Fairfax Financial (FFH.TO or FRFHF.PK) reported results for 2010 a week or so ago. Before commenting on the results, I had been waiting for the annual letter from Chairman Prem Watsa and over the weekend it was posted to the site. I’ve posted on Fairfax before (here and here) and Read more
I’m not a huge fan of investing in bonds, although I do invest in them from time to time. In general, their prospective returns are lower than stocks, they’re taxed at marginal income rates, and individual bond issues are harder to research/buy/trade than individual stocks. However, the most surprising reasons Read more
I’ve talked a lot about how much it takes to retire and safe withdrawal rates and ways to increase safe withdrawal rates. See the series of posts here. All of these discussions and studies I reference are based on a certain retirement model. Lets call it the portfolio value retirement Read more
Here is this month’s income investor dashboard update. Prices are as of the close of trading on Feb 28, 2011, the last day of the month. Almost everything got a little more expensive last month, with yields coming down across the board. In general, stocks did better than bonds. In Read more
I haven’t talked about safe withdrawal rates (SWR) in a while. For earlier discussions on what the SWR is on how to use it in retirement see the series of posts here. The SWR basically determines what is the maximum a retiree can withdraw from their portfolio every year and Read more
One of the things I love about investing is the opportunity to constantly learn and become a better investor. Your results are strongly driven by the time and effort you put into the process. In the past few months I’ve been researching an interesting idea I had. Two posts drove Read more
That dreaded time of year is fast approaching. Yep, tax time. As we barrel to that dreaded time I’d thought I’d touch on an often overlooked tool for investors, tax loss harvesting. Used appropriately, it can reduce the burden of capital gain taxes in retirement and also be a great Read more
The 3rd largest MLP by market cap, Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) reported Q4 2010 results that were as expected. The full press-release can be found here. Total distributable cash flow (DCF) for the year was $1.03B which was only about a 7.4% increase from 2009. The Q4’10 declared distribution of Read more
EPD reported Q4’10 and full year 2010 results on February 17th, 2011 and again they were nothing short of impressive. The full earnings release can be found here. I also highly recommend their earnings calls where EPD always does a nice job of providing additional color to their earnings results. Read more
In my last post I described the commutative property for dividends, i.e. that a 3% div stock with a 2% growth rate is exactly the same as a 2% div stock with a 3% div growth rate. I showed that the commutative property only holds for investments in non-taxable accounts Read more
Sometimes it is good to get back to basics. After a recent conversation with a family member, an elementary school teacher, about the school’s decision to rename improper fractions into something else (no, I’m not joking) I ended up thinking about some dividend basics. One of the basic properties in Read more