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24

“I wonder if that was the same bond board I had as a favorite. My memory is that one became quiet a good bit longer ago than the two years you mentioned. I know zilch about bonds, but I thought I was learning a bit from one poster, name (if memory serves after so long) of CharlieBonds or something like that. Once he stopped posting that was about it for me.”

RHinCT,

Talk about a blast from the past. I’m ‘CharlieBonds’, and that was two or three handles ago during which things like rod-building and boat-building became of more interest to me than posting online.

Much thanks for your kind comments and fond memories of that board that should also be extended to Scott, Paul, Eliot, etc., all of whom actively contributed, though we often disagreed. Paul is still around. Scott has moved on to trading options. Most others have disappeared. These days, SL is the guy you should pay attention to. Best FI analyst I’ve ever come across. We swap ideas with emails rather than post, because it’s faster and easier.

Now, as back then, I’d try to explain bond investing to a beginner as a branch of Ben Graham-style value investing in which the central question to ask of any bond, debt instrument, or div-paying vehicle is this. “Am I being paid enough to accept its risks?” If so, size a position, execute, and then move on to the next opportunity.

For sure, the bond game has gotten tougher compared what it once was for the obvious reasons of persistent Fed interventions and the near total destruction of price discovery. But I’m still in the game and still running a portfolio that holds only 5% equities.

Arindam

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25

My father used to build his own rods from blanks. He invented his own way to space the guides, something to do with inflection points if I remember correctly. He had a jig for winding thread to hold the guides. He made a surf rod by putting two identical blanks together, one inside the other. Adequate at the time, but later he bought ready made surf rods, not trusting what might be going on between the nested blanks. But it must be close to 50 years since I cast a line.

(I’m assuming your rods are not hot, of course.)

26

Hi Arindam, from reading your posts I believe a lot of people would have a pleasure to even read sprinklings of your knowledge. I have written in a diary for more than 32 years and found this to be useful always even as my priority changed over time. I think the old message board format also has somewhat of a feeling of being half a library, half a community, so some boards can be posted to very infrequently but the public like to read back on past posts. In any case, I think bond investing is an important part of the larger picture, even when it isn’t one’s speciality, so I have just now added a “Bond Investing” board with the direct link:
Bond Investing board at Shrewd'm
We can see how it develops, and in the worst case just remove it if there isn’t enough excitement. Bonds Investing (particularly when thinking about the suitable yield and how to price bonds also) also helps investors to mentally clarify their equities valuation models with a useful larger context also.

– Manlobbi

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27

Manlobbi,

Much thanks for your flattering praise of my humble contributions to discussions over the years of how to invest in bonds. And again, I applaud to you for trying to create an alternative to what TMF is offering.

Your ‘Manlobbi’s Descent’ isn’t a board I ever frequented, just as I avoid boards run by those who breathlessly repeat the latest news flash and think they are offering “macro-economic analysis”.

I haven’t read your book and only briefly have skimmed the FAQ on your method. My takeaway is this. Both of us are ‘value investors’. But we differ diametrically on how we prefer to manage risk, so much so, I was going to back away from trying to post in your forum.

My reasons are two-fold. #1, I firmly believe that every would-be investor is unique. He/she brings to the investing task a personality that likely differs from others in how they prefer to deal with Fear and Greed, Hope and Despair, never mind also differing in their means, needs, goals, interests, and opportunities, whereas financial advisors (and “advisory newsletters” such as are marketed by our dear forum hosts) assume a monolithicity of personalities, never mind that they also never accept responsibility for their endless bad market calls.

Said another way, I think Jung’s insights into personality --as popularized by Meyers-Briggs-- is where discussions of investing need to begin. That I’m a “bond guy”, rather than a “stocks guy”, is entirely predictable from my INTJ personality type, and it was only when I aligned my financial activities to my innate inclinations that I began to make serious money, and this despite having bought my first stock when I was ten and having had the good fortune to have had parents who encouraged their children to invest.

The second reason I was going to back away from posting anywhere is that current markets are tough, and the people whose insights should be receiving attention are being ignored. This isn’t a Left vs Right, Dem vs GOP issue. It’s a matter of having the tools to understand the risks of present policies and a plan on how to survive until the Fed’s economic distortions are corrected.

All of that said, I love the bond market(s), and it/they have been more than kind to me. What most don’t understand is how much the bond game shares with the stock game, and how much more forgiving the former can be. So, yeah, I’ll accept your kind invitation to post at your site and encourage SL to migrate there as well.

Arindam

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28

RH,

If all one needs is a good-enough 9’ 5wt (for still water or most streams), then what the Chinese are building these days is both affordable and adequate. But if one is fishing tiny, brushy creeks and having to hike to get to them, then the rod has to be a ‘pack rod’, and the cheapest way to get one is to drop sections from 7pc (or 9pc) blanks and build what one needs, which is something one size up from a midge rod, or what I call ‘Juniors’, which are generally 4pc 6’ rods, but really need to be 5 or 6pc, so the sections are short enough to fit into a sleeve in the back of one’s vest.

That’s what got me into rod-building. Native Cutthroats and Redbands are spooky, and false casting over them will put them down, never mind never having the clearance from trees to do such a cast. So what’s needed is a short rod, which you overline, thus enabling the 10’ to 15’, sidearm casts the brush permits. But the surprising thing about such a rod is that it can also lay out 40’ of line when that’s what’s needed.

As for my boat-building, that, too, happened because what I needed wasn’t available commercially, namely a car-toppable, beach-lauchable, sub-50 pound pram that was stable enough to stand and cast from and that put enough length on the waterline to easily row at 4 MPH. In various versions, I’ve probably built a dozen of them and even donated a pair to a kids’ summer camp whose row boats are always too big for a kid to row easily and well. That’s a point most people don’t even think about. If bikes are sized to their rider, why aren’t row boats? Yeah, marine ply isn’t cheap. But if one makes their own oars, then a finished, 7’10" x 42" pram (or skiff) can be put on the water for under $200 bucks, even at today’s lumber prices.

Arindam

Wet Rat
Wet Rat1195×611 143 KB

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29

I empathise with you completely, and of course I advocated for you writing about bonds, thus creating that particular board for you, and with no relation to the MD board. The platform itself across all boards (with each board having greatly different communities) has perhaps a few binding things in common including a respect for independent and lateral thinking, and complete freedom of speech, increasingly hard to find elsewhere sadly. As a side observation though, on the separate subject of your reference to my tiny board, we might have more in common that you’d think from observation of the equity bias alone. I vehemently avoid paying attention to news throughout the book for example and wrote almost a whole chapter on why news and trend following should be lambasted. Macro observations are similarly given no attention. With respect…

— Manlobbi

30

" I vehemently avoid paying attention to news throughout the book for example and wrote almost a whole chapter on why news and trend following should be lambasted. "

Manlobbi,

Again, we agree on some points – the need to ignore the nonsense called “news”-- but disagree on ‘trend-following’, which is the single best way for retail investors to keep themselves out of trouble with their 401Ks.

But, also, neither is a point we need to debate, and as you’re probably aware by now, I did accept your invitation --challenge? LOL-- to post on your website and launched a decent thread on bond investing which I’ll add to in coming days, as much to clarify my own thinking as to help others for whom bond investing might be a mystery.

Arindam (aka, CharlieBonds and a few other handles as well that got changed every time TMF threw me off the boards and cancelled my access for disagreeing with their preferred narrative).

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31

Your post on the Bond Investing board was brilliant.

(By trends I’m referring more the context of following herd attention. The equivalent for bonds would be some particular bond category becoming super trendy (say junk bonds one decade, inflation adjusted bonds another decade etc), the yield forced down, and bond price rising from the popular demand. Stay away.)

That sounds ludicrous.

— Manlobbi

32

" Your post on the Bond Investing board was brilliant."

Manlobbi,

‘Brilliant’ isn’t the word I’d used to describe that intro post. ‘Journeyman’ is more like it. All I did is state some facts and suggest paths of thought them new to bonds might want to explore.

‘Brilliant’ might happen in time. But for now, I need to cover the sort of basics anyone can look up in a dozen places but never get around to doing, much less try to put together into an investing plan.

As for ‘trend-following’, our disagreements seem to have arisen over a difference in what we mean by the term ‘trend’. You mean ‘fad’ (which shrewd investors will fade). I mean time-price series, especially when paired with a means to estimate IV. If a would-be investor buys over-priced securities, he/she is asking for trouble. If bought at a discount to IV, per Graham, a margin of safety can often be obtained, plus a decent eventual return.

Arindam

33

Fad is a much more fitting term, thanks. I also often use the word “fashion” in the book also. I’m happy with my recent use of the word brilliant though, especially how conveys aptness, scoping, etc. A purely technical brilliance for example mightn’t be apt or carrying scope, so, paradoxically, not brilliant.

34

Manlobbi,

As long as we’re quibbling about words and their nuances, let me suggest an alternative to ‘brilliant’, namely, ‘elegant’ as a mathematician might use the word to describe a proof that really is ‘elegant’ (aka, ‘insightfully simple’) rather than merely brute-force, technically competent.

The problem with such words and such achievements is that they are appreciated only by insiders to the discipline. But what Americans need --nearly universally-- is basic financial education, so they don’t become victims of Wall Street’s endless scams.

It’s been years since I read the book, but it introduced option pricing by starting with coin flips. That, was elegance. I’ve done the same to introduce the idea that bonds are puts and how to size positions relative to one’s account. But for now, I need to stick to basics. Hence, just journeyman’s prose.

Arindam

35

Once again your ahead of me with the words, and I agree elegant would have been more fitting (at least, the scope of the term more targeted). Ironically my colleagues and friends have more than occasionally joked warmly about me using the word elegant (in an optimistic sense usually when finding a solution, but exactly characteristic to the word), and as a composer & mathematician I should have recalled it today!

36

Having been a paid subscriber for most of the last 15 years, I have let it lapse and doubt I will go back due to the new board formats. Navigating a forum just shouldn’t be too difficult and maybe take some learning to do more advanced features but I have never been able to get this new format to work properly. For example, I have Saul’s board in my Categories and it is only telling me I have 6 Unread, the last from 12 days ago, then 4 Jan, then Dec 22. I’ve had boards that I Tagged disappear, etc. I shouldn’t have to invest so much time just to find the basics, there were better alternatives out there.

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37

Without absorbing the difference between Unread and New it is pretty confusing, I will admit. I didn’t get there right off the bat.

New are Topics that you have not read at all. New, as in New to You.
Unread are Topics that have more posts since you last looked at them.

Latest is the combination of the two, PLUS everything else that is neither. When I read Saul’s board I always choose Latest. I never let it get more than a few days old, and I always use the same browser on the same computer, so Topics that are either New or Unread stand out because the ones with no new activity are sort of grayed out because they are in my browser cache. Then I start at the bottom of what I see that is not grayed out, and is recent enough not to be stuff that expired from the browser cache.

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38

That all points to why I’ve almost given up on TMF. I’m likely to use multiple devices, iPhone, iPad, and Microsoft surface and shouldn’t have to worry about getting a different experience by changing devise. It was seemless before and pretty much is on other services

My choices are Latest, Top, Unread but no New.

My unread always shows 6 but are usually very old even after not checking I over a month.

Thanks for your pointers but I’m sort of out of desire to spend more time to make the user experience better

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39

All the tracking is stored across devices so you don’t have to worry about which device you use. The tracking is actually more accurate on this system than the old one, there was a long standing bug on the old system where posts would get missed for users who switched between threaded / unthreaded mode but many folks never seemed to notice. The greyed out links that @RHinCT mentioned are just a standard browser feature.

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40

Absolutely. All it adds is letting me use the Latest view, rather than viewing Unread and New separately. That isn’t much of a difference at all.