Here comes another lesson
The market crash Monday, coming hot on the heels of the one last Thursday, made me think of the book of dark short stories pictured below (one I’ve blogged about here before), Here Comes Another Lesson. A brief excerpt should illustrate.

This excerpt is from a story called “The Professor of [...]

Last week was an interesting week for stocks, and, if the performance of one foreign stock market that was open today is any guide, tomorrow may be interesting too. Here’s a snapshot of how stocks did on Israel’s Tel Aviv stock exchange this Sunday:

Last week was also the best week yet for subscriptions to Portfolio [...]

I just submitted an article to Seeking Alpha about this, so if they publish it, I’ll link to it here. Update: here’s that article, “Lessons from Thursday’s Market Meltdown“. But, in a nutshell: today’s market action showed the limits of diversification and defensive stocks in protecting against market risk. More than 95% of NYSE [...]

The first quote below is from an e-mail I received last week about Portfolio Armor. The writer of it apparently has a prominent job at an international law firm and preferred that I didn’t use his name.
“Your service is a real breakthrough for many of us boomers who, too late in life, are learning [...]

Hedging costs after the debt deal
Last week, with the debt ceiling negotiations dragging on, we looked at the costs of hedging a handful of equity index, gold-, Treasury bond-, and dollar index-tracking ETFs. Below is a snapshot showing the current hedging costs of the same basket of ETFs.

Hedging against a >30% correction [...]

Chafing at the world’s reserve currency
After the excitement of the U.S. debt ceiling negotiations going down to the wire, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin offered these comments about the U.S. and its dollar:
They are living like parasites off the global economy and their monopoly of the dollar.
[...]
If over there (in America) [...]

Credit Suisse on the consequences of a default
On Thursday, Credit Suisse’s global strategy team said that a U.S. default was still unlikely. However, they predicted that if the U.S. did default, stocks would suffer a 30% drop.

Hedging against a >30% correction in stocks
With that in mind, the table below shows the costs, as [...]