Ray Dalio - All Weather Portfolio
"Making these difficult portfolio decisions for you is the point of Target-Date Retirement Funds.  You pick a date at which you're going to start needing to withdraw the money, and the company managing the fund slowly turns down the aggressiveness of the fund as the target date approaches.  Typically you would pick the target date to be around, say, your 65th birthday.  Many mutual fund companies offer a variety of funds to suit your needs. Your desire to never ""have to recover"" indicates that you have not yet done quite enough reading on the subject of investing.  (Or possibly that your sources have been misleading you.)  A basic understanding of investing includes the knowledge that markets go up and down, and that no portfolio will always go up.  Some ""recovery"" will always be necessary; having a less aggressive portfolio will never shield you completely from losing money, it just makes loss less likely. The important thing is to only invest money that you can afford to lose in the short-term (with the understanding that you'll make it back in the long term).  Money that you'll need in the short-term should be kept in the absolute safest investment vehicles, such as a savings account, a money market account, short-term certificates of deposit, or short-term US government bonds." Here are the specific Vanguard index funds and ETF's I use to mimic Ray Dalio's all weather portfolio for my taxable investment savings. I invest into this with Vanguard personal investor and brokerage accounts. Here's a summary of the performance results from 2007 to today:  2007 is when the DBC commodity fund was created, so that's why my results are only tested back that far. I've tested the broader asset class as well and the results are similar, but I suggest doing that as well for yourself. I use portfoliovisualizer.com to backtest the results of my portfolio along with various asset classes, that's been tremendously useful. My opinionated advice would be to ignore the local investment advisor recommendations. Nobody will ever care more about your money than you, and their incentives are misaligned as Tony mentions in his book.  Mutual funds were chosen over ETF's for the simplicity of auto-investment.  Unfortunately I have to manually buy the ETF shares each month (DBC and GLD). I'm 29 and don't use this for retirement savings. My retirement is 100% VSMAX. I'll adjust this in 20 years or so to be more conservative. However, when I get close to age 45-50 I'm planning to shift into this allocation at a market high point.  When I approach retirement, this is EXACTLY where I want to be. Let's say you had $2.7M in your retirement account on Oct 31, 2007 that was invested in 100% US Stocks. In Feb of 2009 your balance would be roughly $1.35M. If you wanted to retire in 2009 you most likely couldn't. If you had invested with this approach you're account would have dropped to $2.4M in Feb of 2009.  Disclaimer: I'm not a financial planner or advisor, nor do I claim to be. I'm a software engineer and I've heavily researched this approach solely for my own benefit. I have absolutely no affiliation with any of the tools, organizations, or funds mentioned here and there's no possible way for me to profit or gain from this. I'm not recommending anyone use this, I'm merely providing an overview of how I choose to invest my own money. Take or leave it, that's up to you. The loss/gain incured from this is your responsibility, and I can't be held accountable.
One company owns majority of popular freelancing websites (elance included)  Aside from the race to the bottom pricing happening for projects; customer is always right. Lots of stories of even a pip from a client freezing accounts -- not even just a project, your whole account with any ongoing projects. Everything gone. Thousands lost. Not worth it. No recourse. Source If you're worried about volatility, and you're in mostly long positions, you should be looking to diversify your portfolio (meaning, buying some stocks that will do better in a bear market) if it's not already diverse, but you shouldn't be looking to abandon your positions, unless you anticipate a short-term need for cash.  Other than that, you may want to hold off on the short-term positions for a while if you're concerned about volatility, though many traders see volatility as a great time to make money (as there is more movement, there's more opportunity to make money from mispriced stocks in both directions).  Unless you think the market will be permanently down due to these reasons, anyway, but I don't see any reason to believe that yet.  Even World War Two wasn't enough to permanently hurt the market, after all! Remember that everyone in the market knows what you do.  If there were a sure thing that the market was going to crash, it already would have. Conservative positions tend to involve holding onto a well diversified portfolio rather than simply holding onto cash, unless the investor is very conservative (in which case the portfolio should be cash anyway). The fact that you say this is your rainy day fund does make me a little curious, though; typically rainy day funds are better in cash (and not invested) since you might hit that rainy day and need cash quickly (in which case you could take significant losses if the time isn't right). Hi I am assuming you are doing this in the US?  I run a social media / content marketing agency in the UK,  Some of our very first clients were real estate agents, the idea we had was to market properties through Facebook using interior and exterior video shots to commercial music,  This took off with some estate agents and not so much with others,  My biggest piece of advice find a chain and start there that way you will get a hell of a lot of recognition by the smaller firms,  You need to find a realistic price point for your clients that is measurable on the ROI and ultimately pays for your lifestyle. I started at £200 which is $257 dollars - arguably very underpriced but it gave me the opportunity to work with a cluster of people,  I even went to the extreme of offering free work so I could get work for the portfolio!  In terms of who to contact and how to find them.. enter Linkedin.com your new best friend - connect with real estate developers, buyers, owners you name it then informally introduce yourself and ask when they are free for a coffee. Post an article about why video and drone footage is the next big thing for real estate, don't be afraid to ask for the business at the end of the day you are providing cold hard value.  I've always tried to get retainer deals with clients in the real estate sector but to achieve this you have to talk to the big boys and not independent firms. I could be wrong though I haven't done business with a lot of people in the states so definitely something to keep in mind.  A good lot of this business idea is trial and error but I agree with it 100% just go and do basically,  Hope this helps - I am happy to show you some of my work if you want to shoot me over a private message! You're in a deep deep hole with no internships or related experience. I have an internship and uni investment fund stint under my belt and I still get passed on for some financial analyst interviews  You're gonna have to rely on networking. Or do temp/contract work to get your resume up This looks pretty good. Do you use their payroll software at all? Currently I am using Gusto and it is pretty automatic with some nice integrations (time tracking software, etc.).  It sounds like if you can accomplish everything with Wave's platform it is a really good option. Will strongly vouch for this. Ray Dalio gives you the macro view in that video, while Ackman gives more of the micro view. Would highly recommend watching them both in the same sitting, particularly for somebody who is just entering their study of finance All Climate Solutions Provides ducted heating repairs and services in Melbourne. We have the fully-qualified team to conduct accurate and personalised repairs and servicing on a wide range of unique heating systems. We also deliver a lasting aftercare experience for our customers. DH payroll is a payroll provider in Kingston to meet your payroll services needs. We are a specialist payroll bureau who have dealt with a large number of small and medium sized companies for the past 25 years and have served them well. Address:- Ground Floor 1 Park Road, Hampton Wick, Kingston-Upon-Thames KT1 4AS  Phone: 020 8977 3559 I'd love to do something in the style of Nassim Taleb (fat tails, black swan events, and so forth)  He's a mathematical geniues, despite his controversial personality.  How useless is the VaR as a risk management tool would be a great topic.  Or something regarding policy/regulation (hot topic now). Also, this would be a sick way to predict the weather. What if there were options on rain that had week long maturities? One could back out from the price and different maturities the probability of it raining on a certain day. "Is there more on where Dalio gets his definitions for the short-term debt cycle (5-8 years or so) and ""deleveraging"" and the long-term debt cycle (75-100 years)? (or his evidence that separates the two)?  At one point 18:10, he says the difference is that in a deleveraging, interest rates hit 0 and can no longer go lower, but I don't know if that works as a definition per se.  There are other things that central banks do when interest rates hit 0, like buy up assets (which he does mention and include in the ""print money"" category of things that can be done during a deleveraging).  And one of the deleveragings he cites, England in the 1950s, according to Wikipedia was due to difficulty in transitioning out from war production, and according to [this excel file](http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/Documents/rates/baserate.xls) from the Bank of England on historical rates, it doesn't say interest rates went to 0 at that time (unless Dalio is referring to another point in history when he cites 1950s England).    20:30 His definition of a depression is when debt restructuring or defaults happen.  Interesting.  What I learned was that there isn't really a hard and fast definition for recessions and depressions (e.g. a recession is two quarters of negative growth in a row and a depression is just a reeeaallly bad/long recession).  And I don't think I recall encountering in the past an attempt to define what a ""deleveraging"" event of an economy is.    24:30 Is debt reduction and redistribution of wealth deflationary?  I think it depends on how much the debt reduction or redistribution hurts the spending of the lender or wealthy versus how much it helps the spending of the borrower or the poor.  Both are actually similarly ""giving some from the haves to the have nots,"" and especially redistribution of wealth is similar to fiscal spending, which is mentioned 25:30 as a valid inflationary way to try to help the economy.  26:00 Are deflationary methods (say, austerity) needed to balance out the inflationary methods (central bank buying assets and fiscal spending)?  Aren't central bank (interest rates, quantitative easing) and the government (fiscal policy) still the main things that move inflation or deflation?  I would think that debt reduction and redistribution of wealth are good when needed, but I wouldn't think you would do those things *mainly* for their (supposed, see above for my doubts) deflationary effects.    Still, a very interesting video and one of the best presented videos on a difficult subject." When you buy your list from eSalesData, we’ll put your sales teams in contact with both big and small advertising agencies North America, Europe, Asia and the rest of the world. Our data specialists constantly update and cross check all our records to ensure that you receive only the most accurate information, every single time. Yea, like others are saying -- it's legitimate.  Just insurance.  In fact, as far as derivatives go -- weather futures are probably one of the least crazy.  FYI, all derivative and exotic securities are legitimate -- just a matter of price.  CDS? Fine.  CDOs? Yep.  Even the CDO^2 -- They're all fine as long as the price is set right.  A truly efficient market would shun some of these as they are too hard to untangle and understand what the real risks are.  However, we don't have a truly efficient market (nor a particularly free one -- but that's another discussion). This article completely misses a big part of his portfolio. He's a congressmen entitled to a full pension. He's guaranteed a 100k+ salary for the rest of his life. He's completely insured against deflation!   So if you've got a full pension that's insuring you against deflation than you want the majority of your other assets protecting you against inflation. It's a sound decision.