Bogleheads.org

Chas

I think the OP has the same concerns I have, but I don't see where any replies addressed it. I know full well that market timing is anathema to Bogleheads, but these are unusual time to say the least. Interest rates have been near zero for over two years and it is like waiting for the second shoe to...

Chas

........ If you want to worry about something, worry about antibiotics. Anybody not worried about this isn't paying attention, because much of modern medicine will collapse in a post-antibiotic world. Yes, the threat of "super-bugs" immune to current antibiotics is real. However, I believ...

Chas

I have had the experience of growing my own little garden. I will certainly testify that picking the fresh vegetables and eating them within hours was marvelously more flavorful than any I could purchase. So, if organic should somehow be fresher then there are grounds for the organic side of the que...

Chas

Contrary to what many here seem to believe, scientific knowledge is not obtained by a voting process. Rather, a theory is used to make a prediction, such as "foods grown free of man made chemicals" improves ones health. Then a double blind experiment is devised with say a group of 200 peo...

Chas

Contrary to what many here seem to believe, scientific knowledge is not obtained by a voting process. Rather, a theory is used to make a prediction, such as "foods grown free of man made chemicals" improves ones health. Then a double blind experiment is devised with say a group of 200 peop...

Chas

The very best feature of this debate is that we are so rich we can spend extra money on fancy foods and esoteric bottled water. A lot of our planet's human inhabitants drink water from mud holes and ditches and eat anything that doesn't kill them forthwith. I would like to see one of their posts on ...

Chas

Florida politicians are corrupt and break the law. Who would have thought such a thing? Out of curiosity, what actions are we supposed to take in response to this thread? Is it more than just one of many "whines and rants about the crimes, shortcomings or stupidity of other people"? I thi...

Chas

Hi Elgob: Most of us have little understanding of how financial firms and their lobbyists influence public officials. I learned from experience. At the request of a good friend who was Chairman of the Dade County Housing Authority, I became a volunteer Director. The Housing Authority issues tax-ded...

Chas

P. S. My SBBI book only compares long-term corporate and government bonds. And it only goes from 1925 to 2004. Over that period, the inflation-adjusted series shows that $1 placed in those asset classes in at year-end 1925 would have grown to an inflation-adjusted value of $8.892 for long-term corp...

Chas

Cosmo wrote: Coming from someone who lost a close loved one in a traffic accident where someone crashed a red light, the solution is simple. RED MEANS STOP, GREEN MEANS GO. The folks who whine about these would not have a problem with them in the first place if they just slowed down and obeyed the ...

Chas

retiredjg has given you excellent information. I'm not familiar with the specifics of SD county. three points however... do you believe city government would allow a private company to install this type of equipment (cameras) on city property without review and approval... secondly, outsourcing the...

Chas

I loved my work all my life with just a few exceptions for short periods. What most people don't understand is that you are a different person when you are over sixty, and vastly different again when you are over seventy. Yet everyone seems to think they will live life at age eighty just like when t...

Chas

From Eternity To Here by Sean Carroll.

An analysis of time by a theoretical physicist. Makes my head hurt almost as much as my sojourn through philosophy. Did you know that theoretical physicists now do such things as calculating the energy per cubic centimeter of a void? No kidding! *Sigh*

Chas

Physics And Philosophy by Sir James Jeans. I have been studying philosophy of late and this book moved me into the modern times after slogging through the Greek and Renaissance philosophers. Out of it all I have come to think that perhaps our perception of the world, limited as it is by our evolved...

Chas

There is an interesting article in the Saturday WSJ by Jason Zweig This is his bottom line concerning global investing allocation of ones portfolio. The weights within MSCI's All Country World index approximate how all the world's investors already have placed their bets: 42% in the U.S., 45% in dev...

Chas

There is an interesting article in the Saturday WSJ by Jason Zweig This is his bottom line concerning global investing allocation of ones portfolio. The weights within MSCI's All Country World index approximate how all the world's investors already have placed their bets: 42% in the U.S., 45% in dev...

Chas

I just finished a quick reading of Jim Otar's book "Unveiling the Retirement Myth," and found it to be an eye-opening read. Otar is an engineer turned financial advisor. His book is filled with a great amount of data analysis and detail based on his research using historical market return...

Chas

The column goes on to pithily summarize the OK-to-walk thesis: That norm might have been appropriate when the lender was the local banker. More commonly these days, however, the loan was initiated by an aggressive mortgage broker who maximized his fees at the expense of the borrower’s costs, while ...

Chas

I'm curious as to what others have as their stocks/fixed AA and how they came to that number. What is your stocks/fixed AA? What is your age? What other factors did you use to determine your AA? For me, mine is 60/40. I'm 35. I used age in bonds and then went a little more conservative. I received ...

Chas

IMO, growth charts are more informative when they visually convey percentage growth rather than dollar growth. A doubling from $10k to $20k is just as significant as a doubling from $50 million to $100 million. Both should cover the same vertical distance on the graph. Very interesting. That is a g...

Chas

while i agree in principle - we have all seen how when things get ugly and people get scared they run back to the US for safety and security. i think a lot of these countries are not quite ready for the big-time. India, for example, where I have visited several time - is still extremely corrupt. Th...

Chas

Other than monitoring our other accounts closely, is their anything else we should do? The card company caught it and called us. The person on the phone didn't seem at all concerned, the account had already been frozen, she marked the four fraud charges we indicated, closed the accounts, she ordere...

Chas

I saw another article today on Forbes by Rick Ferri. This one is entitled, "Who Cares What The Dow Did Last Week?" http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/11/stocks-reits-funds-asset-allocation-personal-finance-bogleheads-view-ferri.html Rick does a good job talking about Bogleheads and our investm...

Chas

bigH wrote:
I understand my single action will not make a difference in aggregate, but you gotta stand by some principles? To me its a defeatist attitude to do nothing.

Vote!

Chas

IMO it's wrong to exclude the bible. I agree that the Bible counts, I read it with fascination when I was a 12 year old, but that was also true of Treasure Island and The Wizard of Oz . I don't think it's possible for someone that has read thousands of books over a lifetime to say that one overshad...

Chas

Well, I suppose if it came out in 2002 its performance would look a lot different. Nothing like good timing. Posts a 16.02% YTD gain. Be glad it isn't Market Neutral with a -11.34% YTD record. Now those folks might have a beef. In the end you need to take the road you feel best suited for yourself....

Chas

This is why one should have an ISP that states that you should buy on dips. There was a nice dip around the end of October. I think we are up about 6% to 8% in those 2 weeks. That's like 2 years of withdrawals for retirees. Did you rebalance into equities 2 weeks ago per your asset allocation? :) N...

Chas

Under The Dome, by Stephen King.

This newest release is classic King, including his tendency to be prolific. This hard cover book is so thick and heavy it requires physical strength to just retain ones grasp while reading.

Chas

The Climb Up To Hell , by Jack Olsen. A relation of the disastrous 1957 climb by four men up the north wall of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps and the ensuing rescue efforts that went on for years (removing and searching for bodies after the initial rescue of just one survivor). Personally, I find it c...

Chas

Serpent On The Rock , by Kurt Eichenwald. An astounding story of mendacity and fraud in the selling of Prudential-Bache investment partnerships as "rock" safe investments to retired, risk adverse, and naive people, all out of shear greed and then aggravating the crime by the company's bit...

Chas

MPT says prices are always right at any current time. I don't think anyone believes that any more. Only an idot could believe that the prices for houses in 2006 were right or an accurate measure of value and a proper investment. The same would apply to the price of .com stocks in early 2000. To say...

Chas

Here's an interesting article on Modern Portfolio Theory and how some investors have less confidence in using the model to determine asset allocation. This is the core of the article: One key challenge is that the theory uses standard deviation to measure variability or risk, but this is valid only...

Chas

Medicare generally pays providers less than private insurance. Private insurance subsidizes Medicare. Without private insurance, some procedures/exams/consults would not be worth what Medicare pays to a provider. Medicaid reimbursement to providers is very low, and they often refuse to pay unless s...

Chas

Hi all, I'm 28 and discovered bogleheads in 2008 at which point I started accumlating shares of VTSMX (total stock) and VFWIX (ftse ex US). As I was buying on the way down to 7900 dow (missed the bottom) my accumlation has reached close to 30% (i think). I was going to rebalance a few weeks ago whe...

Chas

I have two rewards accounts, one with Coulee and another with my local bank. Both pay 4.04% and require one auto deposit and 10 debit card usages per month, no problem. You need two bank accounts in case something happens that shuts down one debit card you have the other. For example, somehow my deb...

Chas

Our lives are not really defined by how much money we have after achieving a certain level of income necessary for basic material comforts. If ones life is defined somehow by whether they have a guaranteed $100,000+ of disposable income per year when they are 80 years old, something went badly wrong...

Chas

nisiprius and grok87, Thank you very much! My library has Patrick O'Brian on tape (unabridged) as follows: - "The Catalans a novel" - "Blue at the mizzen" - "The hundred days". They also have "Master and Commander" and other O'Brian's books on CD. I prefer ta...

Chas

Just finished The Devil's Punchbowl , by Greg Isles. I am attracted to his background portrait of Natchez, Mississippi and the surrounding area included in most of his books. I have read all of Isles' novels, but it seems he is continually reaching for higher levels of complexity and intensity in ea...

Chas

Just finished The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, and thought it was really very good. Close to finished with Patrick O'Brian's The Hundred Days . I'm currently reading the Unknown Shore by Patrick O'Brian. It and the Golden Ocean are tales about the Anson expedition in the mid 1700s- very compe...

Chas

As a Boston native, a Celtics fan, and a generally frugal person, my jaw literally dropped as I read today's Boston Globe article on former Celtics' player Antoine Walker and his recent difficulties with the law stemming from huge overspending and large debt. Highlights / lowlights from the article...

Chas

---- Read Mandelbrot's "The Misbehavior of Markets" - extreme market events/swings are more common than most investors think, they are the norm, not exceptions. Adrian anenu@tampabay.rr.com This comment got me to thinking. TSM declined 50% from 9/1/2008 to 3/1/2009, a six month period, bu...

Chas

A recent study of dollar-cost averaging vs. going "all-in" in one lump sum favors the lump-sum approach. Add DCA to the list of "investment myths" that cost you money. http://www.cfainstitute.org/memresources/communications/privatewealth/2009/august/article_4.html On the basis o...

Chas

When I left home my mother said, "Son never eat in a place named, Mom's.

My dad said: "Son, if a man comes up to you and bets you he can make it rain in your ear and you take him up on it, you are gonna wind up with an ear full of rain."

Chas

Hexdump wrote:was to "be a man of my word". This coupled with a handshake was a rock solid promise of agreement.

"This above all: To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man." - Shakespeare

Chas

My dad said "don't take anything that is not yours to take, try to pay as you go, and don't borrow anything unless you have to"- Then my mom said, "figure out what you want , then figure out how to get it"! :D You have any you'd care to share? Both ideas from your parents was wi...

Chas

As a nation we have no fiscal discipline. True, but what other country on earth can you think of that does not have worse problems than we do? This is a serious question. There may be countries that have a brighter future than we do, but I am not aware of them. I would be curious about other people...

Chas

Hey, it's been an hour and no one has posted a "past returns are not predictive of future returns" missive yet. (Taylor must be sailing this morning.) :D Well, how about, "Past returns are not contrarian to future returns." I realize that the RTM (Return To Mean) crowd would dis...

Chas

Does rising import costs actually cause inflation? I've never heard such. Is it so? Of course it does. Remember last year when imported oil doubled in price and the cost of gasoline soared? Prices of imports are just passed on to consumers. However, imports amount to less than 15% of consumption so...

Chas

DartThrower wrote: ...a cheaper dollar allows us to repay debt more cheaply But the U.S. Government is not in a position to repay its debt, it must refinance it. Therein lies the risk that a falling USD discourages further purchases of dollar debt. Thus a falling dollar would tend to drive furture ...

Chas

.....but another aspect to this is that a cheaper dollar allows us to repay debt more cheaply. It's always good to hear different points of view! I've never heard that a devalued dollar makes paying debt cheaper. An inflated dollar would, but is a "cheaper" dollar the same as an inflated ...

Bogleheads.org

Search found 844 matches

Re: What it's like at the top

Choosing Portfolio Global Equity Distribution

Choosing Portfolio Global Equity Distribution

Re: Otar's book: "Unveiling the Retirement Myth"

Re: Will More Borrowers Walk Away From Their Mortgages? - NY

Re: how do YOU determine your risk tolerance?

Re: Fraudulent purchases on our credit card

Re: Rick Ferri on Forbes "Who Cares What The Dow Did La

Re: Modern Portfolio Theory tested with recent market behavi

Re: Importance of rebalancing during accumulation stage?

Re: Patrick O'Brian

Re: How NBA player Antoine Walker blew through $110 mil

Re: Does dollar cost averaging really improve returns?

Re: My dad to me about age 12

Re: Best Advice you've ever heard and followed?