Bogleheads

In brief summary, Tom no longer endorses the Permanent Portfolio and believes that Harry Browne himself would advocate different vehicles today that were not previously available back in his day.

B ...

I could have easily posted this same thread on stocks when the Dow was at 14,000 and people on this forum were recommending overweighting REITs and other risky asset classes.

David Swensen, the Yal ...

What I least expect is a sovereign country default of a major world currency. It has been a very long time (1922 - Germany ... I think?) since the world had a problem of this sort.

Russia 1998
...

Of course, nobody knows what could happen this time around and history - as well as fundamental analysis - seems to say the the PP will survive because at least one of the assets (long treasuries, sto ...

It is the Swiss franc holdings in PRPFX that is most puzzling to me (though it no doubt made sense back in the early 1980s). I can understand allocating a portion of the fund to a basket of foreign c ...

I'd be even happier if there was any difference between the returns of 50/50 short-long vs. 100% 5-year treasuries.

The advantage is not in performance vs. a larger IT bond fund. I think there is m ...

Frankly, I didn't read all the repilies. so many Embarassed

(it would nice if someone can post a summary Very Happy

)

I have two simple questions
1) what are the disadvantages for the this permanent prof ...

It looks like Swensen recommends a "barbell" approach similar to Browne's PP, with perhaps a tilt toward short-term treasuries.

A barbell gives you stable liquidity of cash to ride out ro ...

I'm curious which ticker to use on sites such as finance.yahoo.com or finance.google.com to compare/track Gold ETFs against the real spot price for Gold Bullion. Any idea?

Thank you,
Freeman

G ...

I don't think that leaving out the single best year for gold (gain of 136%) in the last 37 years is entirely unreasonable. First, this was clearly an "outlier" because it was over 4 SDs fro ...

I'm not sure he was making one.
More just stating the facts.

Over the past 10 years a portfolio that held gold with stocks and bonds beat one that held stocks and bonds alone. The same thing happe ...

From Jeremy Siegel's Book:
The Future for Investors:

Siegel misses the point. Gold is not an investment like stocks and bonds. It has no interest or dividends. It does, however, have an uncanny ab ...

While the author looks to be bullish on gold in general over the next few years, I thought the gold/gold stock/commodities comparisons between 30's, 40's, 60's and 70's were really interesting.

I'd ...

The musician is Aleksandr Hrustevich from Ukraine. Here is his YouTube Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Hrustevich

I don't disagree with you in terms of the current popularity of the approach. If the stock market starts hopping again I expect this idea to fade away back to the relatively boring status it's had for ...

The boring, 3-fund TSM portfolio posted above (and here, using the same stock fund at 25%) is just one type of "conventional" portfolio that has performed competitively (based on CAGR) with ...

At day's end, I am still convinced that, since 1972, the biggest reason an investor was protected was low beta exposure (40% or lower in equities).

...

Cost is negligible, ease maximal, and vola ...

For folks such as myself that are very conservative savers (i.e. cash assets) that are doing well but would like to start re-balancing our portfolio to the stock, bond, cash, and gold split when do we ...

Craig,

I share LBill's argument. Furthermore, while it does seem (at least recently) that there is a strong positive correlation between European and US equities, emerging Asia (and Japan, for that ...

double post

You will add a lot of currency risk though with heavy international exposure.
Craigr - This seems to be a U.S - centric view that I just don't get. Aren't you taking a lot of currency risk by concen ...

If I weren't using the PP allocation, I'd want to have a significant portion of my stock investment in foreign stocks. If I did this and rebalanced regularly to whatever my mix is, let's just say 50-5 ...

I left a post (below) on Craigr blog earlier today.....any answers to these questions will be appreciated.

Joel,

Here is a condensed version of my response. I don't want to discuss politics here ...

And that's the safe portion of the portfolio? Geez. Holding that fund will require a stomach of iron.

Well no asset is perfectly safe and the permanent portfolio doesn't hold Zeros as a matter of ...

That's what I thought a couple of years ago, and yet, rates went lower. Smile

I remember posts from five or more years ago with predictions of rates going up any time now. I remember articles I read ...

If you see a buy-n-hold portfolio that does not contain long bonds a good question to ask is "why are you giving up diversification and taking on unnecessary risk".

I believe Larry Swedro ...

But buying a CD from a troubled bank that may or may not fail is sinful because it may cost taxpayers a tenth of a penny each if the worst happens.

Yes, capitalism is destroying the world. Tobacco ...

If you deliberately open a CD with a bank that you think is shaky and desperate, you know there is risk and you want someone else to take that risk for you. You can get protection at the FDIC's expens ...

Would you get on a plane that you knew was going to crash just because the crew hands you a parachute before take off and promised to save you money on air fare?

Honestly the risks people take to g ...

Great video.

I think that this is an important question, and I will be the first to say that I don't have the answers. I'm just trying to figure all this out like the rest of us.

Agreed. The markets are the re ...

I received a private message asking about how to design PP like portfolios. I decided that this might be of interest to others so I'll bring it out here even though it might get me excommunicated ;-&g ...

Why then, do you think, (and this is not a challenge, I ask all rhetorically) they reach such very different conclusions about the value of these two asset classes within an investment portfolio?

I ...

To restate the MediumTex position on this issue, gold is an uncertainty hedge, not an inflation hedge. Armed with this knowledge, the world may make more sense to the investor pondering the role of g ...

Deleted.

If you'd have just bought the four pp assets on Jan 1 to today you'd be up 9.95% ytd. No chart reading required. That even includes the -16% loss on the LT bonds

I'm okay with Brazil, but the RIC seems loaded with risk.

I've been to Brazil. It, like many Latin American countries, is dysfunctional and corrupt. Rio de Janeiro is the most dangerous city I've e ...

The inverted yield curve is bunk.

What I was actually trying to find out was whether a fund like VEIEX might provide hedge against 1970s and/or worse.

The question really is going to be answered by looking at what countries are ...

The premise of this book was quite interesting and many of the comments about the economy and spending / debt patterns match what I've observed in family members and friends of mine. The bottom line i ...

I think DaveH has your solution. I'll provide the letters for your clipboard that you can use below. Just copy them both in at once. When you need an upper case L just delete the lower one and vise ve ...

Just wait. Currency speculation is even harder than stock speculation (which is just about impossible).

In Spring of last year everyone thought the dollar was doomed. Then in the Fall it went up by ...

Now, however, with gold back in vogue it occurred to me that the PP is one of the few really SAFE ways of owning gold.

Heck, I think it's also one of the only safe ways to hold stocks and bonds, ...

I finally posted a first cut of my Gold FAQ that people have been asking about. It's here:

http://crawlingroad.com/blog/2009/10/13/permanent-portfolio-25-gold-allocation-faq/

Last up is the Cash ...

I think bmb asks a very good question above. Why should we care?

Because we don't live in a vacuum. Other countries can implement trade barriers to keep us from dumping cheap exports onto them. Fur ...

I own a pair of Canon 15x50 stabilized binoculars. They are excellent all around binoculars and have negated the use of a spotting scope for most things I will do with optics. They are larger than mos ...

The respected Boglehead expert, Rick Ferri, ventured an opinion on gold ETFs in this 8/18/2009 rant against the Permanent Portfolio. It does not sound like he did much research, but he certainly has ...

Devaluing the dollar helps exporters of all of these things, and causes import substitution-- for example domestic made cars become relatively cheaper (even if built by transplants).

Of course othe ...

This is not intended to add fuel to the fire, but I wonder if this might have something to do with the scholarships:

http://www.eeoc.gov/press/2-29-08a.html

*dons astesbos suit as a precaution* ...