I followed up with Fidelity and asked about lending of bonds purchased directly through your brokerage account.  Here is their response: "With regard to how the bonds are held, they are held in street name just like any other securities held in your account with Fidelity; however, we do not len...

Understood. One thing I was wondering, though -- from Gumby's Treasury Bond Buying Tutorial, there's a note at the bottom that even direct bonds held at a broker are held in their street name and can be lent out at their discretion (that's why they're willing to offer free bond trades).  Just curiou...

Makes sense.  So if their securities lending income is solely from interest on the 100% cash collateral marked to market every day and invested in an established institutional MMF under the same company umbrella (that they have a vested interest in preserving), then that sounds to me like a higher r...

Thanks for the info. So the biggest risk seems to be the credit risk of the money market funds in a major economic nosedive.  That's certainly a risk (there's a reason HB advocated treasury MM funds), but less so than other investments they could have screwed around with.  Any idea what kind of insu...

Keep in mind, of course, there will come a day when this asset just won't seem to be able to stop stinking up the joint.  It's the nature of the beast.  Looks like that day ain't today, though. That's one thing I like about the PP.  The diversification conditions you to expect at least one asset to...

I personally see no reason to lose sleep over TLT at this point.  Yes, they have non-treasury income that could result in an unexpected state tax bill.  Yet while it surely has more risk than treasuries through Treasury Direct I have seen nothing to make me believe it is high risk overall.   Going b...

I personally went all-in and am glad I did.  But as long you're sitting on cash (and not some risky investment) then if phasing in over time helps you sleep better then I wouldn't have a big problem with that.  My only non-professional recommendation is to buy the stocks/bonds/gold in equal chunks a...

Why stop there?  Why don't they just fully implement George Orwell's "1984" and go ahead and create a "Ministry of Truth."  I've just finally started reading this and the parallels are frightening. Unfortunately some politicians today read that book as a instruction manual, not ...

I personally save up until the trading fees are sufficiently low and buy the lagging asset(s).  It's like dollar cost averaging whatever is on sale.

I love Mint.  We use it primarily to track our spending & net income per month, and its categorization tools have been really enlightening in helping us reduce our spending over time.

In the time he spent ranting about deceptive chart ranges, the author could have easily: 1) Read the date of Craig's post (12/22/2008) 2) Looked up the PP returns after 2008 and concluded whether that made a difference. 3) Actually read Craig's post where he points out himself that the gold run-up i...

With any investment, if you know exactly when the bull market starts and ends then there's generally no downside.  The trick is first finding that crystal ball. 

I'll say straight-out that I'm not a macro-economics guy, so what do I know.  But from my uneducated perspective, Cullen Roche is basically saying "German banks have profited from making loans to Greece, so shut up and keep doing it."  I think it's true that if the Euro breaks up it's goin...

I've noticed that many Democrats and Republicans picture Libertarians as anarchists. Perhaps a small number of them are.  But by and large, I think most small-L Libertarians agree with Republicans on economic issues and Democrats on social issues.  They respect the rule of law and the power of gover...

I agree.  Honestly, it's ads like this that make me feel like politicians who spout these things truly live in their own little political bubble and are increasingly out of touch with the average voter.  Somewhere in Washington today, a staffer is shocked that such an ad showing the generous governm...

Meh. There's a big difference between denying someone a service and asking them to pay their own bill.

It looks like it just went green for the day. Hooray! Hey MediumTex - I've got a new PP timing method I'm going to tryout.  I'm going to watch the market every morning.  If it's in the red, I'll sell everything. In the green, I'll buy. What do you think?   ;) Seriously, though - Part of investing i...

Good point.  Thanks.

Still -- one more reason for me to finally buy some physical gold just to be safe.  It's next on my PP to-do list anyway.

So assuming there's a decent chance the euro will break up at some point and there will be resulting financial chaos in Europe for a time, is there anything we need to be worrying about (that we can control) from a PP perspective?  I'm specifically thinking about the gold ETFs with vaults/financial ...

And saved for the very end: Mr. Wolff said that even with Greece’s departure, the structural problems of the euro zone, which ropes together economies of vastly different levels of competitiveness, are going to remain. European policy makers are “still in a state of denial,”? he said. With Greece th...

I don't have the pictures personally, but I'll ask around to see if a family member still does.  I think they'd be fun to hold onto.

I've not witnessed a supernatural event with no possible logical explanation.  I'm not sure those exist -- even if a true miracle happened and cancer disappeared from the earth overnight, someone would postulate a possible scientific reason it happened.  If you're a believer, perhaps that's the poin...

Similarly (but in a more concise form), here's a good summary of hedonic adaptation.

http://unclutterer.com/2010/08/09/hedon ... you-happy/

I definitely think there's something to that.

On the positive side, there is great evidence that products like Golden Rice (a Monsanto rice variant with additional vitamin A) have saved millions of lives and prevented countless cases of blindness in third world countries.  http://www.goldenrice.org/Content3-Why/why1_vad.html I agree that advanc...