Investing

Accredited Investor Clarification

13 years ago
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Accredited investors are those who because of net worth and income levels are deemed by the SEC to be sophisticated investors and can therefore invest in opportunities that have not gone through as thorough a registration process. These typically includes real estate and oil partnerships, hedge [...]

First Reasonable Prepaid MasterCard

13 years ago
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Prepaid debit cards tend to be fee heavy and are generally best avoided.  So I was surprised when I came across Mango’s offering. First, the $5 monthly fee gets waived if you add at least $500 each month onto the card. Most actions with the card are free, but using an ATM does cost $2 + the local [...]

Equity Expected Returns

13 years ago
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A central part of my practice is calculating the expected return for stocks. There are a number of great techniques for doing this. The following is from John Hussman’s weekly newsletter where he compares two different expected return techniques against actual 10yr returns over the last 70 [...]

Long Term History of US Interest Rates

13 years ago
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It is often humbling to look at long periods of history and realize that while their is certainly rhyming that goes on, predicting the future is fraught with long term unresolvable uncertainties. The following graph shows a history of US ten year treasury yields (or their proxy) since 1790. It is [...]

Mortgage Industry Nuclear Bomb

13 years ago
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By now you have probably heard about the freezing of foreclosure’s by some of the country’s largest banks while they try to get their houses in order. This is my attempt to provide an idea of why this is huge and could be a watershed event.  There are certainly some errors in my description (not [...]

Analyst Optimism???

13 years ago
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If there was any doubt that the ratings from official stock analysts are useless, check out the following graph.

Commodities Still Bubbling

13 years ago
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The following graph showing the relative size of the actual commodity and futures/derivatives about the commodity.  As you can see, the futures market exploded over that last few years.  This is why I say that the historical returns and lack of correlation of the commodity market is a thing of the [...]

Household Equity Holdings

14 years ago
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I’m not sure how accurate the numbers are for actual percentage holdings, but the relative changes that have occurred over time should be fairly accurate.  If you were to plot PE10 on this graph you would find a VERY high correlation.  Unsurprisingly, as people become more fearful of stocks, they [...]

Checking Accounts

14 years ago
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Late last year the bank I had my personal checking account with was taken over by the FDIC and sold to another bank.  FYI, the transition from a customer perspective was seamless.  The new bank is now changing the terms of the account prompting me to shop around again. I thought I would share some [...]

New PIMCO 1-3 Yr Treasury ETF

14 years ago
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Pimco 1-3 Year U.S. Treasury Index Fund  (TUZ) will have an expense ratio of 0.09%.  This compares favorably to iShares Lehman 1-3 Year Treasury Bond ETF’s expense ratio of 0.15%. This is the first of seven ETFs that PIMCO has in the pipeline.  I am esspecially looking forward to the ETFs that [...]
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