ruicarlov
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PTCMan! The doodle superhero of the PTC world!
Posts: 1479
Portugal
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Just to give you a quick update, since December that I changed my strategy a bit, but the biggest change was the broker. Using a Portuguese bank for my porfolio was expensive in terms of transaction comissions and was kind of hard to activated the conventions to avoid double taxation of dividends. With a high enough capital (around 25K€), using a broker like Interactive Brokers becomes more atractive, since we have to spend $120 per year on comissions (they charge you the difference if you spend less), but we have very cheap comissions per transaction ($1 for USA, 4€ for Europe), allowing for some more frequent rebalancing and/or adding more money (how is this called in English?)
Another decision was to leave dividend-paying ETFs behind (as much as possible) and use ETFs the accumulate dividends. Since the market for these kinds of ETFs is smaller (US-based ETFs don't allow this), I had to use multiple ETFs for some categories (like Pacific region - divided into Pacific ex-Japan and Japan). But since I'm now at IB, the number of ETFs isn't much of a problem. My current allocation is the following:
5% XEMB.MI - db-Trackers Emerging Markets Eurobonds 8% IAU - iShares COMEX Gold Trust 5% DBC - Powershares DB Commodity Index Tracking Fund 12% TLT - Barclays 20+ Year Treasury Bond Fund 4% CBU3 - iShares USD Government Bond 1-3 years 9% CBU7 - iShares USD Government Bond 3-7 years 5% EGIL - iShares Global Inflation-Linked Government Bond 9% XGPD - db x-trackers FTSE Global Real Estate 14% SXRG - iShares MSCI USA Small Cap 10% ERO - SPDR MSCI Europe 4.5% EUNN - iShares MSCI Japan 5% SXR1 - iShares MSCI Pacific ex-Japan 9.5% SPYX - SPDR MSCI Emerging Markets Small Cap
TLT is the only one that pays dividends, but there's no other ETF that has US-government treasuries with those maturities. I probably should have done some more rebalancing on TLT. Maybe I'll do that later, when I put some money I've saved this year onto ETF. I've read some interesting arguments favoring actively managed ETFs when it comes to bond markets, which is more exotic than stock markets. I realized I don't have much exposure to bond markets outside US. Something along the lines of a PIMCO Global Bond ETF is something that crossed my mind.
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