TLT Historical?

Discussion of the Bond portion of the Permanent Portfolio

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vnatale
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TLT Historical?

Post by vnatale » Mon Dec 09, 2019 7:37 pm

Is there a consensus here that TLT is the best proxy for gauging historical performance on the proscribed, pure Permanent Portfolio long-term bond holdings?

If so, is there a better place than here to get its historical prices?

https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/ ... historical

Its prices start at 12/9/09. I got it by choosing the "Max" historical prices. I thought the EFT started 10 years ago today, which would have been an odd date. Then it immediately hit me that "Max" must mean the last ten years.

Is there a source that shows more than ten years?

Do the prices on this show the bonds paying interest? I have never owned an EFT (have owned less than half dozen stocks but lots of mutual funds). EFTs do NOT pay interest or dividends? Therefore, somehow those ARE reflected in the EFT price?

Finally, I took what was able to download from the above (the ten years) and computed the daily gain / loss, cumulative gain / loss, and what a theoretical $10,000 invested 10 years ago would look like on a day-by-day basis. And, put the last into a graph. Looking at all of it does well demonstrate the volatility of the investment. That $10,000 invested ten years ago today would be $14,849 on Friday.

Here is what the graph looks like. Anyone have explanations for the major turns in it?
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Above provided by: Vinny, who always says: "I only regret that I have but one lap to give to my cats." AND "I'm a more-is-more person."
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mathjak107
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Re: TLT Historical?

Post by mathjak107 » Tue Dec 10, 2019 5:44 am

tlt trades on fear , greed and perception just like equities ... these create high volatility in it , especially in a flight to safety ..you can see why i like trading it ... whether the trend is up or down it tends to roll back over itself creating small entry and exit points for me regularly .

based on just the last few weeks the difference between where it was and where it is now would be about a 24k difference , as the gains evaporated , if i did nothing but sit with it , since the gains were not enough to trigger any rebalancing ..

while i did not catch the highest point a few weeks ago when i sold and rebought , i did capture about 14k of it .

so rebought what i had and banked the 14k .

of course that defeats the purpose of having the pp if you use it as a trading vehicle so i don't expect others to do it . but you can see in the chart why TLT is ripe for that kind of trading and picking the low hanging fruit . the best times are when the equities market is volatile
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Re: TLT Historical?

Post by Pet Hog » Tue Dec 10, 2019 6:26 am

Yahoo has TLT data back to 2002. Both "closing prices" and "dividend-adjusted closing prices," as well as all dividends and their payment dates. That Nasdaq link has only one set of prices -- and it's not obvious if they are dividend-adjusted or not.
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jhogue
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Re: TLT Historical?

Post by jhogue » Tue Dec 10, 2019 9:18 am

Vinny,

I bought TLT when I first bought into the Permanent Portfolio. After about 6 months, I switched to 30 year T-bonds held in a tax-deferred brokerage account.
“Groucho Marx wrote:
A stock trader asked him, "Groucho, where do you put all your money?" Groucho was said to have replied, "In Treasury bonds", and the trader said, "You can't make much money on those." Groucho said, "You can if you have enough of them!"
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