Now that the first half of 2011 is over I wanted to step back and look at the performance of the sectors in the income investor dashboard. Lets look at the YTD performance of the dashboard and see if it offers any insights. Below are the 1H 2011 total returns Read more
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 Read more
Cash is the best asset class for diversifying your portfolio. This goes against a lot of the traditional investment advice which most of the time recommends bonds as the diversifying asset class. This is particularly true for retirement portfolios. In this post I want to take a look at bonds 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
Happy New Year everyone! I hope you had a great 2010 and wish you all the best in 2011. For my first post of the year I wanted to review my 2010 results and highlight a few real successes and of course some bad trades as well. Lets get right 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
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
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