Bogleheads.org

My taxes, local and state, support the public library system, which in turn gives me no-cost online access to numerous databases which happen to include full-text access to The New York Times from 1985 through today.

"Fictitious price" and "real price" are probably not good terms, but I'll use them anyway. One of the big problems with things as they are is the extreme spread between the fictitious price that appears on the bill, and the real price(s) that insurers pay. Now, mind you, none of ...

[A] book explains how by converting your dollars to pesos you can earn 12% on your savings in Mexico instead of 5-1/2% here.... the author reassures, the peso is one of the stablest currencies in the world, having been pegged at a fixed rate to the dollar for 21 years, and the Mexican government ha...

I am not sure what is the best strategy, but I am pretty sure that simply not paying is the worst. Good, bad, or indifferent, you want to stay in communication, and you want to have a paper trail that shows that you are not just a pure deadbeat and that you are not simply ignoring a bill that you do...

Bull market talk, absolutely. Look, I can only speak for myself but my allocation was pretty darn conservative in 2008-2009, in fact I thought it was probably too conservative and was starting to think maybe I should goose it up just a bit. But when it hit the fan, I found that I had gauged my risk ...

Nisi, an interesting one to plot would be VUSTX (long Treasury). On Vanguard I find it had a total return of 13% in 1998, but I couldn't find more detailed data. Did it in fact experience a flight to quality during the crisis? Those charts I'm always posting aren't anything special, anyone can do t...

Similar authorities are also endorsing high-yielding equities as an income alternative (to conventional bonds) as well, and we all know how poorly those did even more recently. Ain't it the truth? But 2008-2009 are fresh in my memory because, um, I had significant stock investments then (and how). ...

Thanks!

In response to questions about past behavior of emerging markets bonds, LawnGnomeGenome said "I'd suggest reading up on FNMIX." A great suggestion. Now I've had the time to find a few more emerging markets bond funds that go back to 1998 and plot them: http://i43.tinypic.com/2zq4qw5.jpg In...

See, just about everyone in the thread on Vanguard's newly-emerged Emerging Markets Bond Index Fund agrees that they should not count as bonds . There are at least two good reasons. Reason number one. VANGUARD says this IN THEIR PROSPECTUS: (their words, my boldfacing): A Note on Risk: Many investor...

No easy answers to "life's persistent questions," even under the best of circumstances there is stress and worry and care. I think myself that there is a certain amount of "happiness homeostasis," Eeyore (the lugubrious donkey in Winnie-the-Pooh) is never going to stop worrying. ...

1% a year is a lot. The question you have to ask is whether there's any real reason a cookie cutter approach shouldn't work for you. I buy clothes off the rack, I don't have them tailor-made. I just download the binary for Firefox, I don't download the source code for Firefox and pay a programmer to...

I pretty much agree with redS/YDNAL. You expect, hope, and often do get compounded growth through capital appreciation (shares grow in value) and through dividends (if you reinvest). "Compound interest" refers to interest which refers to a loan . Someone lends you $1,000 at 10% per year, y...

I wrote this on November 22, 2011: What about Vanguard's other new offering, Emerging Markets Government Bond Index Fund? I don't know what countries make up the index but similar bonds are yielding about 5% with no currency risk. Interest rate risk is no worse than other bond funds. Of course there...

If the Book of Revaluations is right, it might be the bestial get.

Sigh... he isn't wrong in what he says to do, but he's terribly wrong in reinforcing the "Olympic medal model" of investment analysis, in which everything is based on counting wins , and winning by an inch weighs as much as winning by a mile... "If, instead of trying to pick a fund th...

What do people think about marriage proposals made in extremely public settings or in extremely public ways (on Jumbotrons, with skywriters, on billboards, etc?)

Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever, by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard, on wife's recommendation. 1/3 through, very good. One major gripe, which also applies to Jeff Shaara's books. It just drives me bughouse when a book like this includes battle maps, and I, l...

Syllogism:

1) Index funds are for people who don’t know anything about investing.
2) Nobody knows nuttin'.
3) Ergo, index funds are for everybody.

I sent a message to Vanguard, via the ordinary "secure email" feature in my account, asking whether the risk potential rating of 5 was a goof, and received this reply: Vanguard Emerging Markets Government Bond Index Fund Investor Shares is correctly rated for risk potential at a five. Like...

I think college administrations should be allowed to charge what the market will bear. Supply and demand. When people refuse to pay their prices, then those prices won't be paid anymore. It is that simple. It's not that simple because even "private" colleges are not really private. U.S. u...

3. My suggestion is to accept that everything else is pretty uncontrollable (face it!) - so go fishing and stop thinking that a model, Excel spreadsheet, what-have-you, is going to make you feel better. The attraction of SPIAs is that they DO provide a way to control returns. Yes, they cost money, ...

I see G-money said about the same thing just before I did... Well, broadly speaking, you seem to be saying "Vanguard should do what DFA does." I dunno. It seems to me Vanguard is pretty good at what it does and that it should stick to its knitting. People who have drunk the DFA Kool--I mea...

If one of your criteria for buying this fund was that the manager owned significant chunks of it, then that has changed and you should sell. If you didn't care when you bought this fund if the manager owned shares or not, then it doesn't matter what you do. +1 Steve, this is the core dilemma of the...

It's not the daily noise I have problems with, it's the faddish waves of noise that last for, oh, six to eighteen months, like a hit song or a bestseller; the things that must be true because "everyone" is saying them. Swedroe's reviews like Which financial "sure things" happened...

I follow the owner's manual. With respect to interval, grade, and API rating. Oil changes are cheap. I believe that if one does use synthetic oil, one should still follow the owner's manual. In previous threads, some people have reported that the owner's manual for their car does call out a longer i...

While on vacation in Utah, we saw something we'd never seen at home: big billboards right on the Interstate in which various hospitals were advertising their current emergency room waiting times. Yes, big electronic panel, "the waiting time at our ER is currently ......[43]...... minutes."...

The mother of a friend of a relative plays the lottery regularly. The friend describes it as an "addiction." I don't know dollars and cents but the friend believes it has had a meaningful effect on the household finances. Two years ago she won a jackpot larger than our total retirement sav...

...Although there are exceptions, neither the doc in a box, the emergency room or the orthopedist is likely to do much of anything about your broken finger. Unless the bone is sticking out of the skin, I fail to see how a broken finger qualifies as an emergency. Why can't you go to your primary doc...

He disses index funds... Not exactly. In Getting Back to Even , he wrote: How many stocks does it take to be truly diversified? I have found that it takes a minimum of five to capture true diversification and protection from the undesirable elements…. [ten would be terrific but] if you insist on mo...

What an incredible time to be a retail investor. I am like a kid in a candy store. Bring on the low cost funds! VTIPX http://www.accoutrements.com/shop/product_images/i/12356_1__45504.jpg VGOVX http://www.missfidget.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Atomic-Fire-Balls.jpg

If Vanguard is putting EM bond and stock funds in the highest risk category of "5", that seems like a signal to put EM bonds in the equity, aka high volatility bin, portion of the asset allocation. Paul Yes, but is their "portfolio analysis" tool going to do this? I already get ...

...The funny part is the tab title of the webpage still reads "Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund Investor Shares." This is so wrong on so many levels. Yeah. I saw that, too, and I took the time to send them a note about that via the web-based "secure email" feature on the ac...

EVERY time I log in to Treasury Direct it says that my computer is not registered and that it will email me a one-time passcode. EVERY time, I use the passcode, tell it to register my computer, and it does not issue any error messages or complaints. I can then log in again for some short period of t...

protagonist wrote:awwww....Nisi....you shouldn't have.......

It's not made of real pixels. It's made of cheap imitation pixels.

Questions of "ultimate safety" and "what could possibly happen" are always endlessly arguable. I will just point out a couple of things that don't particularly point in any one direction or another, that you may have overlooked. a) Individual Treasuries are effective against infl...

“We were viewed back then as having a lot of information that no one else had,” said David McWilliams, who became a broker in 1978 when he was 21 and now heads wealth-management transformation at the U.S. brokerage of Zurich-based UBS. “You couldn’t get a stock quote without calling us.” Stockbroke...

For a retired individual seeking income, not wanting to take additional risk (increase % stocks), if bonds are not the answer, and it seems that currently it is not, and other fixed income like CDs are yielding close to zero, what is the alternative? Why do you think there's an alternative? Safe in...

I just sent a message to Vanguard in the usual way--so-called "secure email" from their website--alerting them of the definite goof in the "title" attribute of the web page, and raising the question of whether they really meant to put this fund into "risk potential category ...

protagonist wrote:And by the way, what kind of reward do we get for our 1000th post? A diamond? A share of Vanguard stock? I'm waiting....

LawnGnomeGenome wrote:I'd suggest reading up on FNMIX.

Thank you!

Nice! 40% drop... no, let's not exaggerate... a 39.8% drop from 7/16/1998 to 9/10/1998, less than two months. In a "bond" fund?

larryswedroe wrote:...rmelvey
Greenblatt's model is very similar to the profitability model, though it is an "extreme portfolio" with small amount of holdings that no fund could run on and have a large amount of assets...

Meaning that the Formula Investing Funds don't actually follow the Formula?

Well, let's see... the Prospectus says

the Fund tracks the Barclays USD Emerging Markets Government RIC Capped Index, and

this page, uh, uh, uh... doesn't seem to have it... and neither does

this one...... interesting...

How much should a 37 year old with a 60/30/10 portfolio(stock/bond/REIT) have in the new emerging market bond fund? I like the idea of further diversifying myself away from the US. Should I treat it like my international stocks and go with 30% of my bond holdings? My $0.02. NONE in the emerging mar...

srk2fd wrote:...Larson does other services like [snip]... finding the best life insurance policy for me (they recommended a VUL)...

I do not think a VUL is a good choice for a life insurance policy for most of us, and I think these "services" may be self-serving.

From the same page, Vanguard's risk/return scale number is 5, the highest. Kowabunga! REALLY? That is STUNNING. Yep, really. http://i42.tinypic.com/2s7x5k7.jpg Vanguard is saying that this bond fund is not only riskier than Total Bond (2 on the scale) or High-Yield Corporate (3)... they are saying ...

Can I assume they're still building this fund, looking at the load and the higher expense ratios? There is no load. Is not a "purchase fee" another name for "load"? No, because a load is money that goes to the sales channel to reward them for selling the fund, while the purchase...

...each hedge fund received say $10-$20M. That is a trivial amount of assets to gain for even a medium sized hedge fund. The NYT reporting that hedge fund managers were "lining their pockets" is utter tripe. You do realize the impression that makes on this lowly member of the "mass a...

http://i42.tinypic.com/5fkkdl.jpg :D It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it wa...

The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek , by Evelyn Sibley Lampman. First book of over 200 pages I ever read. It was the beginning of a life-long (at least so far) habit of reading. Ah. What was the first long book I ever read that was not written for children? Probably The Time Machine , by H. G. Wel...

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