Recent content by bosco

As an addendum, I will add that any method that I would consider should not trade frequently, nor have a lot of whipsaws. This method has built into it a 30 day wait between trades which can help or hurt on any given switch but probably is a wash over the long haul. One of the problems with...

I use a variation of SSRN-A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation by Mebane T. Faber The paper is well worth downloading and reading even if you don't have any inclination to use the method. The variation is that I slice the portfolio up into a few more pieces, and tweak the...

After reading Brewer's and Ha's last post, I realize that I don't think of 'poor' and 'poverty' as necessarily being the same thing as not having a lot of money. It is for this reason that I get the feeling that many who are poor are poor and stuck, their real impoverishment is lack of choices...

Actually, it's easy, and done all the time. Just get caught without health insurance, then get some form of malignant cancer. Pay out of pocket for treatment until the money runs out. Although you might overshoot a bit and have negative net worth.

Beans and rice are good for people of any means, but they don't constitute a healthy, balanced diet in and of themselves. Add in the brocolli, fruit, lettuce, tomatoes, etc. and you are getting there. Then compare the prices per nutrient and per calorie. But somehow, I think you already know...

The fact that you put quotation marks around 'hunger' leads me to believe that you don't think malnutrition and obesity can coexist? Nutritional foods cost more money. The cheapest foods provide empty calories. It takes far more calories of these kinds of foods to constitute anything...

The callousness of some of the people on this board never ceases to amaze me. It's one thing to admit that you believe that anything you worked for is yours and yours alone, and that you did it without any help from anyone or from the government. If you can really justify a philosophy that...

I know this is the theory, and the party line, but I have lost faith in this truism. I suspect it is true during long periods of "normal" markets. But from what I've seen, when the fertilizer hits the air-conditioning, EVERYTHING is correlated, and it all goes down. Except inverse funds, and...

A phrase that always pops into my mind in these sort of discussions is "consumption smoothing." I think it was Burns and Kotlikoff. In my case, DW and I have some fairly decent pension income streams kicking in over the next 10 years. We also have investments that total less than $1m. The...

now you have departed from the rational and into the realm of ethics. What you have described was referred to by Kant as the "categorical imperative." It is not rational in that it attempts to determine one's personal behavior based on one's desire as to the behavior of others which you have...

I think there is little in life scarier than the prospect of everybody and everything being too "rational." Corporations behave "rationally" when they hide behind the corporate veneer and hire lawyers to stonewall people rather than behaving ethically. Let's say I am dirt-poor, and can't...

Maybe somebody can help me understand something. I have no brand loyalty. But I notice that people on this board are heavily skewed toward Vanguard. Why is that? I understand that Vanguard has some of the best index funds and etfs. I understand that they helped bring this segment of the...

This is probably obvious, but one way to check this is to figure out what life insurance policy you would have to buy to provide the same survivor benefits. If the premium would cost more than your monthly reduction--take the full pension and buy the equivalent policy. When I went through this...

It matters. You need to roll it into something. unless you want to pay taxes on the entire lump sum distribution. Make sure it is rolled directly. If you accept a check, they will withhold a bunch, and you will have to make up the withholding until tax time if you want to roll the entire...

I don't know for an absolute fact about the taxing of a Roth in Canada. I do know that until fairly recently, they were treated like an after-tax brokerage account (i.e. you had to pay taxes on distributions etc.). Now, I have HEARD that they are treated like other retirement accounts. I...