Early Retirement Extreme Forums

By looking at the active cases, it seems the COVID-19 will peak around mid May to end of May even for the whole world. Many western countries already peaked.With strict lock down like China, Italy, it peaks in 1 month. With relaxed policy like Sweden, it will peak in 2 month. The difference between ...

@J The good news or bad news is that most government are under-reporting cases. It's due to economic. The governments tend to only test and report severe cases. The countries with highest death rate are likely most under-reported their case numbers. e.g. UK. Death to recovered ratio is 66 to 1! That...

@ertyu That's the issue of market timing. My strategy is I don't get in and out of market for the majority of my portfolio. It remains long term investment that I don't try to sell them before the next big crash. @Lemur Look at Italy, before the virus, its economy was in a much worse shape than US. ...

Few days ago, I had the urge to convert everything to cash but resisted after reviewing my investment plan and stick with it. My stocks still keeping the out performance with SP500. It's 10% above the SP500 Year to date (Since Dec 31, 2019) during the worse panic of last few weeks. It's consistent ...

@Bankai,
I am not buying. I've already fully invested.
It doesn't meant it'll go up from here if it's near bottom. It can flat line for a while. In 2008, market bottomed couple months after VIX peaked. Now VIX looks like has reached peak.

@wolf No indicator. Just feeling. Stock market is forward looking. It looks few months down the road. As mentioned above, VIX has peaked for now. Market knows the US case number is increasing exponentially. Market knows it'll peak in a few months due to the exponential growth. That US may experience...

Few days ago, I had the urge to convert everything to cash but resisted after reviewing my investment plan and stick with it. My stocks still keeping the out performance with SP500. It's 10% above the SP500 Year to date (Since Dec 31, 2019) during the worse panic of last few weeks. It's consistent o...

Don't eat raw. Cooking will kill the virus. Fruits with skin is no problem. Wash hand with soap before and after eating. infection from food is rare. It's mostly transmitted by breathing the droplet from the mouth/nose of infected person. When I go out for grocery once a week, I'll wear safety eye g...

I don't get why western governments are not focusing on the most effective measures? Italy did an experiment in a small town where they managed to reduce the infection rate to 0. They achieved this by lots of testing even for asymptomatic cases. and there are lots of asymptomatic/mild cases. That's ...

The virus in China is under control. The active case is in decline. The problem is the active cases are increasing outside of China. This is what Mr.Market is worrying about. It's just started outside of China. No end in sight. No countries will quarantine the whole country like China did.Cough. . M...

It's interesting to see how a subset of SP500 performs vs SP500 in extreme volatility. Note: the precise weighted beta of this portfolio should be 0.87. Previously, I just added them together and divided the sum by 67. The correct formula is sum of [(individual beta)X (Individual stock value/total p...

It works sometimes but doesn't work in the long term because of two extremes: Stock rises/drops rapidly from strike price in either direction. When the stock rises too much and gets called away, you have to buy it back at a higher cost which the premium may not be enough to offset the higher price. ...

@Ego

A possibility is: for the "cured" patients, they were not cured at all. They were almost cured and then released too early thus caused reinfection.

@Jacob, BRK.B is over-rated at current market cap size. It performs very similar to SPY without the dividend. If I am going to buy something when market is down 50%, I'll buy high quality dividend stocks, or a single dividend ETF/ REIT ETF for simplicity. When the market is down, we have living expe...

This crazy market drop has to stop soon. For couple days, the market was trying to squeeze some positive gain in the morning and it turned red in the second half of the day. SP500 is already downed 12% . I know the valuation of US market is elevated but Chinese stock market bottomed at around -11% t...

just a reminder for retired folks, don't speculate based on short term noise.
Gilead Sciences, Inc. (GILD) is in a downhill slide for 5 years already. It's not wise to go against a tide.

Wow! 1/03% = 33%. 33% allocated to a speculative mining ETF. That's too much speculation. I wouldn't even put 5% to a mining ETF. I wouldn't buy it in the first place.

To be a successful long term investor, we need to refrain from short term trades based on speculation. It's specially important not to speculate as a retiree. It's not a matter of which direction it'll go. It's matter of: is it a short term or long term investment? Can you afford to wait? IMHO, VanE...

Date Feb 27, 2020:

2020 YTD performance:
Virtual DIY fund (made of stocks from SP500): 2.08%
SP500: -2.95%

Out performance: 5.03%

If going off of historical performance, I always thought that a trivial answer would be to buy a S&P500 index fund then double down on margin. Most years you would beat the index! It's very tempting to use leverage but it's not good to lose sleep at night. Why not multiple 10% by 1.5 and get 15...