Best inflationary investment

[Guest JackRiver]

nodnub

 

All I will say is that the positives that you point out would also apply to UNP.  I'm not buying UNP.

 

Yours

 

Jack River

[JAllen]

I haven't been able to distinguish greatly between UP and BNI either.  BNI has the least captive traffic out of the top four railroads.  The one thing that I haven't been able to quantify/verify is how much of BNI's coal traffic is truly "below market rates" or being renegotiated in the next few years. I believe that I looked into a revenue per coal ton/mile for UP and BNI and there wasn't a glaring difference that would indicate BNI has been charging below market rates.  UP and BNI both have track in and out of the PRB and I believe they both have traffic in and out of LA. 

 

The rail being able to charge 180% of variable costs to captive traffic was interesting to read about and promising but BNI has the least.  I was thinking that BNI might have the most captive traffic making it more attractive than others but I found disconfirming info.  The one cool thing about (somewhat/previously) regulated industries is that there is a plethora of information from reliable sources.

 

You know it's a good industry when your customers are taking you to court over your prices!  Only 3 cases since deregulation (1980) that have resulted in refunds to customers (but all in the last few years).  That is a strong case against re-regulation.

[prevalou]

Actually I would prefer UP to BNI: better capitalized and less expensive (no Buffett premium) for the same job. the locomotives and railcars are older but it is not a bigt part of their properties. They have more land than BNI too

 

 

[vinod1]

I have invested in the 3.6% real and 3.0% real series of I-Bonds, currently yielding in the 8-9% range.  I consider them to be the gold-standard in terms of the lowest risk investment that is possible. This is a protection aganist "Risk's that I dont know that I dont know" or "Black Swans" or "Hedge" or just plan something really bad happening. I had this allocation right from the day I started investing and plan to have  in future regardless of current economic events.

 

Vinod

[Guest Broxburnboy]

"As you say, as long as you believe the CPI number"

 

Good point. Any discussion of inflation which involves calculation based on the official CPI numbers could be suspect due to the

changes made in how CPI is calculated over the years:

 

http://www.shadowstats.com/article/consumer_price_index

 

 

[bookie71]

For probably about 25 years we had 3 tax returns that were part of the CPI. One was a partnership and two were individuals.  About the time the article states we were told they no longer wanted the costs of the returns.