Bogleheads.org

If you could ask Warren Buffett one question, what would it be :?: I would ask him to elaborate (or point towards sources of information) regarding his thought process when it comes to selling public securities. There are dozens and dozens of books regarding his thought process with regard to buyin...

but my impression is he only really sells stocks -- and does so rarely -- when he "needs" the capital, i.e. it can be deployed better elsewhere (another security or some business need). That much I already knew :) What I want would be pointers towards way way more in-depth description of ...

While not really a Boglehead'ish topic, I don't quite know of a better place to ask since this forum is so full of knowledgable people. There's an absolutely crazy amount of books, articles, etc describing Buffett's thought process when it comes to buying securities. However, a very imporant piece o...

Others can chime in with theoretical arguments, but to me the biggest impediments are practical. There are not many very good ways to leverage your personal portfolio -- margin rates are high , leveraged ETFs have horrendous tracking error due to resetting daily, and most other leveraged investment...

Age: 29

Equities: 100%

20% Vanguard Total World Stock ETF
10% DFA Emerging Markets Value
70% individual stocks

I also keep a cash position roughly 1/10 the size of my stock portfolio, but I prefer to not count this cash position into my asset allocation, as it's essentially an emergency fund.

Thanks for the replies everybody. And yes, by "benchmark", I specifically ment the MSCI Emerging Markets Value index (which would be the appropriate benchmark for the fund in question).

larryswedroe wrote:Why do you think there was tracking error that was large?
Value premium was negative pretty much everywhere and so you would expect the EMV to underperform EM, just as EMS did.

Because the benchmark is a Value index and the fund massively underperformed said Value index.

Can anyone explain me what exactly happened in 2011 that made the DFA Emerging Markets Value fund have such a massive tracking error vs it's benchmark?

I've been re-reading Dr William Bernstein's "The Four Pillars of Investing". More and more, I am coming to the opinions that first, there is no gold standard for monetary policy any more. Get over it. Second, there is no rational theory for gold as an investment vehicle. If gold is not mo...

Own Vanguard Total World Stock (VT) and forget about it.

This also makes me wonder, with Americans so heavily invested in stocks now (and the past 13+ years), will stock market returns necessarily be lower long-term simply because such a huge proportion of the American population is invested in stocks? What? I am quite sure I have been seeing a lot of ar...

VT is the core of my portfolio, it is (IMO) the best exchange-traded product in existance. It became a fair bit better this year, since it has: 1) Decreased costs further (0,25% -> 0,22%) 2) Changed the index to FTSE Global All Cap Index, previously it was essentially a Mega/Large Cap fund. 3) Will ...

ETFs are way less convenient for regular investing than mutual funds. This assumes you practice a buy and hold strategy. This greatly depends on where you live. Where I live (Finland), good and cheap broad index mutual funds simply do not exist: you get either cheap index funds that hold 30-40 secu...

If you subscribe to the basic idea of passive stock market indexing, there is no reason to think that such large companies you are talking about couldn't see a massive resurgence when circumstances and/or management changes. A great example would be Apple, it was a big company in the 80ies. In the 9...

Johm221122 wrote:

chicagobear wrote:I only hold stocks, gold and cash at the present time. Long term bonds are not worth the risk of increasing rates which will happen at some point.

Permanent portfolio?

1/4 of the Permanent Portfolio is precisely long term bonds.

The only "expected" return of bonds is their yield, everything else is speculation. If yields were at say, 5%, and I would be making an investment decision based on my perception of what direction the yields are going, that would be market timing and speculation. By looking at the yield, y...

I am a semi-boglehead (my portfolio core is broad stock and bond index funds, but majority of portfolio is individual stocks, long-term holdings, paying attention to costs and taxes, etc) european investor and I would like to complain about bonds. My perspective is european, but I am obviously follo...

You can't invest in gold, just as with currencies, you can only speculate.

Larry, out of curiosity, what do you think of Bridgewater and their consistent long-term outperformance?

Corning is a great company with solid management and a balance sheet that is in very good shape, however: Their fortunes are currently tied to their LCD glass business, since it accounts for more than 40% of their revenue and more than 70% of their earnings. They were already projecting that their m...

Stock buybacks, when done at sensible valuations and when the company has actual real excess cash, is a method to return value to the shareholders in a tax-free fashion.

And other article on indexing and rebalancing by Henry: http://www.businessinsider.com/warning- ... ash-2012-1

Are both of you claiming that your use broadly diversified index funds by virtue of pure faith in them or are putting money into them "with the expectation of gain, that upon thorough analysis, has a high degree of security for the principal amount, as well as security of return"? No? Didn...

What looks like a bubble to me is college tuition. Got all the markings. I hope a big, fat, hat pin gets put to it. Bubbles are bid up by speculation. People buy tulip bulbs, real estate or gold with the idea that it will go higher so they can make a profit. I don't see what the equivalent of this ...

Here's what I think is the best part. People just refuse to believe this is true. The second thing you need to understand if you want to invest intelligently is that if you choose to play this global sport, you will not be playing in a special Little League or low-stakes table with the folks like y...

Berkshire Hathaway contains stakes (or owns them outright) in more than 80 various businesses. It's true that insurance is a major provider of cashflow for BRK, but calling it an "insurance company" is demonstrating ignorance. That being said, I wouldn't dump all my money into it, but I se...

dnaumov I did not miss that point at all, What you are making mistake as is Brody is form over substance What you call something , or what licence you need is totally irrelevant. What matters only is what the risks/returns correlate with. That defines the type of product it is Larry, I am guilty as...

I can't believe Larry (and a whole bunch of others) seem to be entirely missing the point. Nobody is saying that this GS product is a good choice for the investor. Nobody is denying that you can get a better end result by combining a CD and a tiny part of the money dedicated to a stock index fund. ...

I can't believe Larry (and a whole bunch of others) seem to be entirely missing the point. Nobody is saying that this GS product is a good choice for the investor. Nobody is denying that you can get a better end result by combining a CD and a tiny part of the money dedicated to a stock index fund. T...

leo383 wrote:This is good news for those looking for a true one stop equity fund.

Will the expense ratio come down on this fund? I would love to move my equity funds to this one, but the .45% stops me from doing so.

The ETF has a 0.25% ER.

Why on earth is the comparison table in the article comparing an FDIC-insured CD vs portfolios of stocks/bonds that have nothing of the sort?

This is very very good news. For a long time, I had considered the Total World Stock Index fund to be THE fund to use for exposure to equities in just 1 fund, but I lamented a bit about it's lack of exposure to small caps. Now this has been fixed.

As the subject title reads, would you still invest in stocks & bonds if you had a good pension plan (50-60% of your mid-career salary) ? Edit: I can also add that I'm asking because there was an article in my local paper today about what percent of my countrymen save for retirement beyond payin...

So how do I use an index or some other low-cost passive strategy to get exposure to the liquidity risk which has been handsomely rewarded according to the article?

People who use market, limit and stop orders are not investors . So according to you, it is impossible to be an investor if you own ETFs, stocks or anything else being traded on an exchange then? Because if you can use neither limit orders nor market orders, you, err... can't buy anything. Investme...

Can anyone explain me why do american stock brokerages default to using a market order? AFAIK, most european brokerages default to a limit order. In fact, the brokerage I use doesn't even have such an option as "market order" available through the web interface at all, I would have to call...

Those are similar to US tax rates (for the half of Americans who pay taxes), but we don't have the reinvestment loophole. This "reinvestment loophole" is also the reason that europeans often prefer the "reinvesting" type of ETFs, since the same rules apply. Even though they are ...

The yield on VEU isn't a typo. European stocks make up the bulk of foreign stocks, and they are selling at humongous discounts. European companies are also well known for paying generous dividends. I imagine their tax structure is not setup to encourage capital gains above everything else, like the...

Serious question: how does the EU intend to accomplish anything with this? I've even seen some media mention that EU is threatening action up to "pulling their license". Why would a US company need a license from anyone in the EU to publish their opinion on an US website and to US media?

I like http://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/index.html I also use Fund Manager, but it's not really for the feint of heart, especially if you venture past vanilla stocks and ETFs. There is a not insignificant learning curve. Jeff This is true, the UI of Fund Manager is not particularly pretty or user...

I like http://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/index.html

Why should I believe anything anyone says on Wall St.Hold on tight to your wallet.LOLBuffett for what it"s worth claimed he would never buy an airline or an exchange stock. Yet he did - NetJets - they sell shares in biz jets - a timeshare airplane with pilot I believe - apparently they are doi...

[*]for an individual "amateur" investor of modest means, the extra safety created by picking safer stocks, if any , is going to be wiped out by the extra risks of investing in a too-small number of individual stocks. In The 15-stock diversification myth , William J. Bernstein says "T...

When there are just 3-5 years of underperformance, money will move out of the underperforming and right into the "hot" new funds. Performance chasing is very much alive and well. SCV funds will shrink and lots of companies that build their business around heavy concentration in SCV will s...

While I am generally a proponent of the "If enough people use strategy XYZ, eventually it will stop working" I see very little reason for this ever happening to SCV. First of all, there have been and most likely will be, long periods of underperformance relative to the TSM. An individual i...

I don't think it matters much in this case. It's not as if IBM is a big secret. It would be different if it were some small obscure company. In that case, the news that Buffett is buying could cause a large price movement. The news of Buffett buying anything tends to move prices (at least short-ter...

I worry about confirmation bias in statements like this. Do "investors" consistently get it wrong, or does it only spur articles when they do? I've said before that I just do not believe that naïve investors are endowed with the ability to time the market in reverse, and I'm skeptical of ...

Lon wrote:Now that Microsoft appears to have a winner with their BING search engine

What on Earth would possibly make you arrive at such a conclusion?

Hypothetical situation. Assume you dont have to worry about collateral and assume you can burrow for "as long as necessary" (still within a human's lifetime, so lets cap that at, say, 50 years). Assume there is no risk of forced and/or panic selling (a lot of assumptions, I know!) At what ...

There are a lot of things I understand about the stock market, but as with everybody else, a ton of things I don't. One of the most mistifying phenomena that I often see occur are "selloffs on the good news". Selling on bad news is trivial to understand, the prospects of a company are dimi...