A Boring Market is a Happy Market, so Why Can’t People Leave Their Portfolios Alone?
People use a lot of adjectives to describe the market, but we’re excited to say we are currently experiencing what we would call a “boring market.”
Should You Invest in Cryptocurrencies? (And What Are They Anyway?)
We’ve recently gotten some questions about investing in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, so I want to take this chance to talk about them. To avoid burying the lede, let me just say this up front: they really aren’t viable investment options.
The Problems with Indexing
Index funds dominate the passive management landscape (though they are not the entirety). But just because there’s no way to guess which active managers will do well in the future doesn’t mean index funds don’t have problems themselves.
5 Companies Comprise One-Third of S&P 500 Returns – Is This the Death of Diversification?
Everyone is always eager to declare the death of diversification. They say it fails in a crisis, that correlations are going up throughout the markets, or that building a diversified portfolio is just too dang time-consuming and expensive (seriously). Now people are ringing the same death knell because so much of the market’s returns are […]
Heads My Stocks Win, Tails Yours Lose: The Difference Between Daily Returns and a Coin Flip
We all wonder how the markets did today. Whether it’s actually useful information or not doesn’t seem to matter. Daily returns present an easy, attention-grabbing story the media can fill a couple minutes with every day.
Do Bonds Help Diversify Your Investment Portfolio?
Diversification is a good thing. It’s the only free lunch in finance.
The Possibilities of Broader Diversification in Retirement
Often, retirees are limited to accepting whatever a researcher assumes about market returns in order to obtain guidance about sustainable spending rates. I proposed a general framework for determining a safe withdrawal rate for a given retirement duration, acceptable failure probability, asset allocation, and capital market expectations.
Should You Use a Rising Equity Glide Path in Retirement?
Retirement income comes in many forms. Wade Pfau considers the pros and cons of a rising equity glide path.
What is Risk?
Risk is one of those complicated concepts that you can’t really pin down to one definition, but it’s the single most important factor for investors.
The Dangers of Putting Our Faith in Statistics
Statistics are great and all, but just because the numbers say something will happen doesn’t make it the gospel truth.
