The Permanent Portfolio, Investing, Finance and Random Thoughts.
Archive for January, 2009
What Permanent Portfolio asset will win in 2009?
Dust off your crystal ball and vote in the poll on what Permanent Portfolio asset class will do best in 2009. Will stocks rebound? Will long term bonds have enough power to save the portfolio again? Is inflation finally coming to make gold soar? Or will it be a year of people holding onto their cash?
Vote in the poll to the right. The poll is open until the end of the month. Feel free to talk about your prediction in the comments and we’ll review them in December ’09. If you’re good enough, maybe we can get you a job at a Hedge Fund. 
Permanent Portfolio Wins 2008 Lazy Portfolio Smackdown
3 years ago
by craigr
in Permanent Portfolio
The Permanent Portfolio Allocation won the 2008 Lazy Portfolio Smackdown contest among all professionally recommended asset allocation strategies. This contest tracks a couple dozen portfolios that are designed to be easy to implement with low maintenance (hence “Lazy”):
Lazy Portfolio Smackdown Results 2008
They’re reporting a 2008 result of +1.2% for the Permanent Portfolio strategy with the next closest rival at -18% and worse.
It’s nice to be #1, but the Permanent Portfolio is really not designed for hot and risky performance and will not likely be #1 every year. Instead it is designed to have consistent, stable and safe growth of money with enough diversification to prevent major losses of capital. Over time this performance will add up to big gains and allow you to sleep at night.
Let’s hope 2009 is better for everyone no matter how you invest.
Permanent Portfolio Results 2008 – A Disaster Averted
3 years ago
UPDATED: This posting now lists (mostly) finalized 2008 total returns information (interest and dividends included) from the listed stock indices. The final numbers won’t change much.
“The best kept secret in the investing world: Almost nothing turns out as expected.”
– Harry Browne
Investors won’t be forgetting 2008 any time soon. Yet as bad as it was, the Permanent Portfolio survived intact with a profit for the year of about two percent.
The year included oil and other commodities going to record highs. Real estate prices fell at a rate not seen since the Great Depression. Century old banks that were leveraged to their eyeballs blew up and vanished. Iceland, a first-world country, went broke. Bernard Madoff, one of the founders of NASDAQ, admitted his hedge fund was a $50 Billion Ponzi Scheme. The Treasury Secretary and Fed Chairman openly talked about The End of The World As We Know It if we don’t “do something”. That “something” of course meant big bailouts for banks, irresponsible home buyers and automakers (and maybe more — to be continued).
By the time 2008 was over, the markets were down by one of the largest single year amounts since 1931.
