Here’s another chart to ponder, found as part of an Emergency Physicians Monthly article about investing during recessions. It shows what has happened in the past to the S&P 500 five years after a significant market decline.

Or course, you should also remember that if you experienced a 50% drop, mathematically you’ll need a 100% increase to get back to your original point. But your money invested after and during the drop will have done much better.

From the conclusion of the article:

While it’s tempting to shift your portfolio during economic crises, the noise in the data, the lag time between the beginning of a recession and its announcement, the potential false signals, and the historical market returns during recessions suggest that it’s difficult to time the market successfully. With some historical knowledge, we can sail through future stormy markets a bit easier.

Via EmergDoc at Bogleheads.

Another non-mainstream book that I’ve been reading is Fail-Safe Investing by the late Harry Browne. His conservative investing philosophies appear to have initially been in vogue during the 1980s, a period of high inflation. These days, with stocks earning basically nothing over a decade, it seems to be making a comeback. In the book, he recommends having two portfolios. For money that you will need for things like retirement, you should create a Permanent Portfolio. For money that you won’t need, you can keep a separate Variable Portfolio that you can speculate with.

The Permanent Portfolio
In general, Browne does not believe it is possible to predict the future, and trying to do so is futile. Therefore, he went out to design a Permanent Portfolio that maintains your purchasing power over all time horizons, both long and short, and also independent of future market conditions.

Here are the four asset classes he believes in, which correspond with four possible modes of the market:

The idea is that no matter what is happening, at least one of the four areas will be doing well, and probably well enough to create a positive total return. For example, in extreme inflation both stocks and bonds might be doing bad, but gold will likely be doing great. His proposed asset allocation is simply an even split between them:

From 1970-2003, according to his website, this mix of asset classes has earned about 9.5% annualized, with a lot less volatility than I would have guessed. This is before expenses.

Permanent Portfolio Mutual Fund (PRPFX)
There is also a managed mutual fund that follows this strategy, although not exactly. It is run by the Permanent Portfolio Family of Funds and the ticker symbol is PRPFX.

Very recently it hasn’t been doing as well. The one-year trailing return is -20.60%, while the Vanguard S&P 500 Index fund has a trailing return of -47.50%, and the Vanguard Target Retirement Income fund has a trailing return of -16.90%. But over the last 5 and 10 years, the fund has beaten out most balanced mutual funds of stocks/bonds.

Food For Thought
I’m not advocating this approach by any means, but I found it intriguing for a variety of reasons. First, it still somewhat follows modern portfolio construction techniques by diversifying across multiple asset classes that are not strongly correlated with each other. Most portfolios these days are only split between stocks and bonds. The stocks part may be split many ways (small cap, international, etc.), but with correlations increasing across the board, that hasn’t really helped add much diversification. Maybe we all need more cash and direct inflation protection.

Second, the Permanent Portfolio is still a passive investment style that does not try to predict the future, time movements in and out of the market, or pick the best mutual fund or hedge fund manager. No stock newsletter or trading systems. You just rebalance across the four broad asset classes if they get lopsided.

There are some extreme notes of caution in his writing as well. For example, the gold is recommended to be kept in physical form, and outside of the United States. The idea being that if our dollar (fiat currency) fails, the U.S. government may also be in trouble. Gold and other property might be confiscated. Browne thinks everyone should have a foreign bank account. (My biggest hurdle is buying gold, personally. I’d rather invest in a commodity like oil or even rice than a shiny soft metal.)

More Information
There is some good discussion on this topic in this Bogleheads post, and the Crawling Road blog has several posts exploring this as well.

Via Calculated Risk, Doug Short has a series of charts comparing the movements of various bear markets. The one below compares the Dow starting in 1929 (Great Depression), the S&P 500 in 1973 (Oil Crisis), S&P in 2000 (Tech Crash), and the current bear market starting in 2007 (do we have a moniker yet?).

Click on image for larger version.

I wouldn’t read too much into them, although I do have a thing for pretty charts. 😉 If anything, I suppose we should be prepared for at least another year of fun:

Reinhart and Rogoff mention a three-and-a-half-year average peak to trough decline in equities for past financial crises. As of today, the market peak of October 9, 2007 was about 16 months ago — which would put us well shy of the half-way mark for the average crisis.

Back in December, I wrote a detailed review of the “new” LendingClub, a site which lets individuals lend money directly to other individuals and earn 7-20% interest (depending on credit scores). Many of you sent additional questions about LendingClub, and Rob Garcia, Director of Product Strategy, was gracious enough to answer them. I want to thank Rob for his time and candidness, as some of the questions were quite blunt. 🙂

Some of my readers are concerned about your company being in its early stages. What would happen if Lending Club goes bankrupt? What would happen to our notes in that scenario? Would we be unsecured creditors of LC?
Yes the notes are unsecured obligations of Lending Club. That being said, we’ve structured the program in a way that makes it as “bankruptcy remote” as possible: all lender funds are kept in a trust account that is not part of Lending Club assets, and therefore would be off-limit to other Lending Club’s creditors. We also have a back-up servicing agreement in place with Portfolio Financial Servicing Corporation (www.pfsc.com), one of the largest loan servicer in the country, who will service the loans should Lending Club be unable to do so.

Any insight to why the income and net worth requirements are somewhat restrictive for lenders?
This comes from state regulations; most states impose financial eligibility requirements for clearing new types of securities offerings. We are hoping that some of these requirements will be lifted as the program continues to build its track record. As pointed out in a recent Javelin study, the average annual return for Lending Club lenders has been 9.05% over the last 18 months, with little volatility. If we continue showing that sort of track record over a long period of time, we hoping the financial eligibility requirements will become unnecessary.

Do you expect to add more eligible states soon?
Yes. We are actively pursuing registration in states where the offering has not yet been cleared. Note that residents of most states who haven’t been cleared for the main offering can already buy notes on the Note Trading Platform from FOLIOfn.

Can I just take the current $25 bonus and run? [See below]
You certainly can, although we’d love you to try Lending Club.

Is there plans to fund via PayPal or some other more instant form of funding? I saw a loan I wanted last week, but had to wait 4 days for my bank deposit to clear and missed it.
We do offer this capability, but only to lenders who do not have a linked bank account. Once a bank account has been linked, it is a lot more cost-efficiently (although admittedly longer) to move funds by ACH.

Any plans to pay interest on idle cash?
Not immediately. Believe it or not, there are lots of regulatory challenges for a non-“deposit taking institution” like Lending Club (basically not a bank) to pay interests on idle funds. It is in our interest to do so to attract more lenders, so we are looking for a way around (along the same vein as what PayPal is doing) and are confident it will come through.

I have several old loans from Lending Club still in repayment. However, after the new regulations, I am no longer eligible to lend due to both my state of residency and income. Any idea what might happen to my loans? I don’t want to ask Lending Club in case they close my account…
No worries; we’re not closing anybody’s account! All “old” loans continue to be serviced and all lenders get their monthly payments credited to their account irrespective of their state of residence. The new restrictions only restrict the ability to buy new notes.

— End of Interview —

Follow-up Updates and Comments
Here is a excerpt from the Executive Summary of the noted Javelin study, which notes both pros and cons:

If an individual had invested $10,000 on June 1st, 2007 in a representative group of loans on the site, the value of that individual’s account at Lending Club would have grown to $11,594 by November 2008 (assuming reinvestment of payments received). That return would have outpaced other common investments or indexes such as the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index ($6,289), the Nasdaq Composite Index ($6,605), 1-year CDs ($10,678) and 6-month Treasury bills ($10,501). This comparison factors in Lending Club’s 1% service charge but does not include fees and other transaction costs for the other investments. This comparison does not factor in differences in liquidity between Lending Club notes and the other investments or indexes. Notably, Lending Club notes can only be sold through the Note Trading Platform that was made available recently (on October 14, 2008) and there is no assurance that liquidity will develop on that platform.

Over the last few months, we have seen credit card companies canceling inactive cards, reducing credit limits, and raising rates on lots of borrowers. As a result, I have definitely seen a rise in loan volume at LendingClub.

As a lender, I’ve tried to take advantage by slowly investing in lots of small $25 loans to folks with squeaky-clean credit histories and good job histories, and now have about $1,000 lent out. I understand there is risk involved, and will report my results. I do wish the PayPal funding option was always available, as the convenience would be great. Also, another reader pointed out that if they accepted PayPal, one could fund with a credit card for the rewards.

If you are interested in lending, you can still use this special $25 lender sign-up link to get a free $25 to try it out with no future obligation. There is no credit check and you don’t have to deposit anything. After you are approved, the $25 should show up in your account balance, and you can lend it out immediately.