My hope with this site is for you to think differently about every aspect of your retirement. In no way is the intention for you to blindly follow anything suggested here.
Live Last read · last published · next check
From Meb Faber; And for what its worth, plugging Meb's question into Copilot came up with a range of 15-25% and then zeroed in on 20%. The following are built using SPY for equities and an even split of QMHIX and DBMFsimulated for managed futures. Both are volatile, QMHIX is a full implementation and DBMF is a replication strategy. I tried to color code the backtest results but not sure how…
We're in Tucson this week and this guy paid us a visit this morning. It's a Gila Monster, they pop up on our ring camera every so often. The second volume of How I Invest My Money is out. I read the first one, it is interesting to hear how various people invest ranging from sounding complicated in some cases to surprisingly simple in other cases. Surprisingly simple is not a criticism. Sort of…
Bespoke had a short blog post about rebalancing plain vanilla 60/40 portfolios. It noted that with no rebalancing, a portfolio implemented at 60/40 right after the financial crisis would now be 92/8 which represents massive outperformance by equities. Yes, equities will outperform the vast majority of the time and probably by a lot but I think they were saying the result that took 60/40 to 92/8…
A few days ago I mentioned this passage from a Barron's article A popular choice is a fixed indexed annuity with an income rider. Fixed indexed annuities offer protection against market downturns by limiting upside in a bull m arket. With an income rider, there’s the option to turn on an income stream at any time and collect guaranteed income for life. And then I quipped Or, instead of an annuity,…
Blending several equity factors into one fund can be difficult to pull off in terms of capturing the intended effect. A good example/microcosm from Friday with the Invesco S&P 500 Multi-Factor ETF (QVML). The ticker symbol tells you the factors; quality, value and momentum for large cap stocks. The first three fund target quality, value and momentum respectively. I did a quick review of QVML in…
Finominal did a review of the Russell Investments Growth Portfolio. It's a model portfolio consisting entirely of Russell's mutual funds. The review came via email so no link to share. Some of their funds are shockingly big. The first two listed have $3 billion and almost $4 billion respectively. The Morningstar ratings for the various funds are mixed. Finominal notes general underperformance and…
Let's start with the following. The long term result of the mystery portfolio and plain vanilla 60/40 are identical. There's really only two years with meaningful differentiation. The mystery lagged by a lot in 2020 and went down much less in 2022. The stats in the fist screen grab do favor 60/40 but mystery has a lower standard deviation and slightly better excess kurtosis reading. The 60/40 does…
Yahoo had an article about....wait for it....people 55 years old and up retiring early because they feel emboldened by portfolio growth over the last few years. They post an avalanche of retirement doom and then this. Both can be true. The vast majority of Americans of all ages could be woefully undersaved while those who are not undersaved could easily have enough to retire earlier than they…
Today's post starts with this image from a paper about alts published by Simplify. Simplify says their funds focus on the upper left quadrant. Not included in the lower left, that I would mention so we don't forget about it is litigation finance. I am aware of one fund that doesn't have daily liquidity. I'm not going to use funds that don't have daily liquidity but the way things evolve, this…
A reader left a comment on yesterday's post about navigating a lost decade for stocks using the TBG Dividend Growth ETF (TBG). Yesterday was part 2, here's part 1 . The portfolio we looked at in part two as follows; In part one we just put 25% in SCHD but yesterday we updated it to include IQLT and AIQ. IQLT in foreign quality stocks (owning foreign if domestic does poorly makes sense) and AIQ is…
