Here is the Income Investor Dashboard for April 2011. Prices are as of the close of markets on March 31, 2011. Despite a very exciting and volatile month not much changed in terms of market prices and yields. At one point during the month US markets were down, on the Read more…
In my 2011 outlook post earlier this month I mentioned that I had raised the cash portion of my portfolio to 40%. I did this by selling out of my commodity positions. A recent post I read at Pragmatic Capitalism reminded of me of this and that I should explicitly Read more…
Huh? Why the question mark in the title of this post you may ask? Well, it has to do with my thoughts on forecasts. This time of year is one of the more entertaining. Slews of economists, investment strategists, and research houses put out there forecasts for market performance in 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…
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…
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…
If you’ve been keeping up with the market and investment news you probably couldn’t help but notice all the commentary about the possible bond market bubble. See here for an example. The Siegel article in the WSJ is probably the most high profile piece on this topic yet. The argument Read more…
I mentioned in a previous post on my macro investment outlook of another lost decade for stocks, i.e. that 10 yrs from now the S&P 500 would be at the same level it is today. This investment outlook is based on my thoughts for overall economic growth, which drives profit Read more…