From a language usage standpoint, define socialist? I’ll bet if we asked folks on this board who appear for the most part to be older and the younger generations surveyed what they consider socialism is probably quite different. In today’s politics I’m sure Americans who went through the Great Depre...

I think it is a company’s basic job to make money and the government’s basic job to make regulations and laws. It would be nice to be in a system where companies aren’t allowed to be considered as people and finance those who make the laws.

There should be separation of corporate and state...

I am a self-described moderate Independent. But from the view of someone on the right, I guess that looks left. Vinny I cannot tell if you are being facetious or not since we did not have federal income taxes until 1913 (I believe). Vinny So you do know something about American history! That puts y...

jalanlong wrote: ↑Fri Nov 01, 2019 7:43 am

escafandro wrote: ↑Thu Oct 31, 2019 7:43 pm 40 Stocks
40 Long Bond
20 Gold

May I ask what drew you to that portfolio?

It’s a very good mix historically.

Libtards...a very handy word. You can aim it at both the far left and the far right.

There is something weird with those numbers, they are all excessively high. You can calculate it yourself and all of them are probably a penny divided by the bid price.

To me, Best Laid Plans is the best of them.

IMO this is a great trend for retail investors. As a 4x25 PP investor who rebalances annually, commissions have always been a minor consideration, and payments for my order flow are an extremely tiny consideration. Cash is commission-free so I'm only making a maximum of 3 trades per account per yea...

Good luck in whatever you decide, sincerely! Highly recommend building the knowledge bench a bit before jumping in however. There is a lot of info about various trading strategies with a fondness for bird and cow names but what you really need to learn is what drives option pricing. Not sure how eff...

I use none of them as my PP is really a VP consisting of 3xETFs. I post performance from time to time in the VP section. However, I have looked at them and for a small investor I like SGOL. There is also GLDM you may want to check out.

It is cheaper, but with futures you are on the hook for the entire amount if it heads south (mark to market). If in a long call and the underlying heads south you are only out the premium paid. One additional recommendation...nothing like real money on the line to help really learn something/focus y...

This isn't unique to the PP but every time the PP has had a bad year, the next year has been one of its best years. However, given the DDs experienced historically I don't see any point to waiting to invest.

Based on the question you just asked, I would highly recommend you get better educated on options before doing anything. CBOE and TastyTrade have good, free education materials. Sheldon Natenberg is generally considered to be a good source of option related books and the "Options Bible" wa...

The more time I've spent learning about the time period being described the more I chalk it all up to "man." I agree that the Catholic Church became spectacularly corrupt; however, the reality is that good old fashioned power politics that have been around since we formed political systems...

Selling options is good but do so with moderation and as noted you can get several trades' profit wiped out with one bad market move. However, I would highly recommend one become thoroughly versed in option geek speak and do not underestimate how difficult it actually is. To be profitable in options...

I do have a strong opinion on the gold aspect of the PP. The choice is basic: You are going to go physical or paper gold. I have no opinion on which is the better option as there are strong arguments on both sides that are both good, accurate and compelling (a mix of both is also a good choice, thou...

Excel has some excellent tools for data scrapping now. But yeah, you pay for it and you have to learn how to use the tools.

As folks know, I do a leveraged PP and the relevant anecdote is lost money on UGLD 5 years straight. Last time I checked, the least profitable purchase is up 70+%.

Just buy the stuff, rebalance when your band is hit and be happy.

No, duration in a fund is the average weighted duration of all bonds in the fund. You can do the same with two funds as well by weighting them differently. So, using the OP you could decide you wanted 10 as your duration and 50/50 comes pretty close to that. Accordingly, with a 1% interest change we...

Firms offering no commissions on trading: Charles Schwab (announced 10/1/19) TD Ameritrade (announced 10/2/19, effective 10/3/19) Interactive Brokers ( the IBKR-Lite tier ) Who's next? This is a boon to anyone desiring to do a DIY stock portfolio consisting of dozens or scores of stocks. However, t...

From someone who has backtested a lot, do not think you will get accurate results unless you have a data source that accounts for index changes on the day they happened historically. Anything not using the above, will be grossly overstated. (Perhaps the Dow is doable by hand, but at least do your ho...

I don’t have Schwab so I can’t compare, but pure commission wise if you are swinging a really big bat fixed commission is cheaper than IB.

IB provides a ton of methods to control your trade. Of note, as of Friday IB now offers a commission free trading account for US stocks and ETFs.

If you want to buy individual stocks but are afraid of a company going out of business then simply pick a large or mid cap index and use a longer term momentum or some type of annual quality screen. If the stock gets booted from the index and/or doesn’t make your screen get rid of it. That doesn’t m...

Fuhget about it, it don’t mean nuthin.

Sophie sums it up nicely. My comments were not meant to be positive or negative...just to point out the PITA factor.