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 need to focus on the long term can feel like a bit of […]
How Buffer Assets Might Be Able to Help Your Retirement
Investing involves risk. When you put your money to work in the financial markets there’s always a chance, over every time period, that you could lose money. Most of the time, especially over longer time frames, the market goes up. But they don’t have to. The risk is always there – and that risk is […]
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 whole affair raises, and specifically how this all impacts long-term investors. So let’s […]
What Happened With GameStop?
It’s a bit of an understatement to say that GameStop has been in the news lately. There are a lot of people opining about what is going on, but we want to cut through that and look at what actually happened (we look at what it all means in another article). So what actually happened, and […]
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.
What Do Low Interest Rates Mean for Stock Returns?
Interest rates are one of the key tools that the Federal Reserve has to manage the economy. Changing how much it costs to borrow money can slow down an economy or give a the economy a nudge.
Unpacking Today’s Market Returns
Today, March 9th, 2020, was a bad day for the financial markets. There are four main elements to this story that I want to pick apart…
The Coronavirus and Its Effects on the Market and Your Retirement
Just like many other areas of life, the novel Coronavirus is having a significant impact on the financial markets.
Two Philosophies for Retirement Income Planning Part Two: Safety-First School
This article is part of a series; click here to read Part 1. The safety-first school of thought was originally derived from academic models of how people allocate their resources over a lifetime to maximize lifetime satisfaction. Academics have studied these models since the 1920s to figure out how rational people make optimal decisions. In […]
Two Philosophies for Retirement Income Planning Part One: Probability-Based
Within the world of retirement income planning, the siloed nature of financial services between investments and insurance leads to two opposing philosophies about how to build a retirement plan. There is an old saying that if the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. This tendency is […]
