Bogleheads.org

Valuethinker wrote:.... The long run track of securities prices looks fractal ....

What does not look fractal?

With enough terms, I can use a Fourier transform to model anything. Anything. Enough terms.

Jebediah wrote:I thought it a little disconcerting that stocks, bonds, gold, and ccf all went down together yesterday.

Yep, I was looking for some asset class that went up on Wednesday. Even short-term bond funds lost some ground.

Maybe only a Really Bad Morning? Even SCZ (small-cap developed) is not in RBD territory as I type this. Oh, well.

To answer the question of how this person is paid, the firm is paid on a commission basis. Per trade. To put that in context .... Many advisors charge a so-called Assets Under Management fee which can range from about 0.05% to 2.00% annually of the total value of your account(s) with them (includin...

I use the free Morningstar Portfolio X-ray tool to see my asset allocation. I also use Fidelity Guided Portfolio Summary which shows the same thing. The Vanguard PortfolioWatch tool tries to do the same thing but fails miserably. I just manually enter all our accounts and positions into the above to...

Did you write how much you are paying this person?

Your broker's strategy is excellent. For him. He gets to play with your money with no obligation whatsoever to you. You asked whether the options strategy is viable. You can figure this out yourself. Have you compared returns versus a benchmark? I don't think it is viable or everyone would be doing ...

Normally folks would ask what other investments does this person have, what other income, tax bracket, etc You know, the standard stuff: http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6212 If she wants to spend $5,000 of it, then that means maybe invest $25,000 and spend $5,000. (And lose t...

Key issues:
Disposable or cloth.
Breast or bottle.
Sleep in parents room or another room.
Buy all kinds of junk for baby or let others buy everything for baby when they see that you don't
Whose mom gets to come first

Congrats. Babies are easy and inexpensive for the most part. And lots of fun, too.

I'd invest half now and the rest over the next 10 months. On a really bad day I would accelerate my purchases. I've been waiting for that bad day for the last 3 months. You have not been reading the forum then. A bad day was announced about 10% ago. Many folks bought on that day. Also note that in ...

Assuming that the money you loan is used in an investment that appreciates faster (for the hypothetical assume it was guaranteed to) than the 401k investment appreciation (accounting for the expense ratios) during the period of the loan, this is would be a 'better investment', correct? Correct. Let...

Your understanding is correct, except there is no tax deduction on the interest. I will guess that the OP meant taxes are taken out before the interest is paid. So if one has to pay $75 of interest and one is in the 25% tax bracket, then more than $100 of gross pay is needed before taxes to get the...

I'd invest half now and the rest over the next 10 months. On a really bad day I would accelerate my purchases.

Poke around at this site: www.altruistfa.com/dfavanguard.htm

Our appraisal board will not take numbers from Trulia or Zillow. They take the actual numbers from closings. They also have to provide all those numbers to anybody that walks into their office. So before we protest, we get the real numbers. As for square footage, one should make sure the appraisal o...

....Bottom line: The real advantage, if any, comes from including very risky emerging market stocks, which don't seem to have performed very well for quite some time. The Callan Periodic Table of Investment Returns has Emerging Markets as the best performing category for 2012. That doesn't seem to ...

I've noticed that this week Yahoo intraday charts and quotes are messed up for some ETFs.

Whenever I see something unusual like the spikes you mention, I try a different source for the same info.

Great question for google!

I exercise a lot and do not take statins. I just went bike riding (fast past averaging 20+ mph) with my colleagues at lunch time today. I cannot go as fast as the folks who are 20 years younger.

My conclusion: It is a consequence of getting older.

Does it get water through its water supply?

Remove it and install ice cube trays made of plastic and filled by naturally organic means. Organic ice is the best and safest!

Nowadays, investors are fortunate to have so many great 529 plans to tax-shelter money in. That wasn't always the case. And which low-cost 529 plan one chooses will not come down to the cost anymore. Instead, it will be about available options (Allan Roth touched on this), ease of contribution/withd...

I do not own TIPS nowadays. englishgirl has mentioned recency bias. The performance of VIPSX in 2013 YTD is -1.7%. QBoy said "TIPS are good protection against inflation risk." which turns out to not be completely true. Please read/watch that Vanguard webcast with Volpert and Houston where ...

By recency, you mean the last few months. You certainly don't mean 2012.

Not surprisingly, there have been previous threads like that one, but perhaps not so in-depth. You might search on "mid-life" or "covet" with the search box there in the upper right. Example: http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8942 Then go watch the news about Oklaho...

Note that I did not say "Don't pay off the mortgage early." Indeed, I paid off my mortgage early already. But I used gains in the stock market to do so. So invest the money, make the big gains, cash in, and pay off the mortgage at that time. The problem is, you cannot be certain when that ...

My spouse just returned from a 2-week vacation in Italy and Turkey. Despite my suggestion she did not have an ATM card that worked in Europe, but had no problems in these 2 countries. Well, at least no money problems since her non-chip-and-pin CapitalOne credit card worked. Her traveling companion h...

I don't pay and I don't do anything special to circumvent the pay wall. It is more of a pay net with large spaces between the netting. Actually, call it a pay joke or idiot tax.

Last week's thread on the subject: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=116185

Have you actually done your own taxes to see if you are even affected by whatever you think you will be affected by? Or are you just going by hearsay? You should be able to put a big chunk of your consulting income in a solo 401(k), so that your AGI and taxable income wouldn't be that high. You shou...

Let me just say that if you do not believe that you can do much better than 2.75% investing in a taxable account, then why bother investing at all. You might as well not have an IRA or a 401(k), too. Folks will come along and write, "You can't get risk-free 2.75% anywhere else nowadays", b...

Nevertheless the fees are $15K when the owners withdraw only $60K. That's like a 20% tax on benefits of this portfolio. Ouch!

Our it could be half a year of college education for one of the grandkids.

OK, how about "they should have found that their portfolio went up just in the last 6 months by the full cost of a 4-year public college education"?

ieee488 wrote:No, no relatives near my mom at all.

Near is relative. They could be across the country and move the piano cheaper themselves than she could. (And at lower cost than buying one.)

About 5-6 years ago, I read several books recommended on this site and did quite a bit of research in deciding on what my optimal asset allocation should look like. .... Ah yes. The books years ago matched the availability of investments at the time. With the introduction of the Vanguard Total Inte...

Do any relatives want it? We gave one of our pianos to our niece. She rented a U-Haul truck, drove 300 miles to pick it up and drove back the next day.

This may be sacrilege in this thread, but I would guess that many folks here are insensitive to the price of a college education. Lots of folks here describe how they are maxing out retirement accounts or starting 529 plans before their child is even conceived or how they are helping their grandchil...

The retiring exec didn't write any of the stuff that Blodget (the article writer) paraphrased.

Blodget wrote:Now, before you go scrutinizing Minack's note to find these bullet points, let me be the first to say that Minack does not actually explicitly articulate this advice.

Mr Volpert makes a compelling statement on bond yield to maturity: But I would just point out again realistic expectations for bond investors as well as stock investors going forward. So we looked at the yield to maturity of the bond market right now—about 1.7 to 1.8%—that's a reasonable number for ...

An article in the NYTimes goes more into advisors fees than usual, so it is an interesting read: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/your-money/an-investment-firm-evercore-offers-clients-honest-returns.html Perhaps it should have its own thread, but it seems to me it might be worthwhile for the OP to ...

I'd try the cookie cutter Vanguard approach first because it will cost you less and you won't be making a mistake. If you find that you don't like it, then do something else.

If you do it in the reverse order, it will cost you more money and will possibly lead to more regret.

If I click on My Accounts > Messages / "More ways to contact us" (right-side of Message Center), a pop-up dialog appears with an option "Send a secure message"

My Accounts / Messages is the place where you read the messages.

I ask because on my first playing with the charts I started on April 15th and saw NASDAQ first went down 4% to end up 4%, Dow Jones down 2% then up 2% (though with today's numbers they're both up a touch more than that. But that doesn't seem like "way up" in that time frame, especially si...

I don't know if Fidelity Spartan index funds are as tax-efficient as Vanguard ones. I am talking with respect to percentage of qualified dividends and lack of cap gains distributions. I own Fidelity Spartan funds in my 401(k) where I am not concerned about tax-efficiency, so I have not looked up thi...

Looks like a historical version of our portfolio, so I like it.

I didn't write that mulch kills weeds. But you didn't write that I wrote that either.

I think the basic economic force is that folks don't want to be worse off than in the past, so they strive to better off than they are now. Think about it.

Looks like today was a RBD for a some funds, for those of you with a market-timing bent. VBR down 3.44%, VSS down 2.66%. Of course, now it's too late to transact. Interesting that all the preceding discussion occurred on a day that ended up being nothing, but nobody said anything on the actual RBD....

Place mulch over them then. They disappear instantly under mulch.

Or even more effective: weedwack them, then place mulch over them.

Also please post a photo of these beds. I hope you are not talking about marijuana droppings in your bedroom. Thanks!

Doesn't seem aggressive to me. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

A burning question though: How did she end up with this portfolio? Who decided this would be the portfolio? I doubt it is luck or happenstance.

Why do you need to ask this question? Just go out in your yard, put vinegar on the weeds and see if they get killed. Simple. Please keep it a secret though.

In the 1990's one of the funds with the best performance was Vanguard's S&P 500 index fund. That is, large-cap growth funds kicked butt. If one was performance chasing, they bought VFINX.

So rather than a little thing that led to index investing, a big thing beckoned.