It’s a canary in the coal mine IMO. Sure, he’s early; but he’s not wrong. A very significant portion of growth over the last decade has been the growing ability of US companies to avoid paying US taxes. That growth eventually caps out until you reach a 0% corporate tax rate — the problem here is that shifts the tax burden 100% onto the populace, which absolutely destroys consumer spending and ultimately the economy as a whole.

Right now they’re just turning these changes in the tax rate into enterprise value, but it’s a one-time shot. And if you do too much of it, you undermine the economy. But the corporations can’t help themselves, so we will have yet another boom-bust cycle.

I'm in favor of a (more) progressive tax system, but I'm not sure that means we should tax corporations heavily or at all. The thing about a corporation is that its costs are borne by some combination of customers, employees, and shareholders, some of whom are rich and some of whom aren't. If we want to soak the rich, we should do that, rather than go after entities that are imperfectly correlated. Of course, it is then important to not let rich people shield their income with corporations.

I think these funds are useful as a risk hedge — there is some non-zero risk every year that the economy will collapse. If you invest in a fund that will help offset some of that risk by performing above average in a downturn, you might want to do it as part of a portfolio strategy.

Nobody should be putting their life savings into one of these. Hedge funds like this aren’t for that; they’re a risk management lever that gets set according to the economic model an investor is using.

lots of people here keep using the term "hedge"...none of the permabears market these as hedge funds...they do not internally hedge their own risk positions

these are what they appear to be - bear market funds

Giving a bear market fund a % of your total investment capital is the hedge. They don't need to be hedging their positions, you've already done that on the macro level by diversifying your investment portfolio.

Since Inception (07/24/00): 0.54% It truly is amazing. You'd have to really try to do that bad.

It seems to me whether that is good depends on what you conceive of as counterfactuals. If you truly believe that the investments would have made you a zillion dollars in a worst case scenario for the economy, then the fact that they've made almost nothing when the market has gone up & up & up doesn't seem that bad.

This fund's performance is objectively bad because there are alternatives with less risk that provide much better returns for much lower fees. Also, since the markets, long term, generally go up, investing in something that expects the opposite is foolish.

You can't judge risk by outcomes, so I don't think it can ever be quantified objectively. Risk always depends on what you know and what you don't know and what you think might have happened if things were different.

What was the risk of Trump winning the election? Some people think that after it happened, the odds are retroactively 100%. I think that the odds were probably about 30%, since that's what polling implied on the eve of the election. But then one may argue that we know things we didn't know then, that it might have been rigged and therefore the probability was higher than 30%.

If you imagine repeating anything 1000 times, to find out the odds of an outcome, you have to decide what you are holding the same and what you are not. If you hold nothing the same, it makes no sense to compare. If you hold everything the same, you trivially expect the exact same outcome.

I think the fact that you can spin different stories about what risks were actually taken is why investing, and life in general, is hard to optimize.

Your probabilities for anything after an event depend on your probabilities assumed prior.

That's what the British thought about the East India Company. Then what happened?

then everyone who lost some money in the East India Company invested in everything else rising as the British Empire expanded and made fortunes, that's what