Real Life Retirement Example
One of the Fire Department training objectives for this year that I came up with is hazardous materials. We've never had it before and given all of the old mines in the area it seems like a good idea (beyond all the regular hazmat that people have in t...
Sunday Morning Coffee
A more accurate title to this post would be "4% of what?" as that was the nature of a discussion in the comments of this article at Seeking Alpha. There were varying opinions on how to determine where the 4% should come from; should it be net of variou...
The Big Picture For The Week of April 1, 2012
The other day I was reading an article at Seeking Alpha about Annaly Capital (NLY). The author seemed to draw a negative conclusion and he got ripped pretty good in the comments. I would note that the author seemed to misread a couple of metrics and se...
Financial Crisis NIMBY
Zerohedge posted a brief research note from Brevan Howard noting visibility for what it calls a fiscal drag in 2013. It views this as a certainty to be caused by an increase in capital gains and dividend taxes, presumably as the Bush tax cuts finally e...
There is Nothing New About Conflicts of Interest
Earlier this week TheStreet.com announced layoffs. I've been an outside contributor there since 2005. My experience with them has been fantastic and I hope to write for them for a long time. I only found one news story about this from Business Insider ...
Debunking Myths
A contributor at Seeking Alpha who goes by the handle Regarded Solutions wrote a post about a month ago that sets out to debunk 10 retirement lies. Per the bio page Regarded Solutions is retired, there is no mention of gender and because of the liberal...
"Volatility is Not an Asset Class"
The WSJ had a blog post further detailing the peculiar odyssey of the Velocity Shares Daily 2x VIX Short Term ETN (TVIX). A lengthy part of the post was devoted to the thoughts of one portfolio manager who among other things said that volatility is an ...
There is Always a Bear Case
Yesterday I was reading an article about one of the stocks we own. It was generally a favorable article. It drew several comments including a long-ish one laying out something of a bear case for the stock. The comment was articulate and possibly compel...
The Big Picture For The Week Of March 25. 2012
A few brief items this morning.First up is the meltdown of the Velocity Shares Daily 2x VIX Short Term ETN which is more commonly referred to by its symbol which is TVIX. This is a levered ETN that tracks the futures market for the VIX index. Futures o...
$2 Million?
The other day a reader left the following comment;I read a lot and figure someone needs $2M to really have a good shot at living well and retiring with few worries. Roger your thoughts?The reader also shared that he is 58 with the implication that he i...
The Goldman Sachs Equity Call
A big fuss was made over the Goldman Sachs call yesterday advising clients that equities will be the better hold than bonds for the next few years. Here are three links recapping the call here, here and here.Before getting too excited I would remind th...
Retirement Attitudes
Last night during the NIT game between UMass and the Drexel Dragons there was a John Hancock commercial that showed the same scenario playing out simultaneously in the bedroom of many boomer aged couples (clean it up, this is a G-rated post) where the ...
