A Permanent Portfolio By Another Name
At the end of Alan Abelson's column there was some commentary from Michael (Dogs of Dow) O'Higgins and a portfolio he called MOAR which stands for Michael O'Higgins Absolute Return. Really this was a spin on the permanent portfolio concept. The origina...
Sunday Morning Coffee
This week's Barron's interview was with Ben Inker who is the head of asset allocation at GMO. Part of his job is to run the GMO Benchmark-Free Allocation Fund (GBMFX), an open ended fund that is closed to new investors. The interview focused on a coupl...
Predictions Gone Awry? So What?
A few days ago Seeking Alpha ran a Q&A about 2011 that I participated in. There were really a lot of negative comments which surprised me in that after six years of doing this I've observed that comments get nastier when the market is doing poorly ...
Self Imposed Means Testing?
Yesterday on our Sunday hike (pictured to the left) I had an epiphany about social security and medicare that I think can be part of the solution. The idea has a couple of building blocks of understanding that if agreed upon make the idea more plausibl...
Merry Christmas
James Montier's latest missive talks about reversion to the mean, tails and the folly of forecasting. One great nugget was;fat tails often create fat pitchesThe context was in taking the other side of the new normal argument for lower returns with lowe...
The Big Picture for the Week of December 5, 2010
IndexUniverse posted an interview with Jack Bogle with all sorts of things to talk about. Bogle is obviously one of the biggest proponents of the most passive of index investing, he might be rightly considered the father of indexing. I have noted many ...
Sunday Morning Coffee
The Barron's interview this week was with Marty Whitman who is probably most known as the manager of the Third Avenue Value Fund (TAVFX). The fund is 20 years old and since inception it has absolutely clocked the broad market. According to Morningstar ...
Seriously, Stay On Your Mat
Charles Kirk had a post up that I thought was particularly useful both for the investment implication but also the philosophical implication too. In the post he answered a reader email who feels that the US equity markets are being manipulated by the U...
A Slight Paradigm Shift
It seems like the theme to this weeks posts have been along the lines of realizing that US equities are still not looking so hot but that there is opportunity in certain foreign markets and themes. This is obviously a long running thread here that I be...
Predicting The Next Black Swan (Again)
That title is still a joke as by definition a black swan is not reasonably predictable. The Wall Street Journal had sort of a long article on the subject called How To Profit From The Next Black Swan. For most individuals and professionals this has bad...
More Bodie
There was one more point from the Zvi Bodie interview mentioned yesterday that I wanted to discuss. He feels that too many "analysts" only consider one scenario. In making his point he uses the example of the current debate of whether deflation really ...
More Lists
Yesterday was a day for blog lists. In addition to the investing essentials list I posted, Brett Arends post a list of investing cliches that he debunked and Tech Ticker re-ran a list of 23 stats that "prove" the middle class is "being systematically w...
