Tag: commodities

Can we increase the Safe Withdrawal Rate with Momentum/Trend-Following? – SWR Series Part 63

November 12, 2025 – Hello, readers! Welcome to another installment of the Safe Withdrawal Rate Series. Please see this landing page for an introduction to the Series and a summary of all the other parts so far. After a long hiatus from writing due to my busy travel schedule during the summer and lots of other commitments, I’ve found my groove again and put together something that has been on my mind for many years: Is there an asset allocation strategy that could have improved historical safe withdrawal rates? Specifically, could we devise an asset allocation strategy that shifts weights between different asset classes in a way to improve investment results? Of course, that’s easier said than done, but there are some interesting ideas out there. One such approach is to tactically shift asset class weights based on asset return momentum. Some people also refer to this flavor as “Trend-Following.” If you want to sound really techy and fancy, you’d also call this “Tactical Asset Allocation” (TAA), “Managed Futures,” or “Commodity Trading Advisers” (CTA) strategies; however, these three terms often encompass many other dynamic asset allocation strategies, not just momentum.

In any case, maybe a momentum strategy can help us avoid some of the worst historical asset market disasters if we could sell equities early enough during a bear market. How much Sequence Risk could we eliminate? By how much can we raise our safe withdrawal rate if we could have reliably avoided some of the worst historical asset market disasters? Let’s take a look..

Continue reading “Can we increase the Safe Withdrawal Rate with Momentum/Trend-Following? – SWR Series Part 63” →

Using Gold as a Hedge against Sequence Risk – SWR Series Part 34

January 20, 2020 – Happy New Year! It’s time for another installment in the Safe Withdrawal Series! Here’s a topic that I’ve thought about for a while and that was also requested dozens, maybe even hundreds of times from commenters: What about gold? Gold has been a safe haven asset for many decades (Centuries? Millenials???) and it should have the potential to hedge against Sequence of Return Risk. And I recently found this article on Yahoo Finance: “The world’s super-rich are hoarding physical gold“. Maybe it’s just click-bait. Yahoo Finance must have lowered its standards substantially because they even (re-)published one of my articles last year. 🙂

But seriously, in light of the recent runup in gold prices, rising interest by the world’s super-rich, and the many requests by readers, I’ve finally gotten around to studying this subject in the context of Sequence Risk. Let’s take a look at how useful gold would be as a hedge against running out of money in retirement…
Continue reading “Using Gold as a Hedge against Sequence Risk – SWR Series Part 34” →

Passive income through option writing: Part 3

March 27, 2019. Back in 2016, I wrote a few posts on trading derivatives, especially options, to generate (mostly) passive income. See the options trading landing page for more info. I’m still running that same strategy but it definitely evolved quite a bit over time. This might be a good time to write a quick update on what I’m doing and what I’ve changed since then. And for everyone who’s wondering what’s the use of this: I’m planning a future post on how selling options may help with Sequence Risk, so this is all very, very relevant even for folks in the FIRE crowd!

So, let’s take a look…

Continue reading “Passive income through option writing: Part 3” →

Guest Post: Farmland Is The New Gold

Happy Wednesday! I have been busy with the move this week so this is a good time to run a guest post! Today, we feature a guest post by Scott, who runs the Basic Capital Forum. I don’t really feature guest posts very often despite getting tons of proposals – my fellow bloggers probably know what I’m talking about! But a guest post about an alternative asset class with pretty cool return stats is actually something I like to publish. So, take it over, Scott…

Are the boom times back? Judging from investor sentiment, it looks like they are. Despite some recent volatility, the bull market is still in full swing and according to data from fund tracker EPFR Global, markets attracted $102b into equity funds over the past four weeks. Behind the curtain, the euphoria might be unjustified – there are a few warning signs that investors may be ignoring. Firstly, stocks are over-valued by many measures. The Shiller CAPE hit 31 in January – the same vicinity of its peak in 1929. Warren Buffet’s measure states that stocks are overvalued by 40% as of November. The most over-weights stocks are FAANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) with forward-PE-ratios even higher than those in the overall S&P500.

Secondly, the level of private debt is enormous. According to the IIF, global debt hit $233 trillion this month. If global GDP is roughly 73 trillion, the global debt is 310% of global GDP. To put this in perspective, private debt to GDP only surpassed 150% in 1929 and 2008. In this time of overvalued stocks, one could make the case for investing in gold. The issue with gold, of course, is that it produces nothing and it has no inherent value. The enterprising investor, however, could invest in the 21st-century gold: Farmland. Continue reading “Guest Post: Farmland Is The New Gold” →

Gold vs. Paper Money: a rant

Have you ever seen these TV commercials:

“Governments are trillions of dollars in debt and are printing paper money at record pace. So, don’t invest your retirement in paper money. Transfer your IRA to a Gold IRA at XYZ Capital. Call now for your free IRA transfer kit.”

I have to cringe every time I see or hear that. What deceptive marketing! Our financial assets (equity ETFs and Mutual Funds mostly) are not invested in paper money, they are merely denominated in paper money. In fact, if people are so troubled by measuring their equity portfolio in USD paper money, they are free to measure it any way they want: ounces of gold, metric tons of copper, bushels of wheat, gummy bears, the choices are endless. And by the way, don’t forget that gold is denominated in paper money USD as well! Continue reading “Gold vs. Paper Money: a rant” →