Tag: gold

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” →

Inflation Risk for Early Retirees – Part 4: Hedging

Here’s the next installment of the inflation series, joint with my blogging buddy Actuary on FIRE. Check out the other parts here:

Today’s post is about one issue I raised in the post last month: What asset classes – if any – are useful in hedging against inflation? Simple question, not an easy answer. It all depends on the horizon!

Continue reading “Inflation Risk for Early Retirees – Part 4: Hedging” →

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” →

The Ultimate Guide to Safe Withdrawal Rates – Part 7: A Google Sheets Toolbox

Update 8/29/2018: Check out Part 28 as well with some enhancements to the Google Sheet!

Update: We posted the results from parts 1 through 8 as a Social Science Research Network (SSRN) working paper in pdf format:

Safe Withdrawal Rates: A Guide for Early Retirees (SSRN WP#2920322)

One commenter the other day had a good suggestion: Publish the Excel spreadsheet that we use in our safe withdrawal rate research. Great idea! There is only one problem: we didn’t use Excel to calculate any of the SWRs. We did use Excel to create some tables, but the computation and most charts were all done using GNU Octave, a free number-crunching programming language, similar to Matlab.

But we still liked the idea of creating a tool to run some quick SWR calculations. In Octave, we can calculate a large number of simulations and calculate safe withdrawal rates over a wide range of parameter value assumptions. Millions and millions of SWRs over many different combinations of parameter values (retirement horizons, final asset value target, equity shares, other withdrawal assumptions). That would have been cumbersome, probably even impossible to implement in Excel. But a quick snapshot on how one single set of SWR parameters would have performed over time? That’s actually quite easy to do, even though there are 1,700+ different retirement cohorts between 1871 and 2015.

Continue reading “The Ultimate Guide to Safe Withdrawal Rates – Part 7: A Google Sheets Toolbox” →

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” →