2024 – Q1 Quarterly Market Review
2023- Q3 Quarterly Market Review
What is the Role of Bonds in Your Portfolio?
A lot of the time, investors view each of their investments in isolation. They focus on how this fund or that fund did. But this is a fundamentally wrong headed approach. Just like your investment portfolio only really matters – and can only be evaluated – in the context of your overall retirement plan, you […]
What is the Efficient Market Hypothesis? And What Does it Mean for You?
Navigating the financial markets can often feel like you’re in a labyrinth, with news outlets, analysts, and every ‘guru’ on the internet vying for your attention, each one painting a picture of the market landscape teeming with endless opportunities for extraordinary gains (or horrific losses). But there’s an easy way for investors (whether you’re focused […]
Choosing Between Individual Bonds and Bond Funds in Your Investment Portfolio
When investors are looking at their bonds, one of the most common questions is whether they should use individual bonds or bond funds (either in the form of mutual funds or ETFs) in their investment portfolio. Interest rates have come up over the past few years, so the yields on bonds have also come up. […]
Home Sweet Home Bias: Overweighting US Stocks in Your Portfolio
Investing is deceptively simple. Until it’s not. As investors, we want to start with the market portfolio—that is, by definition, the most efficient portfolio. But we’ll also want to customize our investments to address our specific situation. For instance, the global bond market is substantially bigger than the global stock market, but most retirement-focused investors’ […]
2023 – Q4 Quarterly Market Review
2023- Q3 Quarterly Market Review
Financial Support of Adult Children and Your Retirement
Much has been written about how the current generation of young people are transitioning to full adulthood. Some take a very negative view characterizing the transition as “slow” while others take a sympathetic view, reasoning that that the transition is more difficult to make than it was for prior generations given that the cost of […]
2023 – Q3 Quarterly Market Review
2023- Q3 Quarterly Market Review
Do Stocks Get Safer The Longer You Own Them?
There are a lot of cliches in retirement planning. And a lot of them are cliches for a good reason – they’re good advice. But not always, and more than a few of them are right for the wrong reasons.
One of those cliches is that with investing you need to focus on the long term to reduce the risks from investing. It is absolutely true that investing is a long-term activity, but is that second part true? Do stocks (and other types of investments) get safer the longer you hold onto them?
Which Retirement Are You Buying?
For many, the default approach seems to be to just “save what I can” for retirement. Individuals taking this approach usually save what’s “leftover” after making payments on their home, car and credit cards and covering their expenses of daily living. People generally recognize that they should save at least enough to capture their employer’s 401(k) match, if such a match exists, lest they “leave money on the table” each year.
