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Your advisor can't be trusted, he wanted you to lever up and buy funds that would benefit them? Sounds like an "agency" problem to me. Get a fiduciary or buy books on investing and do it your own

You are levered 2.5 to 1?

Rogoff 'never defaulted' list A diversification approach is to own the most historically reliable currency of each continent. With the exception of Africa (Mauritius being too small and without a liquid currency to be choosen), every continent has a good currency to pick from

One cool trick is that at IB, the first 100K CHF one can own without having to pay the negative rates. The cost to own is 0% now for the first 100K

Oanda for instance, charges -1.5% a year to long the CHF. Its just suicide to own this. Back in the day the reason I had an account there was because they had pretty good interest rates compared to IB and other places. These days its hard to own anything there

The third approach can work without interventions as well. One can own a portfolio of assets then redenominate the assets to the desired currencies (balancing the need to protect against big moves in the domestic currency but also protect one self against governments by having some stores of...

There are perhaps three main approaches that one can take with the idea of reduced tail risks through FX diversification: -The Taleb method. He owns the actual bonds and currencies with the bulk of his portfolio. Those positions are cash-like, he is just trying to keep up with inflation and not...

Which are some of the classic works on the topic?

So there are two balances that one needs to get right: 1)How much domestic currency to own vs store of value currences 2)How much of each store of value (and which ones) to own The 2nd one sounds simple but silver is so volatile that it might make sense to weight it down. I got to run some...

Taleb is in a situation where he is so wealthy (I estimate he is worth at least $10M USD) that he has his 'natural shorts' covered by so much he doesn't have to be worried about them anymore (specially given that he has book royalty income on top of his assets). He can put all his money (or the...

But of course, this has to be balanced with the 'natural shorts' (the need to pay for food, rent, health care insurance, entertaiment, etc). If you put 100% of your money in the store of value index and your high risk country has a huge boom (like Brazil did from 2003 to 2008), you will get...

If one thinks about it, measuring yourself in terms of the domestic currency (specially if its a high risk or medium risk currency) is kinda like measuring yourself in terms of stock market units. Lets say someone puts 50% of their money in fixed income and 50% in stocks. Stocks rise 10%, fixed...

The solution is to not suffer from "home currency illusion". Not measure wealth in terms of the domestic currency but in terms of a stable form of value, like a basket of things that keep their value over-time. There is a certain psychological element to this. It helps to 'train' one self to...

Given that high yielding currencies tend to produce returns over low yielding currencies but ocassionally blow up (or produce severe drawdowns like those long the Turkish Lira are finding out), one can even consider that they are kinda like being long high yield bonds or the stock market. Most...

Looking at the Purchasing Power Parities of the currencies I found OECD data (vs USD) Main currencies CHF 140 DKK 120 AUD 118 USD 100 Additional (the "backup team") CAD 94 GBP 99 So it appears that the main currencies command a premium over other currencies due their relative...

One way I could solve this would be to add a couple more currencies to the index, this would bring an equal weighted exposure to 12.5% of each. Precious metals would be 25% of the total, still quite high but closer to a more resonable level where the volatility starts to get dampened by the...

Inflation linked bonds are interesting investments but only if the underlying country behind them is stable. If the inflation rate is likely to fluctuatle widely, then they are not as protective as they look. Lets say a country has a inflation linked bond promising a 2% real return with a 2%...

I probably need to bring down the weighting of Silver some because its so hugely volatile. Maybe even gold a bit. Otherwise the y-y changes will be mostly dominated by them. Further improvements could be made

One idea that might make sense is to implement a 'stop loss' approach. I got my BRL/USD/Gold exposures which I can measure against the store of value index. If I notice that I'm lagging the index and I start to get worried I'm getting devalued by those governments, I can then switch to a FX...

Last time I measured my FX exposure I was at 50% BRL 45% USD and ~5% Gold. I probably need to further diversify my USD exposure into other currencies in the index for safety and more diversification benefits. I still think it's probably optimum to have a good chunk in my domestic currency...