I am a contrarian investor by nature. When there is too much fanfare around an investment, be it a stock or whole asset class, I usually find myself wanting to run for the exits. The hair on the back of my neck literally stands on edge sometimes. Most value investors […]
Investing and weight lifting? I must have lost it. No, not quite yet. Bear with me. My latest post on cash as the ultimate diversification tool got me thinking about a very underused investment strategy, barbell investing. The term and strategy come from the bond world of investing. It is […]
Well, its finally time to put it out there. Since I started blogging I’ve been trying to build a base of background posts to get me to this point. Today, I want to share with you the retirement model that I am using to fund my retirement. I think I […]
I’ve been looking at municipal bonds recently. Whenever I see a large sell off in any asset class accompanied with a lot of media hype the contrarian hairs in the back of my neck tend to perk up. All markets tend to over react more often than not. These over […]
There is a whole world of income investments out there. And the options for income investors are increasing every year. As I mentioned in my previous post, I often use the US 10yr note as a proxy for alternative income investments. This is a great tool to simplify the investment […]
I apologize for the light posting but the holiday festivities are in full swing here in Florida and they do tend to get in the way of posting. For this post I’ll tackle the advanced reading list for investors. This is by far the easiest list to compile and it […]
Today we woke up to a cool rainy Florida winter day, a perfect time for me to reflect on the next 5 stocks on my Christmas wish list (part I here) with a nice cup of hot cocoa by my side. I’m going to keep the list to the top […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]