Topic: [poll] - My Investment portfolio (Read 2368 times)

you should add the option:

invested in pre-order mining

because a lot of money from a lot of forum members is sitting RIGHT THERE

Some people are expecting Armageddon, if you are: guns and ammunition are by far the best investment.

USA, I guess... only in USA one would count guns as investment 

The poll allows for more than one option so it is not surprising at all.

I just find it weird than on a bitcoin forum, less than 40% have bitcoin in their portfolio...

Seriously? This is your portfolio?

Oh dear.

This could be long, long time.

Well, what are you waiting for? 

edit: jj, I know that all the smart people have tons of fiat sitting on the exchanges ready to go into battle when the time is right.

Since we're talking real estate...

I've been thinking about whether buying makes sense vs. renting here in Finland at the moment. One reason I'm doubtful is demographics. When my parents were born, the fertility rate was around 3 children per person, when I was born, it was just above 1.6. In brief, the population is getting old, and my parent's generation seems to me to have been much more eager to buy real estate than their children have been. It's a bit of a morbid calculation to make, but in 20 years time, the generation with the greatest accumulated wealth, including real estate, will largely have died and passed their property on to their children, who are fewer in number. So it seems to make sense to expect housing prices to go down quite a bit by 2030 or so.

The question is, how low will they go? And will they go down everywhere? Cities are growing rapidly here, with real estate valuations showing the expected increase. This trend may well continue regardless of demographic changes.

Currently, in central Helsinki, a 50 sqm apartment seems to rent for 1,100 EUR / month, and can be bought for, roughly, 280,000 EUR. These are rough estimates, and even owning an apartment, you're still looking at close to 200 EUR / month in fees. So calculating from this, and not taking into account future price movements which I have no way of predicting, for the investment it takes to buy an apartment in Helsinki at the moment,  you can rent the same apartment for about 26 years. If you expect prices to keep going up, the calculations look different of course. Still, if I had a bit under 300k EUR to invest in something, I'm really not at all convinced buying myself a place to live would be the best option. I'd guess the effects of this demographic change will start showing in 15 years or so, still a decade away from the equilibrium point of buying vs. renting. If houses go down low enough, renting looks like a pretty good idea to me.

edit:
I'll just leave this here:

"Percentage of the population over 65 in Europe"

like bitcoin, housing prices only ever go up! 

I've been waiting for years for a crash In Canada's real estate.
Until now it has only gone up Up UP!

http://www.housepriceindex.ca/Default.aspx

IMO the next market downturn will crash Canada HARD.

I have some play money on puts for RBC and BMO.
If the market can continue like it did today for another week, I'll be quite happy.  

They're dry powder. I can't profit on the massive swings in BTC valuation without holding something liquid and current. If the best option I can find devalues at 2% a year, well, so be it!

32% in Dollars deprecating away.

In Canada we have not had a recent significant real estate crash yet but this has not always been the case. There was a brutal crash in real estate in the early 1980's in western Canada for example.

I think the Permanent Portfolio (self-balancing diversification over stocks/debt/commodity/currency) is a great idea. I think this because I'm a fool who has lost plenty of my savings by betting on this or that stock - I'd rather have a fool-resistant strategy than trust my naïve impression of a "good bet". Also, properly configured, the PP loadout can be used to profit on volatility at every time scale.

That said, I haven't yet moved into the broad ETFs called for by PP strategies, mainly because I am waiting for a good opportunity to exit those bad bets.

My current holdings are about:
$10k in BTC (mostly appreciated from when BTC prices were lower)
$15k in USD (most of it sitting on Mt. Gox or Bitfinex)
$12k in stocks (one tech stock that has been doing poorly in the market despite very good fundamentals, one commodities stock that has pretty good dividends, plus some minor ETF positions)
$10k in REITs (originally chosen to preserve my buying power in case of home market recovery)

Holy shit you are a moron! Did you read the news the past few years how real estate has been in a huge bubble?

I speak from personal experience, real estate can go down. I bought a house in 2005, sold it in 2012 for a 70% loss. FML

Why do you hold bonds and especially treasuries? It isn't 1981

Some of the reasons I am a bear when it comes to Canadian real estate.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2013/06/05/business-oecd-housing.html

Right.  Here in the US we have the Fed directly holding down mortgage rates.  When this policy changes we might have some trouble, although obviously the hope is that the economy will improve in the mean time.

I bought my house to live in.  My fiance will be in school here at least 4 more years and we've already been living in our new home a year.  There is a good chance we may stick around here after school, or possibly rent it out to my younger siblings who will be getting close to college age by the time we're both done.  The only debt tied to the house is about 50% of the home's value in a loan from my fiance's parents.  There is no interest or payments while we are in school, so it was a no brainer compared to dumping $7000 a year into rent between the two of us like we did before.