There was a recent post at the Times’ Bucks Blog about Longevity Insurance that caught my attention. I decided to run some numbers to see what returns are implied in the current prices of longevity insurance and compare that to the risks, and the alternative of just keeping your money Read more
Just when you thought it was safe to back in the water…here comes the shark again…in this case muni bond ultra bear Meridith Whitney. Whitney is back in the spotlight again renewing her call for massive defaults in municipal bonds. Absolute Returns (AR) did a great screencast the other day Read more
Here is the Income Investor Dashboard for May 2011 and my commentary below. As usual I highlighted the sectors in green that became cheaper during the month. Most people would put these in red but I have a bias to looking for opportunities and putting more capital to work which 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
Here I go again. Bond bashing time. I think many income investors worried about risk mistakenly focus too much on the lower volatility of bonds as a risk measure. Volatility is only one measure of risk. On other measures of risk bonds perform just as poorly as stocks but with Read more
I’m not a huge fan of investing in bonds, although I do invest in them from time to time. In general, their prospective returns are lower than stocks, they’re taxed at marginal income rates, and individual bond issues are harder to research/buy/trade than individual stocks. However, the most surprising reasons Read more
Last month I introduced my income investor dashboard that helps me keep tabs on the investment landscape from an income investor’s point of view. I’ve updated the dashboard as of this morning. Here it is: I added this month’s updates to the table and calculated the change in yields from Read more
In my Time to buy munis? post the other day I think I left out a couple of key elements in my desire to keep the post from becoming too long. As I said in my last paragraph, an even slightly aggressive income investor may want to look at muni Read more