What's in Your Portfolio

[tw]

Unpopular realities were discussed in 2004: investments by Wall Street professionals underperform the market. Financial professionals tend to be inferior investors. While also reaping high profits. Since their purpose is profits; not the product - service of their customers. Anyone with years experience in mutual funds typically would have learned this the hard way. Better mutual funds tend to be index funds - where no professional makes decisions.

But it gets worse.

From CBS Marketwatch.com entitled 401(k) documentary ruffles feathers:

The PBS "Frontline" documentary "The Retirement Gamble" debuted on Tuesday night [23 Apr 2013], and it made for a sobering introduction to the American savings crisis. If you've got 53 minutes to spare, and you're the kind of person who's galvanized by bad news, you can watch the entire report online at this link. I recommend it as a concise introduction to the biggest shift in the retirement landscape in our lifetimes - the migration from a corporate pension model to a self-funded model that depends on personal savings and investments.

When Frontline (PBS) does a report, informed citizens watch. Frontline, for example, in four reports repeatedly demonstrated the myths of Saddam's WMDs. If still investing in mutual funds (as if Wall Street professionals are best advise), then you still did not learn why mutual funds are typicallly a poor investments. View The Retirement Gamble here.

Anyone who invests should also know of better investment instruments that many Wall Street professionals fear you might learn. Michael Sapir, founder of ProShares and a champion of the ETF

In essence it is a mutual fund that trades on a stock exchange. So ETFs end up having greater liquidity during the hours of the day than a mutual fund that you generally can only come in and out of one time a day. You trade exchange-traded funds like a stock. Generally speaking, ETFs are passively managed or indexed.

Review investment advise in 2004 in Portfolio 101. Mutual funds were defined even then. Frontline adds more facts to the same conclusion.

Also demonstrated was what the informed and most easily brainwashed (depmats) do. Cheapshots.
Frontline is for adults. Review what was obvious 8 years ago in Portfolio 101.

If you did not do the math, then learn it from Frontline. Some finally did their homework. And were shocked. They also learned the hard way. What's in your portfolio?

[IamSam]

I think younger workers are certainly going to have a more difficult time figuring out how to live in retirement than workers in my generation and our parent's generation had. Retired workers who are now in their 70's and above probably had it easier than many. They had the advantage of working and saving in those prosperous American decades right after the end of WWII.

It seems to me that retirement planning was worth doing up to around the time of Reagan. Every since the financial Bonzo tricks that were introduced back then, it's become ever more difficult to figure out sane financial plans for a life of full retirement at age 65.

As a boomer who entered the work force full time after I got my degree in 1980, I joined the rest of my generation with the country and the economy already under-going a retreat from the halcyon post war era.

These days we get to wonder if and how much of what the government promised us from all those nose to the wheel payroll taxes will ever actually materialize. The large boomer generation paid out a considerable sum in social security taxes that allowed the pols to play fast and loose with money that belonged to all of us taxpayers - NOT the rapacious members of Congress with their pet wars and pet military bases in the old home district and pet tax subsidies to their pet special interest groups.

We have been lied to by the government at every turn. No surprise there, but the lies have become more and more egregious, so that people in their early sixties and younger must worry that Medicare will be seriously tampered with - maybe even vanish. We have no idea what will become of Social Security, either. Halliburton may decide that baby needs a new pair of shoes and those of us who are in the unenviable position of depending on Social Security may end up living in chicken coops again. Worst of all, we might have to move in with one of our kids - probably the one who happens to have a fold down ironing board hanging over the kitchen door - almost as good as a Murphy bed!

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by IamSam

Halliburton may decide that baby needs a new pair of shoes

Halliburton sold off its war services division in 2007 and is now just an oil services company. They are a generator of wealth now.

[Gravdigr]

What's in Your Portfolio[?]

Cash.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Gravdigr

Cash.

If not averaging 8% annually on that money, then you are losing money.

[IamSam]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Halliburton sold off its war services division in 2007 and is now just an oil services company. They are a generator of wealth now.

We certainly have had our differences, but I have to admit that you have the best sense of humor evah! Yeah, old Halli is generating dollars faster than the Treasury can print them out. You never saw a happier group of CEO's and major shareholders in your life - especially when you scan down the list of Halliburton's affiliate corporations.

Much of the gang these days is going into the fracking game full speed ahead. The fav techniques out West here is to construct endless roads back and forth across public lands for thousands of miles (that means the lands that belong to ME, Sam; and YOU, Undertoad, BTW). Once Halliburton and the rest of 'em has pumped ever last molecule of natural gas out from between the layers of shale, and caused the Colorado and Green Rivers (among others) to go dry since fracking requires mucho aqua, the energy guys will pack into their crew cab, hit the liquor store drive thru for some Coors and Glenlivit and are never seen in those parts again.

Whatever rural region in the West that has just been raped in this manner faces an expensive massive clean-up which will never really end. The dry soil around here has a tendency to turn into dust and blow away if you scrape it off the land's surface to put in an unpaved road. And there's that nagging little water problem. Have the aquifers now become depleted or contaminated with fracking chemicals? Can the rancher across the way get his water rights back?

Who knows? But the taxpayers are either going to have to fork out a bunch of cash in an attempt to mitigate the huge environmental damage that we all now get to deal with. Or, we could do what the now defunct US Uranium Mining Corporation did to the poor little Colorado mining town of Uravan, since the Corporation CEO's couldn't have cared less about either safety or the environment. It was much easier to just send the bull dozers in to flatten every building in sight and then pave the entire thing over with asphalt. They even made a deal with the CO Department of Highways to re-route Colorado 145, so that it no longer goes by what has become a huge and distasteful grave by the side of the old road.

The Uranium Company then declared bankruptcy which meant it never had to pay a penny for clean-up, and its various affiliates were gobbled up by affiliates from other energy and hard rock mining outfits and - POOF!

Yep, creates so much money that those offshore banks may have to start digging under the ocean to store it all.

******************

Me? I'd stick with gold if I could. Since gold is out of the question, given my slender resources, my portfolio consists of items that would fill a whacko survivalist type with joy - Coleman lanterns, tents, non perishable food items, maps, The Army Manual for Escape and Evasion, etc. Hey! At least collecting all this stuff keeps me off the streets.

[Undertoad]

Unless your miserable life last winter was heated by solar, wind, or lit unicorn farts, feel free to turn off the hyperbolic bullshit factory.

[orthodoc]

Fracking pisses me off. It's big (no, huge) business getting a pass on the regs that anyone else would have to observe, because it's Haliburton - creating their little shanty-towns in areas that aren't prepared for the traffic, road wear, noise, or sudden increase in school enrollment without any increase in tax base (the guys working the frack well sites stay on site usually, but their families come along and stay nearby - the kids are enrolled in school but families aren't paying school taxes, so resources get overstretched - until everyone leaves).

The wells and holding ponds are set up literally in long-term residents' backyards. The noise is enough to drive people crazy. PA has a regulation on noise now, but it isn't enforced. The local wells spew weird colors and odors out the kitchen faucets, and the aerated holding ponds waft volatile organic chemicals throughout the neighborhood.

No, thank you. We're following the environmental and medical impacts, but by the time enough long-term data have been collected, Haliburton will be long gone. And we don't need this gas right now; its price is in the pits, there's an oversupply. Half the wells are drilled and capped. For now, Haliburton is exempt from the Clean Water Act. They're wreaking destruction while the sun shines. Later they'll screw all of us with ridiculous gas prices plus hundreds of ruined sites that they'll never have to pay to clean up.

It's fine for them to destroy the local environment around the small country properties and hobby farms that people have saved all their lives for. These people now have green or black water coming out of the kitchen and shower faucets, and when they go outside to garden or walk, the air smells like a chem lab. Their property enjoyment and property values have been destroyed.

[Undertoad]

To not move south would be hypocrisy, because air conditioning is much less energy-intensive than heating.

[IamSam]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Unless your miserable life last winter was heated by solar, wind, or lit unicorn farts, feel free to turn off the hyperbolic bullshit factory.

My interesting life last winter was heated by a wood stove fed mostly with dead branches of Juniper (Cedar spp) and Pinyon. The drought and unsually warm summers have caused many of the lower limbs on trees around here to die. They either fall to the ground at some point or they can be easily snapped off from the trunk once you learn the trick of it. Doesn't hurt the trees and actually helps by removing potential fuel for next summer's forest fire season.

Wood burned from either species tree provides plenty of BTU's. A few sets of soft wool, genuine made in Switzerland long underware make my comfort complete. (It's good to maintain a connection to a group of people who have wintered over in high mountain regions for 1000's of years).

My Swiss Mom never let me set the thermostat above 55 in the winter, so I leaned how to be comfortable even in a rather chilly house - something Americans should start learning to do in case they get tired of those ever increasing heating bills and following around cleaning up messes after Halliburton which still refuses to be house broken.

[Undertoad]

Bullshit factory.

[tw]

Originally Posted by IamSam

We have been lied to by the government at every turn.

Government did not create mutual fund scams. However corrupt political rhetoric tried to move Social Security into mutual funds. Others were so easily manipulated as to advocate that near disaster (along with another myth about tax cuts making a more prosperous economy). Who proposed those myths? People who would later be called the Tea Party.

We discussed poor investments in 2004. Government was nowhere in that discussion. Professional financial people (ie stock brokers, mutual fund managers) - not government - were specifically cited as the problem. Frontline in The Retirement Gamble has simply confirmed what was posted eight years earlier.

[tw]

Originally Posted by orthodoc

It's big (no, huge) business getting a pass on the regs that anyone else would have to observe, because it's Haliburton - creating their little shanty-towns in areas that aren't prepared for the traffic, road wear, noise, or sudden increase in school enrollment without any increase in tax base (the guys working the frack well sites stay on site usually, but their families come along and stay nearby - the kids are enrolled in school but families aren't paying school taxes, so resources get overstretched - until everyone leaves).

In West TX, no townfolks bothered to ask if a school built near an Ammonia Nitrate storage facility was a good idea. Nobody in PA is asking why PA has so few environmental inspectors for fracking.

This is all completely different from what Frontline discussed.

One common factor. People who eventually got screwed did not do what is required. Learn facts with the always required reasons why.

Too many saw short term mutual fund profits only because some urban myth said it was true. Too many knew Social Security was better invested in the stock market. Too many foolishly believed tax cuts create prosperity even though history said otherwise. In every case, because short term advantages looked so good. In each case, nobody considered the long term.

In 2004, realities of mutual funds are contrary to widely held beliefs. Informed adults watch Frontline to avoid becoming a victim.

So who is guilty? The scam artist? Or those who all but begged to be scammed?

Even Alex Baldwin asked, "What's in your Portfolio?" It must be true. It's on the internet.

[IamSam]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Bullshit factory.

Leaping turquoise lizards! Give it a rest already. You know all sort of interesting things and you’re one bad ass bass player and no pawn shop customer in Philly or anywhere else would ever even dream of looking at you cross eyed.

I neither know nor care to know the places you’ve traveled, the things you saw there or the amazing local customs you got to observe first hand in these places – where ever they were.
However, if you’ve managed to make it to anywhere within a 500 mile radius of the Colorado Plateau and stayed for more than 24 hours; I’ll eat my cowgirl hat, my corgi, and my truck. And that’s just for starters.

Plenty of people – especially in rural areas - burn wood to stay warm and even to cook. Even people in rural PA apparently do this – believe it or not. When I was still married to my ex-husband, the boy who grew up in urban Arlington, VA only to run off to the American West to become a Colorado Mountain Man, he was a fanatic about heating anyplace we happened to be live in with wood – preferably using a good wood stove, but making do with a fire place when there was nothing else.

When we were in Idaho, it was mostly larch that was the fuel of choice. I hated that stuff - mainly because it was almost impossible for me to split, since, being a girl, I didn’t have old Jeremiah Johnson’s upper body strength. Plus the larch we had wasn’t really dry and took forever to get the house warm. I left for work in the morning still shivering, and I returned home at night to shiver some more.

I had grown up in suburbia myself, and the only thing I hadn’t liked about forced air gas heat was my Mom’s insistence on never letting the thermostat go up into a more balmy range of heat.

I didn’t know how good I’d had it as a child until I got married and “Deep River Ed” was off somewhere playing lumberjack with the Forest Service yet again. But I found out real fast. Those were the times when I had to go grab some wood from the dilapidated pile of larch on the front porch, try to split the stuff with a mallet and amass enough sticks of kindling and carefully crumpled sheets of newspaper arranged just so to encourage a small flame to finally lick up and turn into a fire.

I would sit on the couch and cry with homesickness for the Southwest and its wonderful stands of juniper and pinion that even a girl could split by just hitting a dead branch of juniper over her knee. Plus, juniper burns so hot, it wouldn’t surprise me if the devil uses it when he runs out of brimstone.

For anyone who actually gives a shit, here's a couple of random links from Google giving reviews on wood burning stoves and the fuels used and so forth. The first link is to an essay written by someone out of Cortez - quite the surprise since I hadn't even been aware this person existed. The Internet never ceases to amaze, I guess.

http://www.hcn.org/wotr/the-woodpile-and-me/print_view

http://www.trailspace.com/gear/vargo.../review/23573/

http://reviews.northerntool.com/0394...ws/reviews.htm

Now, are we clear?

[Undertoad]

You know what would make me look really stupid right now?

A picture of you sitting next to your wood stove that you use exclusively to heat your apartment.

I'm prepared to look stupid, so bring it. If I am wrong I will admit it. It's something I do regularly. It would really change my opinion of you. I would apologize for a long time. You can even fuzz out your face, or paint over it with MS Paint, but it will have to be in an apartment setting. And with "cellar.org 4/30/2013, fuck you undertoad" written on a piece of paper in the frame.

Pictures are worth a thousand words so you wouldn't even have to accompany it with a wall of text. Just the picture alone would be enough. And although you and I got nothing but time, this should take between 5 and 15 minutes to accomplish.