Vignec, Alex Frakt, grabiner, bobcat2, VictoriaF, and others who've slipped my mind. It was pleasant to put faces to names. I sat at Mr. Bogle's table once, but I couldn't slip a w...

Bobcat2 -- I can't be entirely an autodidact, because you've taught me a lot (for which I thank you). (I was half-expecting you to take umbrage at the appellations of heretic / reformer.) Anyway, def. 2 of acolyte is "a devoted follower", and I think it fits. You have labored seriously to ...

I haven't read The Ivy Portfolio , but I took David Swensen's Unconventional Success to heart. Swensen said (paraphrasing) that he wanted to tell small investors how to invest like he invests the Yale endowment. He quickly realized that he couldn't, because we can't. Our chump change will not motiva...

McCharley --
What is it that you dislike about the funds' holdings? Is it the financials (PE > 90), or the nature of the business (not socially responsible, eco-unfriendly, etc), or something else?

General Chemistry by Linus Pauling, Dover paperback edition. I know how it turns out, but I never get tired of the story.

You are off to a good start. Your allocation is an orthodox Boglehead allocation. There's nothing wrong with it. It is more important that you have the Roth early and feed it, than whether it has REITs or TIPS or Small Cap Value Frontier Markets. You are not putting too much into bonds. Have you wri...

This sounds like a kind of false syllogism that salesmen use. Posit a counterfactual premise: "If you accept the Fama-French 3-factor model" and draw an actionable conclusion: "Go full-tilt into small & value stocks." The premise makes a subtle implication: the Fama-French mo...

To lose money on a bond, you have to sell it, after interest rates rise, and before the bond matures. If you hold a bond to maturity, you get your principal back. If you buy a bond fund with a shorter duration than your investment horizon, you [probably] won't lose [much] money. The venerable nisipr...

At that age (50 years ago) I liked logic and geometry, but not calculation. Three things got to me: 1) A little book called Math Without Numbers , by Edgar S. Bley (c) 1961. It's still available used. The first half is plane geometry, starting with construction (so the student gets to do something) ...

I got my engineering bachelor's in 1976, and went right to work. I was eager to be independent of my parents -- "Thanks for everything, you've been great, but I've got it now." I never considered staying in another year for a Master's. I didn't want my Dad taking on more debt for me, when ...

Robert Townsend, the CEO of Avis in the 1960s ("We're #2 -- we try harder.") wrote a book called Up the Organization . Under the a topic Underpaid : Resign. Go to the personnel department. Fill in the forms. Apply for your old position. Under "Salary Objective" put down what you ...

When you own index funds, someone brags about his stock picks, and you nod and say "Yeah, I've got some of that..."

I was, and am, using the David Swensen default allocation: 30% US stock, 20% real estate, 15% developed international stock , 5% emerging international stock, 15% intermedidate Treasuries, 15% TIPS. The real estate got hammered first, then the stock market. I had an investment policy statement. I ma...

I had to look up "Res Nullius". It's a legal term meaning "property of no one" or "belonging to nobody". I imagined blue-painted William Wallace, boasting "They'll never take our freedom!", and raised an imaginary Claymore in salute. I hope that's the spirit i...

fishnskiguy -- Oh yeah, Mom knew. When I was three, she'd take me to meet Dad after work at the university library, and he'd come out and I'd run to him -- and right past him -- to the cutaway turboprop engine in the display case, and I'd push the button to make the blades spin. (Of course, living i...

I knew at age 4 that I wanted to be an engineer. I just didn't know that that was what it was called.

Some people choose to compete for high-status or high-wealth jobs, where level-of-effort sorts the winners from the losers. However talented or smart you are, someone with comparable gifts can out-work you and takes the prize. Doctors go through internship and residency. Wall Street traders mock peo...

Maybe it's not the money. Maybe you need a bigger town, with a bigger market, to offer a greater variety of opportunities. I've got to read this someday: Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser. He finds that, for...

I'm now doing a Swensen (30% total US stock, 15% developed foreign stock, 10% emerging foreign stock, 15% US REIT, 15% nominal Treasuries, 15% TIPS). With > $100M, Maybe I'd do a Taleb: 74% inflation-linked bonds of several nations (safe income), 8% venture capital (pays in a boom), 8% deep out-of-t...

Another movie taken from Philip K. Dick is The Adjustment Bureau, based on his 1954 story The Adjustment Team, transforming a mindbender story into a romance drama flick.

RBD is a Really Bad Day. Livesoft has a criterion for buying the dips, explicitly stated at the 40th post on this thread: Buy on the Dips ? For this discussion, I will define precisely a "really bad day" in an ETF as a drop of at least 2.5% AND greater than the 4th biggest drop in the ETF ...

rob said:

Predictions by a people that didn't realise the threat the Spanish might pose are sort of in the same camp as market predictors to me.

Nobody expects the Spanish imposition!

To select your best 401(k) options, we need to know your options. Seventy-some investment options is a lot. To save typing, screen some of them out by expense ratio, fund type, and maybe the gee-whizzery of the fund name. Bogleheads aren't going to recommend funds with expense ratios over 1%, or sec...

SP-diceman: The Typewriter was composed by Leroy Anderson. He also wrote The Syncopated Clock, which I think is used for the Final Jeopardy thinking music.

I favor the Baroque trio of Bach, Handel, & Scarlatti, all born in 1685.

Welcome! To get the high-grade advice, you'll be asked to list the investments available in your 401(k), according to: Asking Portfolio Questions Then, senior Bogleheads will recommend optimum portfolios from what's available to you. But, to get started: 1) It would be simplest to pick the 80% stock...

Started on trumpet in 4th grade. Switched to French horn in high school. Marching band, symphonic band, 1st chair in senior year. Got a no-name electric bass, used Telecaster electric guitar, and Sears Silvertone Twin Twelve amp in high school. Tried to keep up horn playing in college. Couldn't hand...