How Long is the Long Term?

Everyone always talks about investing (and planning) for the long term. But they’re usually vague about what the “long term” actually means. Does that mean 5 years? 10 years? More? (Spoiler: the answer is definitely more). And frankly, talking about how you…

Read More

Occam’s – How Do Interest Rates Affect Stock Returns?

The financial media loves to talk about interest rates. There are a lot of good reasons for this, but two of the big ones are that interest rates are really important, and they’re relatively understandable and have a direct connection to most…

Read More
GME and WallStreetBets

What Does the GameStop Kerfuffle Mean?

It’s been a pretty wild ride with GameStop. But while there has been a lot happening, does it actually mean much? We’ve examined the details of what happened elsewhere, so I’m going to focus on some of the bigger questions that this…

Read More

Is the Value Premium Pining for the Fjords?

There’s no magic formula for investing. The financial markets seem to take some sort of cosmic joy in bringing people back down to Earth. And it’s value investing’s turn – in fact, it’s been value investing’s turn for a while now. To put it mildly, this has been a rough decade and a half for value stocks.

Read More

Adjustments For A Conservative Return Assumption

Consider three scenarios: An individual investing a lump-sum amount for thirty years An individual saving a fixed percentage of a constant inflation-adjusted salary at the end of each year over a thirty-year accumulation period An individual withdrawing the maximum sustainable constant inflation-adjusted…

Read More

A Guide to a Conservative Return Assumption

A simple approach for building a financial plan is to decide on a rate of return for the investment portfolio and to plug that value into a spreadsheet to represent assumed asset growth. Historical data may be used to calculate historical average…

Read More

Planning For The Future – What About Bond Yields?

Adjustments for Current Bond Yields An important consideration is that current interest rates are lower than the historical averages. The historical average return is not relevant for someone seeking to estimate future market returns from today’s starting point. The general problem with…

Read More

What To Do When Markets Plummet – Investor Behavior Gap

Another concern is whether investors are disciplined enough to stay the course with the investment strategy in order to earn the underlying index market returns. Studies on retirement spending from investment portfolios typically assume that retirees are rational investors who rebalance right…

Read More