No Free Cake

Bond and Stock Price Returns vs. Total Returns

I don't think using DVY as a proxy for "dividend stocks" is a fair telling of the story for the time period shown. DVY was heavily weighted in financials in this time period and, as we all know, financials badly underperformed. Just look at a price chart for XLF for this time period and you can see what impaired DVY.

DVY's underperformance shouldn't indict a dividend strategy in general or other dividend stock products that were more balanced. It's a good lesson learned about highly concentrated portfolios - but not dividend stocks.

Construct a Fixed Income Portfolio with 5%+ Dividends Using ETFs

Was anyone else confused reading this? If the author is going to discuss bond ETFs in the same breath as equity ETFs he should be clearer what sentences pertain to what.

Such as when he suggests digging into each ETFs holdings to determine each company's payout ratio. How does that apply to the bonds, REIT, or even preferred stock ETFs mentioned? Huh?

And, frankly, talking about "dividends" for equities and bonds at the same time is very odd to me. Bond prices, by definition, hover around some baseline (par) whereas equity pricing has no similar bound.

There are some potentially interesting ideas here, but, I think better care should have been taken in the presentation.

Time for California Muni Bond Investors to Take a Stand

California is clever. The IOU's are a much cheaper way to borrow money than to issue new bonds. Heck, they even said they might allow you to pay a variety of bills with the IOU. Sort of like printing their own money. Like I said, very clever.

ETFs: Chart Trend Comparisons

No one else has said so but I sure like the charts. Thanks

Six Month Correlation Among iShares ETFs

User 75976, AZGM, and User 95663, correlation is a standard investment metric. We can argue it's usefulness, but, it's a common tool. Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) is based on it.

Even before Richard commented it was obvious the baseline was the SP500. You could see that since IVV was listed with a correlation of 1.0 in the 6-month chart. Even without that, in the US correlations are generally assumed to be the S&P unless stated otherwise.

If you follow Richard long enough you'll actually learn something. But, you do have to actually know something about investing to appreciate some of his comments.

The Road Ahead for Investors

I like reading Geoff's articles, and I bought his QRP, but, it still puzzles me why he and so many others necessarily think US equities must go up in any reasonable timeframe.

Japan's Nikkei index is lower today than it was 25 years ago. Certainly there were some tradeable peaks and valleys for the nimble and lucky but counter to the idea of rising equities. What is so intrinsically different about the US that this couldn't happen here?

In other words, just because the line has been going up for some time, why must it continue to do so?

Bye-Bye Dividends

Ronald Pires, retained earnings only have positive impact on share price if the company uses that money wisely. Many many times this has not been true, especially as companies grow larger. Sometimes you want to buy a company for growth, sometimes for a share of its earnings - depends on the company and your situation.