Well, it looks like you make $50 more for an additional 0.05%
You will make even more when you consider that your bonds are earning income. I like Vanguard's Total Bond index fund for its great diversity but GNMA funds are a close second choice or even a mixture of the two is fine.
It adds up
At times when we are getting less than 2% in money market funds, we should not dismiss this potential to gain extra yield just from market volatility. For a $1,000,000 portfolio, an extra 0.5% translates to $5,000! Compound this over 40 years and this can really add up.
Q2: "Kirk, You have done even better. How do you get your better returns?"
The easy answer is I increase the volatility of my portfolio so there are more and larger opportunities to rebalance.
What I do is try to buy a handful of stocks I like very much for the long term but that are highly cyclical so they have very high volatility. One I like is Lam Research which can move up 50% and down 30% more than once a year! I cover LRCX in my newsletter. I try to give good price points to add to positions and price points to take profits using a mixture of TA (technical Analysis), FA (fundamental analysis) and "seat of the pants luck" (skill?).".
For me, it has acted like a cash machine and I hope this continues. With ten or twenty stocks in my portfolio, it always seems there is one that I can trim back or buy to get my asset allocation on target.
Of course, the profit taking and buying back or buying new stocks is the "art" part and this involves some skill and some good luck. Bad luck is part of the equation too and so you have to look at a total portfolio over time and compare it to the benchmarks to see if you are adding value.
You should also notice that I make no claims to call market tops or bottoms as I believe this is impossible to do over and over without making mistakes trying to get back in or out too soon. A good example is Brinker's followers saw what this is like with their QQQ experience.
Conclusion
People can make electricity from the rise and fall of ocean waves. I got the idea of using the markets
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