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turar

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Posts posted by turar

  1. I can't seem to find an equal weighted Wilshire 4500 or extended market (ex-SP500) etf. Do you know if one exists in ETF or Mutual fund form? The results of SP500, SP600 and RAFI equal weights don't look as good.

     

    It doesn't exist.  It's a theoretical portfolio that Wilshire constructs and calculates every month:

    https://www.wilshire.com/indexcalculator/index.html

     

    Equal weight portfolio have one big design problem in real-life.  The monthly re-balancing to get back to equal weights for 4500 stocks imposes huge frictional costs that really punishes returns.

     

    I use the Wilshire 4500 to get a feel for what the average small cap stock does each month.  I call it the dart-throwing monkey portfolio.  So my example upthread is not to suggest an ETF or fund, but rather to answer the question of what type of stocks rebound most after a sharp bear market.

     

    Hope it helps,

    wabuffo

     

    VXF?

  2. Been rolling a number of my long positions into two year, deep in-the-money LEAPS which has freed up 40-50% of the cash in the positions.

     

     

    Will be missing out on some sizable dividends, but have same notional exposure for capital gains and will hopefully make more than the dividends missed by putting the incremental capital to work as new names go down further.

    Not a bad idea at all.

    some of those premiums are pretty high looking

  3. What we are experiencing is the decline of the American empire --- the decline of its importance on the world stage. This happens to all great empires eventually. Nonetheless it is painful to watch.

     

     

    If you look at all previous empires in recent centuries, they're still around and most of them became regular old first and more rarely second world countries -- UK, Japan, Spain, France, Turkey, etc. The big problem though, at least historically, is that the big shift from them being empires to no longer being empires required major wars to be fought out.

  4. Doing what you suggest has real costs.  Huge costs.  What if massive changes where made in 1970 to reduce world population and curb fossil fuel use.  We wouldn't have saved ourselves from anything but imagined demons, but we would all be significantly poorer today.

    The cost of climate change is like an ultimate economic externality. I'd argue that cost is already large and getting larger, it's just being paid by others.

  5. We had a semi-Indian wedding, can't remember how many people it was. Anyway, we spent about $10K on it, including a week stay at 2 rental houses on the beach for close family. And we got $9K or so back in wedding gifts. As in checks/cash in envelopes. If we did it right, we could have made money on our wedding. :) Not sure if checks in envelopes is a cultural thing though and not as widely practiced in more traditional American/Caucasian weddings.

  6. When an innocent person is killed in war, who bears moral responsibility? The free country acting to protect its citizens from slaughter or the people who made such action necessary?

    When the "free country acting to protect its citizens" is operating flying killer robot drones to terrorize women and children of a land half a world away, you gotta stop and ask yourself -- "are we the bad guys?". "Are we the Death Star?" "Are we the ultimate terrorists?"

  7. The easiest way to outperform is to buy an index fund. You'll outperform 90%+ of other investors.

     

    Even that's not simple though. Vanguard alone offers way more than one. As of January 2016, which index fund should I choose --  S&P or Emerging Markets? And that's just two options.

  8. Yes, as TwoCities said, check out Altius. It is a diversified mining royalty company operating in Canada that is operated by some pretty smart guys with a proven track record. There is an extensive thread on Altius on this board.

    Wow, that thread was started January 8, 2011. Almost 5 years in, ALS is down 13% in CAD terms, while CAD itself is down another 25% on top of that.

  9. I will need to move a pension account into a "locked in RSP" account (LIRA) with one of the brokers. Unfortunately, IB doesn't offer locked in accounts, so I'm trying to choose between Virtual Brokers, BMO, or TD. I do have a smaller VirtualBrokers account, and they've been mostly OK, just that their trading interface feels a little odd, let alone that there are several. Does anyone have any experience with BMO, TD, or others?

  10. Premfan's idea 2 but slightly different worked for my friend. He started buying in 2009 in Arizona and got 100% bank financing from banks who were suffering from receiver's high billings. His cost was half his competitors across the street so his rates are permanently better. A few simple changes like  paint and furniture and 20 shady canopy parking spots resulted in the value tripling. The bank soon sold a second nearby and now he is building a third.

     

    Did your friend use the patel employee arbitrage system?( This isn't copyrighted... yet.).  Buy hotel and fire all staff members. Replace staff with family members or friends from India.  Creating a win/win.  The employees make more money here in the U.S. vs India. Plus with hard work maybe in the future one of the patels can finance them a hotel of there own. The hotel owner now has a sustainable competitive advantage with the lowest cost of labor. That is the key element of the Patel hotel empire.  Many new families to the US from Pakistan and etc are copying this blueprint.

     

    There's actually a fantastic article about this. Oldie, but goodie: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=patel+motel+cartel&safe=off  (first link in search results)

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