Total returns of 27% per year since 1996. 15% annual growth for dividends in the same time. A $100 investment in ’96 would have turned into $2,518 as of 9/3/2010 compared to $185 for the S&P500. It’s no doubt that Kinder Morgan (KMP) has been a stellar investment over the Read more…
Today I finally wanted to get to discussing my investment portfolio and some of the reasons behind my allocation decisions. I think its better to see actual ideas being implemented rather than just talk about generalities. Lets get right to it then. You can see the bulk of my portfolio Read more…
In my post yesterday I mentioned the important need to get educated on financial matters. I forgot to mention one of my favorite resources for on-line for educational content, the Khan Academy. If you have not heard of the Khan Academy I highly recommend that you check the website out. Read more…
I wanted to talk about saving money tonight. Specifically, how the government is waging a war on your ability to save money and build wealth. Most people first start to save by building up short term savings, a rainy day fund, emergency fund, etc… Currently, the gov’t is making this Read more…
I an earlier post I talked about MLP valuation and considered if the sector was overvalued. My conclusion was that based on avg historical yield the sector seemed pricey but based on my preferred metric, the yield spread to the 10yr note, the sector was not over valued. Today I Read more…
Modern finance theory teaches that market risk is measured by the volatility of asset prices. Just calculate the standard deviation of asset returns and there you have it – risk. But risk of what? Volatility measures risk as how much your portfolio varies over time (also to the upside remember). Read more…
Today I wanted to cover one of the most critical dividend stock metrics, yield on cost (YOC for short). Rising YOC is one of the great benefits of owning dividend stocks, in particular one with good dividend growth. YOC is simply the current dividend rate divided by the price you Read more…
I figure that after my last post on stock market returns for the next 10 years, I’ll try and do something similar for bonds. After all, these are the two most important assets classes that make up retiree portfolios, often in the much talked about 60%/40% stock, bond allocation. Without Read more…
So says John Hussman. First, if you don’t know who Hussman is, I recommend that you get to know him. Hussman is a mutual fund manager who runs the Hussman Funds. He is a value oriented manager but also focuses heavily on managing risk, i.e capital preservation in bad market Read more…
All markets experience periods of excesses. It looks to me as if we’re getting to one of these times with the fixed income markets. The news item that led me to this post was about a foreign bond – ‘Mexico floats century bond in a hungry market’. An excerpt from Read more…
High investment fees hurt. We should all try to minimize them. Conventional wisdom, right? In one way you would think so with the rise of firms like Vanguard, discount brokers, ETFs, etc… On the other hand, there has been the massive rise of hedge funds, derivatives, and other esoteric products Read more…