As an investor or speculator, how might one respond to QE3 taper?
"Any answer for what to do in a taper will assume ceteris paribus because how markets initially react when they suspect a taper may immediately change depending on what data are released after the taper. For instance, I've seen Soros and a few other hedge fund managers hold shorts when expecting a taper because the theory is that the market may fall.  However, suppose the market falls 5%, but then positive employment numbers are released.  What then?  The same holds true for betting against Emerging Markets (EM), something I've seen Jesse Colombo and others suggest; the claim that Emerging Markets are in a bubble thanks to the U.S. Federal Reserve (the more money they release, the more the money goes overseas ...).  Again, this is possibly true, but if good data are released after the taper for these emerging markets, they could see growth and those with the shorts could get killed. TL;DR - when we ask about what happens after the taper, we have to remember we're assuming some things about everything else.   I do think that the ""safest play"" post taper is what Bill Gross mentioned about bonds (basically a bubble), as we should see interest rates rise and the Chinese seem to be reluctant to buy as much of U.S. bonds as they have in the past (though some, like Mish, assert the U.S. would welcome this).  The other play I like is the VIX (if you think the market will fall) or against (if you think the market will rise).  SVXY has been one of the best plays since 2011 (compare it to the SPY for the same time period)." As I tell all my clients... remember WHY you are investing in the first. Make a plan and stick to it. Find a strategy and perfect it.  A profit is not a profit until you take it. the same goes with a loss. You never loose till you sell for less than what you paid.  Stop jumping for one market to the next, find one strategy that works for you. Making money in the stock market is easy when you perfect your trading strategy. As for your questions: Precious metal... Buying or selling look for the trends and time frame for your desired holdings. Foreign investments... They have problem in their economy just as we do, if you know someone that specializes in that... good for you. Bonds and CD are not investments in my opinion... I look at them as parking lots for your cash. At this moment in time with the devaluation of the US dollar and inflation both killing any returns even the best bonds are giving out I see no point in them at this time. There are so many ways to easily and safely make money here in our stock market why look elsewhere.  Find a strategy and perfect it, make a plan and stick to it. As for me I love Dividend Capturing and Dividend Stocks, some of these companies have been paying out dividends for decades. Some have been increasing their payouts to their investors since Kennedy was in office.
"No, I understood your question perfectly.  I'm just saying that sort of situation is generally rare.   A quick Google search yields [this article] (http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/1112/small-business-financing-debt-or-equity.aspx) which responds to the question - Which funding method should I choose? with the answer ""Often you will not have a choice"".    That is exactly what I'm saying.  The status and stage of your business dictates what sort of financing is even available to you.  Most often you don't even have a choice between one or the other.  If you want a formula, the other people responding mentioned [WACC] (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/wacc.asp) which is the ""standard"" that finance professionals typically use.  You generally will want a WACC that is similar to other successful companies of your similar size and industry.  The actual mechanics of adjusting your WACC will involve either issuing (or repurchasing) equity or debt.  Regardless, what you are asking is not generally practical nor does it come into practice in 99 out of 100 financing situations.  WACC is important to understand and consider but people don't issue equity or debt just to balance their WACC.     Think about this another way... how easy is it to raise debt?  Probably fairly easy as usually you can go to commercial banks or go to an investment bank if you're raising enough debt.  Companies borrow all of the time, they're constantly paying off loans or taking new ones with different interest rates.  There are revolving lines of credit, secured loans, factoring (borrowing against receivables), EETCs, fixed interest debt, variable interest debt, mezzanine debt, etc etc.  How easy is it to issue equity?  Pretty amazingly difficult... sure you have your IPOs but that happens once in a company's lifetime.  You might have [secondary offerings] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_market_offering) or [follow ons] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follow-on_offering) but those are incredibly rare... I mean you've probably never even heard of them right?  You don't hear about Apple or Boeing doing those every quarter do you?  You'll hear about private equity companies buying up firms and you'll hear about mergers all of the time but again those are once-in-a-company's-lifetime events.    So now that you've read that.. how often is a company **really** going to be deciding between debt and equity?  Not very often." The ECB has put up about 400BEuro from EU countries. They are borrowing the money at an interests from other EU countries and then lend it to Spain with an interest. Same way the FEd is borrowing money from tax payers for yet another stimulus, QE3. "In Orange County (southern California), one agent has blogged pretty extensively about using rental parity to determine when it is time to rent or buy. Rental parity is achieved when the cost of renting is equal to the cost of owning; in theory, if you buy when a home is selling above rental parity, you're overpaying, and you'd be better off renting. He has many posts on the subject; a few you might care to read would be this one, and this other one. You might get a better sense of how to calculate rental parity by looking at an example or two. There is also the NY Times calculator mentioned in other responses, and the Patrick.net calculator. Be aware, the calculators are garbage in, garbage out. In other words, you have to consider the input carefully. In particular, I found the defaults on the Patrick.net calculator were not realistic. So far as I am aware, the agent at OCHousingNews does not make his calculations public (though I have never actually asked). He's using a spreadsheet which I have never seen. That is another option, if you care to do this kind of analysis yourself. Search around, you can find a spreadsheet that someone has posted here and there. But keeping something like that updated is not trivial. In my experience, in practice, it's difficult to be totally rational and mathematical when it comes to many decisions, and as other respondents have noted, where you live is one of those decisions. Too, saying ""buy when rental parity is achieved"" is sort of like saying ""buy low, sell high,"" as though it were perfectly clear when stocks are at a bottom and/or a peak. In our case, we bought a house about 12 years ago, before rental parity was being discussed in the blogsphere. Looking back, we supposedly bought at the wrong time, according to that agent's rating system, but it turned out fine for us. Our house has appreciated, whereas the S&P 500 is basically where it was 12 years ago. Had we been thinking in terms of rental parity, we might not have bought at that time. Of course, your mileage may vary, and hindsight is always 20/20. I think the most helpful advice I can offer was something I got from a real estate agent around the time we were looking. He told me ""when you're looking at houses, be sure you like the floor plan and the location, because those two things are not easily changed."" That advice really helped us to see things more clearly." If you're willing to entertain the fact that a lack of any action by the fed would have killed market confidence and caused equities to tank, gold could have been a suitable asset in a flight to quality.  Of course as others have said the drop would just be the uncertainty about QE3 being removed from the price "I think it's apt to remind that there's no shortcuts, if someone thinks about doing FX  fx: - negative sum game (big spread or commissions) - chaos theory description is apt - hard to understand costs (options are insurance and for every trade there is equivalent option position - so unless you understand how those are priced, there's a good chance you're getting a ""sh1tty deal"" as that Goldman guy famously said) - averaging can help if timing is bad but you could be just getting deeper into the ""deal"" I just mentioned and giving a smarter counterparty your money could backfire as it's the ""ammo"" they can use to defend their position.  This doesn't apply to your small hedge/trade? Well that's what I thought not long ago too! That's why I mentioned chaos theory. If you can find a party to hedge with that is not hedging with someone who eventually ends up hedging with JPM/Goldman/name any ""0 losing days a year"" ""bank"".. Then you may have a point. And contrary to what many may still think, all of the above applies to everything you can think of that has to do with money. All the billions with 0-losing days need to come from somewhere and it's definitely not coming just from couple FX punters." "All of these frameworks, Markowitz, Mean/CVaR, CARA, etc  sit inside a more general framework which is that ""returns are good"" and ""risk/lack of certainty in the returns is bad"", and there's a tradeoff between the two encoded as some kind of risk aversion number.  You can measure ""lack of certainty in returns"" by vol, CVaR, weighted sum of higher moments, but even sector/region concentration.  Similarly do I want more ""returns"" or ""log returns"" or ""sqrt returns"" in the context of this tradeoff?  You don't need any formal notion of utility at that point - and I don't know what formal ideas of utility beyond ""I want more returns and less risk"" really buys you. The Sharpe ratio only really gets its meaning because you've got some formal asset-pricing notion of utility.   In my view the moment that you're putting constraints on the portfolio (e.g. long only, max weights, don't deviate too much from the benchmark ...) - really you're operating in this more general framework anyway and you're not in ""utility-land"" anymore." "Assuming this is real, the Q's (QQQ) is an ETF that tracks the Nasdaq-100. It would be the approximate equivalent of saying ""Just put your money in SPY"" or any other ETF.  I didn't see the thread in question (looks like it was in /r/personalfinance not /r/finance; so, not the ""rules"" here), but my guess is people down voted you (and you were eventually removed by the mod) for ""low effort"", which simply stating ""Put your money in an ETF"" could possibly be construed as.  That said, the top rated comment in that thread *did* suggest putting some portion of the funds in an ETF, it's just rarely an appropriate answer for *all* of someone's investment capital." "here is what I don't get . . .when they say ""Unwind"" does it mean put a corkscrew up their ass and twist? because if they mean sell it back int the market, the problem was that there was no market and thats why it ended up on the Feds balance sheet.  There is still no market for those Toxic assets . . . so does that mean the Fed is going to write it off?  I bet we see QE 4 before any unwinding"