The Intersection of Personal Finance, Economics, and Politics.
You know how on Facebook most people will only post positive messages and status updates, and tag themselves only in happy photos? There are even Facebook groups dedicated to posting only positive things, in order to keep up the facade of a sterilized perfect life. We’ve all got that one friend who tosses up the [...]
If you’ve been around a while… you know all about this series. Approximately one entry per month where we look at the way puts and calls are trading on the ETF SPY (a S&P 500 ETF), and use those to divine the future based on the disparity between those prices and where the stock is [...]
Today was the all time high closing price for the dividend reinvested, inflation adjusted S&P 500. I know that much of the financial world has been rambling about the continual new highs in the stock market. You haven’t been, though… you read my post earlier this year (or read my Tweet this morning) where I [...]
“If I was running $1 million today, or $10 million for that matter, I’d be fully invested. Anyone who says that size does not hurt investment performance is selling. The highest rates of return I’ve ever achieved were in the 1950s. I killed the Dow. You ought to see the numbers. But I was [...]
Below is a calculator which will calculate the return an investor might have made buying and selling gold. (Note: for the first time you try to calculate a return, please give it a few seconds – the data file is a bit over 1MB. After the first usage it should be noticeably quicker.) If you [...]
There’s a few topics we like to return to now and again on this website – our “go-tos” if you will. A few years back we noted that options, although not instruments that we often use, are awesome since the price signals they give us let us estimate three different things: Direction – Will a [...]
Editor: On May 8, 2013 there was a new dividend adjusted closing high in the S&P 500. Retained for posterity: On March 28, 2013 the S&P 500 Nominal Closing price ‘broke’ the record, so I updated the article. Sorry, folks – based on my daily CPI adjusted total return data, we’re still 3.9% off the [...]
One necessary ingredient in planning for your financial future is estimating how much your money will return while invested. Since you can’t tell the future, the best thing you can (likely) do is look to the past. But, you might say, “Past performance does not guarantee future returns!” That doesn’t mean that past performance is [...]
Update: Preliminary April data added! For those who have asked, this data is usually a bit behind the data for the S&P 500. The calculator below uses long run 10-year Treasury Data from Robert Shiller to compute Treasury returns, based on reinvesting the coupon payments. You can see the total returns for the 10 Year [...]
Although this blog regularly deals with personal finance, economics and politics, our interests span a wide array of other areas of life. One of my personal favorite blogs, The Volokh Conspiracy (a legal blog that has a mostly Libertarian bent, I’d say if I was permitted to classify them) recently featured a fascinating article by Nick Rosenkranz on a [...]
