40% bonds & 60% equity

25% in gold??? that is like putting 25% in one stock…

25% gold? Wuss.

I’m around 45% these days.

Paper or physical gold?

Indeed, past performance does not guarantee future performance. LT Bonds had a great run the during your study time. It will most probably get killed in the next 3 decades. Maybe switching from LT to ST bonds would be recommended.

Does that include transaction costs of rebalancing yearly?

This is called the “Permanant Portfolio”- google it, you can find a lot of info about it. There’s even a mutual fund that will buy it for you, but its so simple that it makes more sense to do it with ETFs for probably 1/5th of the expense ratio.

so many gold bulls these days…i ran into one for drinks last week…what strikes me is how speculative their mentality is…they have a target derived out of thin air…but hey, who says intuition doesn’t work?

To be fair, the long-term intrinsic value of gold (yes, there is such a thing) is -

One oz of gold for one gun.

See http://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-the-colt-peacemaker-outshone-gold-2009-11-05

Silver actually. I just say gold to save time. Since the bulk of my investable assets are in qualified accounts the best I can do is PSLV for silver and PHYS when I do go gold. I stay away from SLV and GLD.

I also buy physical when I can. Anytime silver dips below $27 I get the weirdest erection.

And the miners. They’ve been challenging investments over the last year or so, but I always keep some sort of position in SLW and AG.

If you dollar cost average every week or month, a mutual fund might be cheaper.

The Permanant Portfolio (PRPFX) is the original. There’s an ETF version that tries to mimic it - PERM. I’d strongly recommend sticking with PRPFX. The costs are fine at 0.71% and while the strategic asset allocation is fixed, each slice is actively managed.

The slices are actively managed. I did not know that.