At this time of year our thoughts usually turn to the holiday festivities, family gatherings and such. While no different for me, I usually have one more activity at this time of year that puts me in the Christmas spirit, the creation of an investing wish list. Making an investment Read more
In an earlier post I introduced a method to time the market, based on the 200-day moving average, that produced higher investment returns, lower volatility, and lower drawdowns than a buy and hold portfolio. As I’ve stated here many times lower drawdowns (max principal loss in any period) is critical Read more
The holidays are here and its made posting a bit tougher. Its hard to work on a post with family members all around, left over turkey and pumpkin pie all over the place. Not that I am complaining. For today, I found a couple of interesting charts on inflation. Its Read more
The safe withdrawal rate (SWR) that I’ve discussed in several posts (here, here, here) is a great tool to use for retirement planning and once in retirement. I’ve presented a range of SWRs from the super conservative 4% that has worked 100% of the time to the slightly more aggressive Read more
I’ve covered one of my alternative investment strategies for retirement portfolios already, in my post on structured products. Today, I’ll introduce the primary strategy I use to generate income from my cash balance – option selling. Cash is an important part of any asset allocation. It allows an investor to Read more
In an earlier post on risk management I discussed various methods of managing downside risk in a portfolio. One method I mentioned was a momentum strategy based on moving averages. Most would call such a strategy a market timing strategy even though that brings up a lot of negative connotations Read more
Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) is another of the big cap MLPs. Along with KMP and EPD it makes up a good portion of the Alerian MLP index. Like my earlier posts on KMP and EPD this post takes a look at the partnership’s historical performance and how its positioned for Read more
In an earlier post I discussed the big boy of the MLP space, Kinder Morgan. Today, I’ll talk about the new big boy in the MLP space, Enterprise Products Partners (EPD). EPD is now the largest MLP by market cap. Like KMP, EPD’s historical performance as an investment is downright Read more
In earlier posts I’ve covered how much it takes to retire, the safe withdrawal rate (SWR), and one method of increasing the safe withdrawal rate. Today I wanted to cover the method I use to increase my SWR significantly without taking on any more risk. Sounds exciting huh? Well, maybe Read more
I’ve been thinking a lot about risk management lately. A retiree faces a lot of risks but not the ones that are usually talked about. The biggest two, in my opinion, are suffering a very large portfolio decline and retirement income not keeping up with inflation and taxes. This is Read more
I wanted to start discussing some alternative investment strategies that are often not discussed or a just dismissed outright as being too risky. Today, I’ll start with structured products. A structured product is a fancy name for an investment vehicle that combines a traditional investment, like a bond, with a Read more