Mad Money Machine

Mark Hulbert Writes About the Permanent Portfolio

In his MarketWatch article today, Mark Hulbert writes, Would you be interested in an all-weather portfolio that, despite hardly ever changing its composition, performs creditably in almost all market environments? Hulbert characterizes the Permanent Portfolio this way: Browne’s idea was to invest in a basket of asset classes, each one of which has a low […]

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It’s iPad!

Just a quick post to review the predictions I made and how well they turned out. Name: iPad (Ding!) Size: 9.7″ (Ding! I said 10″) Form Factor: Basically a large iPod Touch (Ding!) Home Button? (Ding!) Aluminum back? (Ding!) Buttons and holes: headphone (Ding), microphone (Ding), volume (Ding), mute (Ding), sleep (Ding) USB port? (Bzzzt!) […]

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Time To Talk Tablet: iTablet, iSlate, iBook, iPad

Take your pick of names but we are all awaiting the next holy product to be announced from Apple. After “The Jesus Phone” which had people literally weeping in their seats upon its unveiling, the Apple Table is set to be the next  revolutionary gadget that we didn’t realize we couldn’t live without. I have […]

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Investments for Inflationary Times (to Come?)

The Austrian economists anticipated the present crisis. Should we listen to them when it comes to their predictions about what comes next? In one voice they are saying we will experience inflation unlike we’ve seen in the USA in over 100 years. Inflation is defined as the increase in the supply of money and credit. […]

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Kindle 2 Announced. Should you buy?

Amazon announced the upgrade to their Kindle ebook reading device today. Get in line to buy one if you want. I just sold my old one yesterday. I will probably not be buying the new one because I think for $359 I can buy a heck of a lot of books. Or I can buy […]

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Austrian Investing, Continued

Read an article by Michael S. Rozeff today in which he describes his approach to investing. The article was called "The Opportunistic Investor ."  He says that a year ago he published two articles on buying a diversified portfolio and holding it. That portfolio is down 34 percent. Better than most. He says he actually […]

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Have We Really Lost Wealth?

With the stock market down some 40% last year, many people are asking, "Where did the money go?" Sure there are some stock market losers. But remember the winners, those who sold their stocks in October 2007? They got their money. Remember also that for every share of stock sold, there was a share of […]

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Open Source Software. Hayekian.

I loved the most recent EconTalk podcast with Russ Roberts interviewing Eric Raymond about Open Source software. Eric explains why it works and why it works better than closed source. I think we need to take the discussion to the next step and talk about open source Government. One of the keys of open source […]

Tags: EconTalk Hayek

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Excitement Tomorrow?

Wow, people were really excited today. I must admit, I was getting caught up in the euphoria somewhat myself. I was mostly watching CNN but I also caught the streaming tweets at http://tweetgrid.com/inaug09. As you know, even though I have a Twitter account , I haven’t made much use of it yet. But lots of […]

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Moving from Skype to GrandCentral Voicemail

So Skype emails me and wants another $60 for my phone number for a year. Bah! The way I figure it, this is not just the "Information Age" but the "Free Information Age." I mentioned on show 141 that I was probably not going to pay. Well, leave it to a listener to remind me […]

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Shifting to Mac Hastened

Remember that new Dell XPS I bought off eBay to help rescue my previous DELL XPS that failed? And remember that it worked, right, I got my data off the hard disks. Whew, that was nice. Now guess what? The sound is gone. No audio. Mute. I have tried everything that is reasonable including replacing […]

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