In case you missed it, here’s a summary of the ETF topics and market reviews I posted to my blog during the week ending on 12/23/2012.
Anxiety about the fiscal cliff outcome was overridden by continued hope that a compromise would be in the cards which lifted the S&P 500 by about 1%.
Friday’s sell off brought back the sobering reality that ‘compromise’ is a dirty word as nothing was accomplished on Thursday night with the result that the markets headed south but not as severely as it originally appeared. I happened to be watching the futures and saw a flash crash take the Dow briefly down by 350 points while the S&P 500 dropped about 40 points.
By Friday morning things had calmed down a bit and helping the indexes later on were well timed news reports that the warring parties were still engaged in conversations. So, hope is still on the agenda, and the drama will continue for the remainder of this year.
Over past week, we covered the following:
One Man’s Opinion: Can We Live On Stimulus Forever?
New ETFs On The Block: Advisorshares Pring Turner Business Cycle ETF (DBIZ)
ETF/No Load Fund Tracker Newsletter For Friday, December 21, 2012
Weekly StatSheet For The ETF/No Load Fund Tracker Newsletter – Updated Through 12/20/2012
Equities Advance On Fiscal Cliff Hopes; Europe Little Changed As Optimism Fades
Fiscal Cliff Regression As Negotiations Stall; Europe Rises On German Data
7 ETF Model Portfolios You Can Use – Updated through 12/18/2012
Equity Indexes Go Vertical On Fiscal Cliff Hope; Eerie Chart Of The Day; Europe Tracks Higher
Hopium Lifts Equities As Budget Talks Are Still Alive; Europe Turns Lower On Cliff Worries
ETFs/Mutual Funds On The Cutline – Updated Through 12/14/2012
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Comments 2
The Most recent AAII Journal highlights the new book, “The Permanent Portfolio” by Craig Rowland and J.M. Lawson and provides a 4 equal piece strategy that involves re-balancing holdings in only a broad index fund, cash, a long term treasury fund and physical or ETF gold. They posit that this approach will have a lower overall execution cost than PRPFX and annualized returns that are better. They do not clearly provide a 100% ETF portfolio to implement this approach. Comment? Thanks.
Al,
That’s what the original concept was as written in Harry Browne’s book. I am not sure if the manager’s of the actual PRPFX fund have modified the composition or not. My ETF version, as featured in Wednesday’s model ETF portfolio update has outperformed the PRPFX fund by a considerable margin in 2012 (+8.67% vs. +5.23% as of 12/21/12). While it’s far easier to simply buy PRPFX, when looking at the difference for this period, it would have paid to own the ETF components.
Ulli…