Bogleheads

What's the point of selling them? What would I buy with the proceeds?

More TIPS, and if the ones I sell are up, so are the ones I buy.

It's the basic problem of fixed-income assets. If what yo ...

Times are never normal. When times feel great is often the time of greatest risk (think 1999).

Stocks may go down again.

Bonds could easily under perform for years to come.

Inflation could re ...

Fortunately no one (I hope) really believes these sorts of studies are directly useful in making firm long term plans, and at best only provide a ballpark estimate that needs to be monitored and adjus ...

Sure, 20% to 40% is reasonable. Could even go higher.

Three important notes, I think:

1) the actual amount is not all that likely to matter much
2) more important is to keep to whatever plan yo ...

These are interesting studies,

But the uncertainties in any such projection grow exponentially with time.

That is small errors in assumptions grow exponentially.

We all know the power of exp ...

Geeze, tough bunch.

Yep, tough bunch. Cos he went against the grain. Almost all the literature asks me to tune off the news, not analyse it.

Easier to tune out the news if you recognize the sc ...

Its funny to consider markets as the leading indicator - of all changes absolute (2.5% or greater change a day) since the 50's 95 out of 323 times occurred from 8/07 thru 10/09 - does any one think th ...

Geeze, tough bunch.

Certainly you all don't think an unbalanced view helps do you?

No offense but this seems like an awful lot of nit picking.

All he said is having a balanced view is helpful ...

People often speak of the "freedom" you have in doing what you want, with your own house and on your own property, as opposed to if you're renting.

I say that's just an illusion people li ...

One can tame MVO weirdness to some degree using ideas borrowed from Ridge Regression and such, but still of limited use as you have at best one significant digit to the inputs (really more like half a ...

Alec, as I mentioned I'm not trying to say I know where things are going. I'm also holding my Jan 2016 TIPS. But my latest purchases were to sell 20yr TIPS and buy short term investment grade. So t ...

The command you want looks like:

=XIRR(C22:C239,A22:A239)

Where column C is how much you put in each time and column A is the date.

The only tricky part is the last entry of column C is minus ...

Fortunately most of us sample hundreds of entry points. (and exit points)

I'd be more concerned about entry points if I had one lump sum and that was all I was ever going to get.

All that said, ...

It may be worth noting that TSM is still 25% off peak.

If we had a more gradual steady decline to this point people would not be worried about the market being so high, they would be lamenting how ...

It may be worth noting that TSM is still 25% off peak.

This is also worth noting:

When I started investing in the early 50s, the S&P was fluctuating around 25. Today it is over 1,100.

Y ...

It may be worth noting that TSM is still 25% off peak.

The market will always be at or below the peak. But rebalancing would have you selling as it reaches its peak and buying after the crash. ...

I was wondering the same thing , would Dr. Bernstein still reccommend foreign and domestic stocks? When he wrote his book the US current dividend yield was 2.5 %; now it has dropped to around 2%. Wit ...

I would appreciate opinions on what exactly is fueling this current market rally? (since last March?) Is it the falling dollar?

Without getting into politics, unemployment is still at an all-time h ...

I wonder if anyone has ever tried to determine a rebalancing algorithm by using the efficient frontier calculation?

There should be 2 reasons for rebalancing: (1) shift from your risk target and (2 ...

I'm merely arguing my proposition that it's futile to do widely-diversified active management.

Hi at,

If that is the point you are making, I agree.

Though I am still unclear why are you argui ...

Holding a fixed portfolio is not likely to capture much, if any, of the momentum effect.

Yep, that is correct essentially by definition.

In fact, rebalancing can be an "anti-momentum&quo ...

No I made a bunch of 100K investments which each lasted 10 years. Maybe the pseudo code would be:
For years 1991 to 1999
for months 1 to 12
start investment
calculated 10 year returns
...

The most recent studies noted in the links I provided state that AT LEAST 350 stocks are needed to eliminate most of the US systemic risk.

Can you quantify what you mean by "most" of th ...

It really depends on whether or not there is short term momentum. If prices are truly a random walk rebalancing daily might be optimal (though I doubt the magnitude would make it possible to pick out ...

While as a general proposition I definitely agree bond risks are lower in magnitude over the short and intermediate term than the risks for stocks, and maybe generally in the long term too (but not al ...

I don't think the last 60 years in the stock market have been all that surprising. To someone in 1949 who had direct knowledge of the Great Depression and perhaps had parents with direct memory of the ...

Your money would not always be sub-optimally invested using DCA. Getting to your target AA immediately would not help right before a sharp market decline or a protracted bear market.

That seems to ...

I'm a bit lost on what you did.

Did you do compute returns 1991-2000, 1992-2001, ... etc. only using first of the month start times?

If so:

1991-2008 is 17 years. This results in less than 2 ...

"

Here is what we did. The eight asset classes included Large-Cap Growth, Mid-Cap Growth, Small-Cap Growth, Large-Cap Value, Mid-Cap Value, Small-Cap Value, REITs and International. Equal am ...

Spend your money don't make the mistake my father did. All his money invested, then died and enjoyed none of it. Another words, DIE BROKE.

Dying broke is easy.

Going broke the day before you die ...

"I know one answer to this question might be momentum. Is that valid, and are there other reasons?"

Two of us ran an 18 year study using 8 major asset classes and we found that rebalancin ...

Peter,

Very interesting citations

It really depends on whether or not there is short term momentum. If prices are truly a random walk rebalancing daily might be optimal (though I doubt the magnitude would make it possible to pick out ...

"Information" is a deeper concept that just "opinion" or "news" (it's about more than just "facts", too).

agreed

I guess I do agree with Siegel that the theoretically interesting "extension" about zigging and zagging disappears if you apply MPT over a period in which the SD of a 100% stock portfolio is ...

Hi Rod,

I already have a headache so I'm not going to make much of an effort to articulate a position here, but I guess my first reaction to your post is that if "Modern Portfolio Theory" ...

FWIW, MPT is really at its heart extremely simple.

If I have three estimates of the temperature then taking the average is generally better than picking just one of those temperatures.

We can ma ...

How can information be wrong? Interpretation can be wrong, but facts tend to be facts/

"information" is only facts?

What about news in the papers, on the TV, or on the Web?

Isn't t ...

How can information be wrong? Interpretation can be wrong, but facts tend to be facts/

"information" is only facts?

What about news in the papers, on the TV, or on the Web?

Isn't t ...

MPT is good for getting a general idea of why diversification is good, maybe some general idea of the benefit, but worthless as far as setting up an allocation to three significant digits. Or even 2. ...

I'm curious if the folks who use a shifting asset allocation have carefully benchmarked their returns, and if so what are the returns and risk of their approach vs the benchmark.

Real time, not bac ...

One look at this idea:

http://home.comcast.net/~rodec/finance/papers/Q-timingV2.pdf

I don't claim this is the end all and be all of what one can do, but if nothing else it shows this is not a sl ...

If that were true wouldn't it show up in a slow doubling of PE10, q, etc. over that time (with fluctuations for noise of course)?

and get those 30% CAGRs

I missed the 30% CAGR. Value investing may be useful (and may not), but rather consistent 30% from value investing is non-sense, IMHO.

Even Madoff was not crazy enough to ...

I find it extremely hard to believe that everyone is so obsessed with year-to-year performance that they are knowingly and willingly ignore all these incredible longer-term opportunities. Since ~50% o ...

Fascinating. Especially the lack of a difference between Age in Bonds and a straight 60/40 allocation. It does makes sense when you step back from it.

I don't find this lack of difference very ...

i think you're correct - the state school figure did not include room and board. it's still a huge difference though.

Question:
What are the trends in the cost of college education?

Response: ...

well with tuition at only $857 and fees at $4,681 it looks like they are playing with semantics and calling what would normally called "tuition" at most schools and including it under the &q ...

FWIW:

In-state UMass Amherst, per semester

Tuition $857
Fees $4681
Room $2200
Meals $2000
------------------
Total $9378 per semester
Total $19,476 per year

Costs vary a little dependi ...

1. fees are not that much. the difference if you are a resident in state vs. non-resident out of state can be big - but misc. fees are nominal

Since I write the checks I can tell you they certainl ...