When people talk about Fairfax Financial and its chairman Prem Watsa, the description used most often is the ‘ Warren Buffett/Berkshire of Canada’. This is fitting in many ways as the companies are in similar lines of business, insurance, and have impressive investment track records. But how do they compare Read more…
A while back I wrote about some historical analysis I had done that showed several ways that an investor could achieve market beating returns and thus maximize retirement income. It has been known for a long time that several ‘factors’ or characteristics of stocks generate market beating returns. The two Read more…
It’s been a long time since I’ve written about Fairfax Financial. Last time was in October 2011 (see here for previous posts). Fairfax recently held their annual shareholder meeting which had some great information about the company, its results, and why it is a good investment. I’ll discuss some of Read more…
Time for the IVY timing portfolio trading signals for the end of April 2013. You can see the signals at world beta or my preferred source dshort. Below are the signals for the end of April 2013. Another source I’ve found for IVY updates is Scott’s Investments. He updates a spreadsheet that details Read more…
For my first post back I want to update the last post I did before my hiatus. On Feb 10, I posted on how well the MLP sector did in January, with it being the second best January ever, and that good early year performance usually leads to strong results Read more…
Its been about 2.5 months since my last post and after some consideration as to whether continue blogging or not I’ve decided to keep at it. I was recently inspired by a recent Frontline documentary called ‘The Retirement Gamble”. You can watch it on-line here. Its well worth your time. Read more…
Just wanted to update the January effect results for the MLP sector. As I noted in previous posts January tends to be the best performing month for the MLP sector. January 2013 ended up being the 2nd best January for MLPs ever, with a total return of 12.6% Here is Read more…
Time for the IVY timing portfolio trading signals for the end of January 2013. As usual you can see the signals at world beta or my preferred source dshort. Below are the signals for the end of January 2013. Dshort posted this update during the day but I have confirmed that the signals Read more…
Well, that didn’t take long at all. After a pretty robust January for stocks, about 5% for the SP500, it was just a matter of time before the gloom and doomers found a new reason to squeal ‘the sky is about to fall’…… again. Amazing when just a simple focus Read more…
Now that 2012 is behind us I wanted to update my analysis of the worst times to retire in history. See here for the original post. Armed with my own annual return data base I can now show at lot more detail as to the progress of the portfolios of Read more…
All the year end results are in so its time to update the performance of the retirement portfolios that I track. I’ll quickly review 2012 performance for the IVY portfolios, the Permanent Portfolio, and the traditional 60% /40% stock-bond portfolio. Then I’ll put them in context of their long run Read more…