Investing Intelligently

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I Told You So!

Tags: Gurus, Media, Real Estate/Housing, Stocks, predictions, real estate, stock market
24 Nov 12:59am
Posted by intelligentdave
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Hilarious video of bearish Peter Schiff on various talk shows in the past few years getting laughed at by his peers: Somewhere around the middle of the clip there were a few stock recommendations. Ben Stein recommended buying Merrill Lynch when it was trading at $76.01. It’s now trading at $8.34. Someone else said Goldman Sachs is cheap and recommended buying it at $175. It’s now trading at $53.31. Ballsy Peter Schiff countered those recommendations with “Stay away from the ...
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How This Bear Market Compares to Other Bear Markets

Tags: Miscellaneous, markets, S&P500
27 Oct 4:36pm
Posted by intelligentdave
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The New York Times has a great graph that compares this bear market to other bear markets. Of course, it only looks at the S&P 500. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like they are updating it. I’d be very surprised if we reached the same bottom that we did in 1932, but who knows, anything can happen. The current bear market looks a lot like the one from 1937 to 1942.
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Global TV Says Vancouver Housing Bubble Has Burst

Tags: Real Estate/Housing, calculations, bubble, media watch, real estate, Vancouver
24 Oct 4:29pm
Posted by intelligentdave
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Just over 4 months ago, I wrote that the Vancouver housing bubble had finally burst. The mainstream media has finally come on board and is supporting the idea that housing prices will fall over the next few years, based on a report from Central 1 Credit Union. Take a look at this report from Global TV: Global TV is now saying that the “air is now officially out of the real estate balloon.” My only complaint with the piece is that there is no mention of the complete lack of affor...
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A Lost Decade?

Tags: ETFs, Indexes, Investing, bear market, ETF, inflation, random thoughts, S&P500, SPY
23 Oct 11:01pm
Posted by intelligentdave
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If you had purchased shares in the S&P 500 index (through the SPY index ETF) in July 1997 (at about $91-92 per share), your investment would be worth the same amount today, but in today’s dollars. So technically you would have lost money if you consider inflation. So it has an annualized return of about 0%, neglecting inflation. All this ignores dividends which were roughly 1.5-3% during that period (very rough guess). So let’s just for sake of argument that the dividends canc...
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VEA vs XIN: Foreign Exchange Fees vs. Higher MER

Tags: ETFs, calculations, foreign exchange, VEA, XIN
22 Oct 6:33am
Posted by intelligentdave
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A commenter named Blitzkrieg asked: How do currency exchange fees factor into the decision between VEA and XIN? XIN’s MER is 0.35% higher than VEA’s, but it is purchased using Canadian dollars, so there is no exchange fee. VEA’s MER is nice and low, but don’t you immediately lose a few percentage points of your investment when you buy it due to currency exchange fees? He’s exactly right. The answer to “which one is better, VEA or XIN, from a cost perspective” is “...
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