Prologue from Nick...
As we do each February, NMI updates (a) our Sixty-Two Year Scorecard on equities in the real lives of real people, (b) the classic DFA one-pager on “volatility” properly defined, and (c) the hundred-year record of the phenomenal (nay, miraculous) healing power of time in equity investing.
Client’s Corner takes a bemused stroll down memory lane with regard to Debtmageddon. Hope you (and select clients) will find it drolly instructive. Pick your spots, however: I can well imagine that certain “clients” may elect not to see the humor in it.
In other news, gold at $5,000 has slipped the surly bonds of earth and ascended into some kind of alternate universe; its continued surge is perhaps the ultimate current comment on the universality of chaos. Back here on planet Earth, an ounce of gold worth $800 in January 1980 is now worth $5,000 or whatever. Eight hundred dollars invested in the S&P 500 at the same time and left to compound has grown to $150,000.
We don’t do a lot of prediction around here – and for damn good reason – but finding oneself in a rather larky frame of mind this snowbound morning, one is moved to offer the blissfully unscientific guess that people paying $5,000 for gold today will be behind the inflation eight-ball for the next 20 to 40 years. Give or take.
