Compassionate Curmudgeon

Here she is world! Here's Gypsy!

I've added a Quicktime movie of Gypsy Rose Lee's appearance on What's My Line on May 31, 1959, to my Gypsy page.

When TSP Talks, Don't Listen

I'm always on the lookout for good advice on how to allocate my TSP funds, so when I came across a nifty little web site called TSP Talk (www.tsptalk.com), I decided to give it a look. BTW, TSP stands for Thrift Savings Plan, which is comparable to a 401k for federal government employees; it offers two bond funds and three stock funds. It's site can found at www.tsp.gov.

TSP Talk is a free site, run as a hobby by a (presumably) government employee who is invested in the Thrift Savings Plan. You can subscribe to the site and receive periodic emails on how to best re-allocate your capital in the various TSP funds. The site's owner doesn't pretend to be a market guru, but he does claim to have had some success managing his own TSP account.

He seems to issue a new alert, signaling an allocation change, every few days (there have about 30 alerts so far this year).

The current recommended allocation strategy, in effect since Oct. 28, is 100% G fund (government bonds). Hmm, anyone who followed that advice would have missed out on the terrific gains that the stock funds have seen since, well, since Oct. 28. Not a very encouraging start.

So how's he done year to date? Not too good. A paltry 0.19%. That's smaller than the gain from any single fund. In other words, if you had kept your money in any one fund this year, you would have had a better return than he's had.

Well, maybe this is an off year for him. How has he done over a longer period of time? For the period 2000 through 2004 he shows a return of 14.64%. That might not seem too bad until one considers that it's basically the same return you would have gotten by simply investing 20% in each of the five funds over that same period and letting it ride.

Clearly, this guy is a danger not only to himself, but to anyone who subscribes to his alert service.