Bogleheads.org

nisiprius

Level 15: Independence lets you do and say what you please, unconcerned with other people disagreeing with you , since you don’t rely on the support or opportunities they could offer. Kitces really thinks that financial independence gives you the moral right to be boorish, arrogant, or unkind? And ...

nisiprius

(Deleted, misunderstood). I guess the question is how many financial institutions support OAuth, and whether you feel there is a risk simply in disclosing read-only access. You might want to listen to the podcast, Anatomy of a Scam , and, in particular note how important it is to scam artists to kno...

nisiprius

I'm not sure people in this thread are heading in the right direction. Oddly enough, some of the cheaper bargain brands of headlamp use "COB LED" technology. (So do some better lights, and some use a combination). COB LEDs aren't focussed; they are a row of a dozen or so LED emitters, with no lenses...

nisiprius

Just for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a riband to stick in his coat— Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us, Lost all the others she lets us devote; They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver, So much was theirs who so little allowed: How all our copper had gone for his se...

nisiprius

OK, unkind speculation ahead. Wikipedia says "July 22, 2005, Malkiel retired from 28 years of service as a director of the Vanguard Group and trustee of Vanguard Mutual funds," which would set 1977 as the date of his joining Vanguard (a year after the Vanguard 500 fund was launched). Recall that the...

nisiprius

I did not "tout" it as "the answer to an inflationary situation." I said that "anybody who discusses inflation risks of 'bonds' and never even mentions TIPS is dishonest, not to be trusted, and not worth reading." In real life, TIPS may or may not actually keep up with inflation after taxes, but (as...

nisiprius

...I plan to take them to my bank the next time I go there. It's just two blocks up the street... Please let us know how that works out. My prediction is that you will encounter some kind of minor nuisance... for example, a fee for cashing them (even though you paid a fee to buy them in the first p...

nisiprius

I just did a very slow double-take. Rob Arnott lets his name be used on the jacket: https://imgur.com/jWLmWAG.png Rob Arnott is also the champion of an indexing system developed by his firm, "RAFI Fundamental Indexing" and, I assume, approves of the mutual funds that track it (including some big Sch...

nisiprius

Larry Swedroe, "Rules of Prudent Investing:" #17: Owning individual stocks and sector funds is more akin to speculating, not investing. The market compensates investors for risks that cannot be diversified away, like the risk of investing in stocks versus bonds. Investors shouldn't expect compensati...

nisiprius

Weighting by market capitalization is just another rule. If you've chosen to invest in market capitalization weighted index funds/ETFs you've made an active decision to favor a strategy. It's not "just another rule," because the market portfolio itself , that is to say the sum total of all of the s...

nisiprius

No, they're not a free lunch. The one time I actually looked at a variable annuity, it came with a forty-page fine-print prospectus on onionskin, and eventually I got tired of reading and just decided to count the number of different kinds of fee that were mentioned, and then I got tired of that aft...

nisiprius

I haven't used travellers cheques* in more than thirty years, because I found them to be basically useless. It can only have gotten worse since then. I had all of the following problems both with American Express and Citibank cheques, incidentally, it wasn't a brand thing. 1) By the mid-1970s I felt...

nisiprius

Why wouldn't the market already be pricing in these risks? I assume it is. I've never seen a prospectus actually refer to confiscation risk (but I haven't read a lot of them). However, every prospectus for an international stock fund I've ever checked has had language like the following, which I th...

nisiprius

TIPS don’t work in large taxable accounts due to the taxflation problem Your so-called "taxflation problem" exists in every investment . It is not some special issue with TIPS. In discussions that talk about "the historic returns of the stock market" how often do you see after-tax numbers quoted? V...

nisiprius

My thoughts are that anybody who discusses inflation risks of bonds and never even mentions TIPS is dishonest, not to be trusted, and not worth reading. No, TIPS were not available in the United States until 1998 (European countries introduced inflation-linked bonds much earlier), and they are not t...

nisiprius

E. S. Deluariers, beware of concocting storylines. Certainly what you say could happen, but it's only one of ten thousand possible future scenarios. There isn't any easy, cheap, effective way to protect you against any of them, so you'd better sure the scenario you fear is really likely before actua...

nisiprius

(Shrug) DFA funds are mildly active, in a gentle sort of way. That is why none of them call themselves "index funds." I don't see why there should be any mystery about this except that people want to obfuscate the issue. Their "patient trading" technique is also mildly active, they do some market ti...

nisiprius

...The "bonds for safety" narrative has only gained credence because the 1970s and prior seems like it was so long ago... I don't think this is true. As a matter of fact, it was only in the 1950s, following Markowitz's work, that pension funds began investing in stocks at all. Before that, only bon...

nisiprius

I have to wonder how the original poster stumbled on this book. Only three people have given it Amazon Reader reviews---one gave it one star, one three, and one five--and its Amazon rank isn't too impressive,#640,579 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store), #469 in Stock Market Inves...

nisiprius

One of the (only three) of Amazon Reader Reviews says: Title is misleading. Terrible book. Watch out. Disjointed to put it charitably. Would not recommend. Waste of time and money. Arguments are simplistic and only the last chapter directly addresses indexing and then only briefly. I got hooked by t...

nisiprius

One of the (very small number) of Amazon Reader Reviews says: Title is misleading. Terrible book. Watch out. Disjointed to put it charitably. Would not recommend. Waste of time and money. Arguments are simplistic and only the last chapter directly addresses indexing and then only briefly. I got hook...

nisiprius

I don't want to harp on this too much but there is a legitimate question how liquid CDs might be, if interest rates rise so much that large numbers of people want to break their CDs before maturity... particularly if it happens at a time when banks are stressed. People assume that money in CDs is av...

nisiprius

I don't see where either Matt Topley or Jeremy Siegel says anything about bonds being a "Maginot Line," and I don't see how this analogy does much to illuminate anything. Sure, it's a way of saying that confidence in the protection of bonds might be ill-placed, but as an analogy it doesn't say why o...

nisiprius

OK, now I have what Burton Malkiel wrote in the 2015 edition of "A Random Walk Down Wall Street." I said "he trashed it" and that's correct. He spends a full chapter on it, chapter 11, pp. 260-288, "Is Smart Beta Really Smart?" He knocks down everything, listing "the positives" and "the negatives" f...

nisiprius

It was only four years ago in 2014 that Burton Malkiel trashed smart beta in a paper in the Journal of Portfolio Management, "Is Smart Beta Really Smart," and in 2016 he said In that [smart beta] does enhance returns, it’s likely because the portfolios have additional risk...It isn’t some smart new ...

nisiprius

Just finished The Perfectionists:How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester. Fantastic. So I'm starting another of his, A Crack in the Edge of the World . Finished The Late Show , by Michael Connolly, a police procedural, with a new protagonist, Renee Ballard. Pretty good. ...

nisiprius

They do nothing. The firm's market cap drops because the price of their stock has dropped. The value of the shares the index fund owns drop, thereby reducing the percentage of the fund's value that is now invested in that stock. It happens automatically as a result of the change in the price of the ...

nisiprius

It's the same problem as the supposed basis of Ponzi's scheme,* but with a much less favorable return. You could probably buy them in sufficient quantity to store enough value to be a meaningful investment, let's say $5,000 worth or more. Indeed, I see that "Flowers from the Garden" is available in ...

nisiprius

If your point is that a portfolio of a few "obviously good" stocks is not the sure thing many people think it is, I agree. You can demonstrate this point in many ways. The "top stocks" underperformed. I'm fond of tracking the three stocks named by the authors of Dow 36,000 in 1999. They chose them o...

nisiprius

I found in 2008-2009, with retirement less than ten years away, that I processed the loss in terms of years . That is, the number of years it had taken me to save the amount that I had just lost. Throughout my retirement savings journey I also found that I didn't mind losses too much as long as the ...

nisiprius

Good article about the idea of brokers jumping from buildings, and crash-related suicides, in The Washington Post in 1987, here.

nisiprius

Yes, here is is: December 11th, 1929: EX-BROKER, 56, DIES IN NINE-STORY LEAP: Frank K. Emmett, Who Retired Three Years Ago, Jumps From Window in Apartment. CAUSE OF ACT A MYSTERY Wife and Associates Say His Health Was Good and He Had Suffered No Financial Reverses. So, a broker, a jump, but not from...

nisiprius

He is thinking of the wallstreeters flinging themselves out of windows after “the big one.” I don't know if anyone actually threw themselves off a window ledge after the Crash of 1929 - that's got a smell of an urban legend (can't right now track it down). I once made an incomplete attempt... what ...

nisiprius

I suspect much of Managed Payout’s underperformance is due to the international holdings. Adding Lifestrategy Moderate Growth to the chart might show that. It might be true, but it's also post hoc sample selection bias. I try to provide links to the source to make it easy for anyone to do their own...

nisiprius

Rick Ferri issued a warning about micro-cap funds in 2010: The Truth About Micro-Cap Index Funds . To his data, I'm going to add data for the Vanguard Small-Cap Index Fund, NAESX, and WMCR as well. I'm going to put indexes in green, actual funds in blue. Comments in parentheses are mine, not Rick's....

nisiprius

Very rough round numbers. We're on Medicare. In each case, the 2x12 means I'm multiplying a monthly number by two people and by twelve months. 2x12 x $100 for Medicare part B, + 2x12 x $35 for the combined costs of Medicare part D plus out-of-pocket co-pays on prescriptions, + 2x12 x $216 for Medica...

nisiprius

...I never decline updates. If they break something next update would fix it... Twice, automatic updates put my wife's Windows 10 computer into a state in which it would not startup. Once startup is broken, how can the "next update" fix it? (Both times I was eventually able to recover by restoring ...

nisiprius

...Yes, but virtually eliminates the risk of catastrophic loss (assuming independent probabilities of fraud). That's the whole point... I'm not sure it does eliminate it. Of course I'm just engaging in creative storytelling, not realistic risk assessment... ...But if I were going to fuss about it, ...

nisiprius

Anybody deliberately use different investment firms to lower "institutional risk," or is it not worth consideration? We all know that Vanguard and other mutual fund firms are not covered by any SIPC or other insurance, so, are there real risks to customers assets such as fraud, bankruptcy, or other...

nisiprius

We've annuitized about 1/4th of our portfolio. How did you decide on 1/4? I don't remember exactly. It was a combination of seat-of-the-pants, what we felt comfortable irrevocably "spending," and, if I remember correctly, I really did deduct our anticipated Social Security benefits and from our rou...

nisiprius

We've annuitized about 1/4th of our portfolio. The products we used were an inflation-indexed single-premium immediate annuity from AIG Life Insurance Company, now renamed American General, and a TIAA-CREF lifetime payout contract with the "graded" payment option, which generates an imprecise, vague...

nisiprius

...I think because Puritan is free to change its asset allocation between a certain range and that kind of thing is frowned upon here as market timing with manager risk... Actually, in an appendix to Clash of the Cultures , Bogle has a table of how Wellington's stock/bond allocation has varied with...

nisiprius

That's what makes the "H" in EMH a hypothesis. If it were "proven" (a difficult term to use considering most scientific research will never use the term proven but will only speak in terms of statistical significance, which means that there's always some percentage chance that results you got were ...

nisiprius

Any ideas how to see if I am set up to reinvest? I am using Ally invest. I don't know Ally invest. I suggest you telephone them. This is the sort of question a rep should be able to answer very quickly. The short answer is that if you don't know how it's set up, you probably are reinvesting. It's p...

nisiprius

Market rebounded a bit yesterday, but FPURX down 5.44% Any ideas of whats going on there? You do realize that nobody knows what FPURX is? atlgenxennial, he's right; in this forum, we try not to seem sophisticated by referring to everything with ticker symbols. It's consider polite to give the full ...

nisiprius

FPURX paid out a distribution. https://fundresearch.fidelity.com/mutual-funds/fees-and-prices/316345107?redirect=1 https://imgur.com/15QNIuk.png It paid out money. So there's less money "in" the fund. So each share is worth less. The same thing happens with individual stocks. If you have your accoun...

nisiprius

This is just some random snark I had lying around... it isn't a "factor fund," but the Vanguard Managed Payout Fund, which now has a full decade of history behind it, takes a "modern" approach: high stock allocation, risk supposedly mitigated by use of uncorrelated assets, factors, alts. The composi...

nisiprius

I take it seriously--not the version that says the omniscient market sees all and knows all, centuries into the future, though. A lot of important, useful, valuable concepts can be called tautologies if you want to. For example, the first law of thermodynamics is a tautology because whenever energy ...

nisiprius

Probably the best approach is to choose a supplier, call them, and ask them "are you a Medicare DME?" If they say "yes," then ask them what protocol needs to be followed.

nisiprius

For supplies that are covered by insurance, I let my DME do it. For supplies that are not, and for accessories (like lithium batteries for powering my machine overnight when camping), I've used mycpap.com and cpap.com. They're both good, reliable, typical Internet "mail-order" companies. I sometimes...

Search found 35929 matches