PERSONAL: Tim's Investment Page

DISCLAIMER: 

If you use any advice from this page, 

then you get whatever you deserve!

No sage advice here - just some interesting investment notes. Hey kids, get yourself an education in investing - it'll pay off for a lifetime. In the meantime, boring pages like this one deserve a beautiful photo like this one (2 kayakers at Morro Bay at Sunset, taken 10/6/2013 at the Harbor Festival in Morro Bay):

I'll start with a financial saying stolen from the "From the Mind of WAAG" page (yes, some things do overlap):

Others-13: You make your best investments (buys) when people are overwhelmingly fearful. (Another version of this is"Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful". Here's an article on the subject: Buffett's Crisis-Lending Haul Reaches $10 Billion. This statement is commonly and frequently attributed to Warren Buffet, the "Oracle of Omaha", considered to be the best investor of our times. Its another version of "buy low, sell high". When others are fearful, that is when you make the best deals, if you have the guts to do so. During the market crash of 2007-2008, we had cash to invest, but were fearful and did not, finding security in our cash - while all of our investments except Gold (GLD) were tanking. If we had followed the Oracle's sage advice, we'd be in a better financial place today. Alas, we felt that being able to sleep at night was a better option at the time).

TW5: Nobody will ever care more about your money than you do. Up until 1997, I used a full service brokerage to manage my puny investments. How naive. A tiny account like mine would NEVER get the attention it deserved. So just a year before we opened our business, www.Waag and Co.com, I educated myself about investments and never looked back. I have not consulted an investment advisor since then, and if not massively successful, I at least understand what is happening with our hard-earned savings, and am comfortable making decisions about them.

I've just started with these, but as I recall my lifelong financial wisdom, those things will show up here.

REVERSION TO THE MEAN (10/8/2013): The best way to predict market bubbles. Its the financial version of "whatever goes up, must come down". It means that over time, things that have become overvalued will eventually revert back to their traditional value. Commonly used in stocks in reference to market P/E's, or Price to Earnings ratio for a given stock, or in the case of the stocket market, the market-cap weighted P/E.

TIPS (10/8/2013): Inflation protected bonds, issued by our very own US government. Never invested in TIPS and glad that I didn't. I like to keep things simply, and was never fully comfortable with what they would do for me in the event of inflation, and more importantly, what they would do for me if there was no inflation. Well, between 1/1/2013 and 9/30/2013, TIPS returned negative 6.3%. Warren Buffet always said that you should never invest in something you don't understand, and I'm glad that I didn't! Inflation is nowhere in sight.

BOB BRINKER'S MARKET TIMER (10/8/2013): I have been a subscriber for more than 15 years, and appreciate his measured advice on investing.

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