How Can You Protect Yourself from Identity Theft and Data Breaches?

Data breaches are a constant concern in our modern society. As the latest in a long string of data breaches, Equifax recently announced they were the target of a cyberattack in which the sensitive information of nearly half of all Americans was compromised. You can follow this link to see if you’re one of the 143 […]
How Can You Prepare for the Next 2008?

Because financial markets are habitually unpredictable in the short run, it’s challenging to draw useful conclusions based on extreme observations. However, there are important lessons investors would be well-served to remember: Capital markets generally reward long-term investors, and having a resolute investing approach may better prepare you for the next crisis and its aftermath.
How Good Is the VIX Index at Predicting Market Volatility?

Here is a summary of the VIX Index.
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.”
What Does Your Funded Ratio Score Mean?

By providing your financial objectives and the ways you want to fund them with essential and discretionary expenses, you can create a framework. Your Funded Ratio score will tell you how close your aspirations are to your reality.
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.
The Difference Between ‘Safe’ and ‘Optimal’ Withdrawal Rates for Retirement Spending

Distinguishing between “safe” withdrawal rates and “optimal” withdrawal rates is an essential piece of the retirement spending conversation.
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 […]
Taking Portfolio Spending Into the Real World for Retirees

There has been too much emphasis on the portfolio and spending conservatively to keep failure rates low. This is not the whole story for retirement income. Certain circumstances, which we will explore, may allow retirees to accept a higher probability of “failure,” and spend more aggressively from their investment portfolio.