RetireJapan

I was reassured by this assessment by Scott Bessent of the current drop in the market. ;-) “ "For everyone who thinks these market declines are all based on the President's economic policies, I can tell you that this market decline started with the Chinese AI announcement of DeepSeek," Be...

Tax avoidance is legal. Tax evasion is illegal. Nearly everyone engages in some degree of tax minimization. It’s just a matter of degree and how many loopholes governments try to close. Ask Jimmy Carr :lol: However, this think tank agrees with ChapInTokyo “So here are some things that are not tax av...

On the other hand, if the US continues decoupling from the international trade ecosystem, the use of the dollar as the world’s key currency might undergo some changes some way down the line. I think that if a mad US president can wreak so much havoc in just a couple of months in office, anything is...

On the other hand, if the US continues decoupling from the international trade ecosystem, the use of the dollar as the world’s key currency might undergo some changes some way down the line. I think that if a mad US president can wreak so much havoc in just a couple of months in office, anything is...

My target bond allocation is 1/3 Japan bonds and 2/3 yen-hedged international bonds, but because of the still high rates of yen hedging against the dollar, I have not been able to execute this bit of rebalancing yet. So currently I have maybe 1/2 Japan bonds (mostly the TMAM JGBi fund that you ment...

Yes, we discussed this before, I think. Short duration individual JGBs don't yield enough. However, most of the 1-3 years bond funds that I would want only contain US Treasuries, which would expose me to dollar-yen fluctuations. I think the yen will depreciate over the long term but don't want to b...

Duration is a headache for me too, as it's become unclear whether the Fed and BoJ respectively will be able to cut and raise their interest rates as had been the expectation. Since it's difficult to say which way they will go, I will probably go with SGOV or BSV once the yen has strengthened to som...

Rather than "I lost this much," or "I'm down this much", another way to look at it is when was your portfolio last at the present level? Was it six, nine, 12 months ago, or what? For me, that was may 7-8 last year (the august dip is now a little above where I am now). So another...

Well, I'm definitely living in my sequence of returns risk phase now. 8 million yen down and counting... not from the peak, but from the total amount I invested. What with being hit by a 300,000 yen repair bill on the car (unbudgeted for!), and the world's economy heading for negative growth due to...

I think I am unlikely to ever hold more than 10% of my portfolio in intermediate or long-term bonds, given the risk of inflation and higher yields due to government debt. I have been following the Cederburg paper on 100% equity portfolios since it was first covered a year or so ago. Ben Felix has a ...