2024 Index of Economic Freedom Update
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Last year, eleven countries made our cut-off. This year, twelve do.

Updates to Our Emerging Markets Strategy (March 2024)
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Because of Mexico’s current valuation, we believe that it has the possibility to perform well regardless of how this potential conflict resolves.

Freedom Investing in Review (December 2023)
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This quarter, we saw that in 1-year returns using the dynamic tilt and ending December 31, 2023, Developed Freedom Investing had a -4.21% disadvantage, Emerging Market Freedom Investing had a +4.78% advantage, and Overall Freedom Investing had a -1.46% disadvantage.

Freedom Investing in Review (September 2023)
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This quarter, we saw that in 1-year returns ending September 30, 2023, Developed Freedom Investing had a -4.77% disadvantage, Emerging Market Freedom Investing had a +3.89% advantage, and Overall Freedom Investing had a -1.63% disadvantage.

Adding an Ex-China Fund to Our Emerging Market Strategy (July 2023)
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If China booms, it may be a mistake that we reduced the allocation. If China undergoes investment controls, it may be a mistake that we kept China at all.

Executive Summary of the Possible Taiwan Conflict (June 2023)
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This article is a curated list of recent news about Taiwan.

Freedom Investing in Review (June 2023)
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This quarter, we saw that in 1-year returns ending June 30, 2023, Developed Freedom Investing had a -3.68% disadvantage, Emerging Market Freedom Investing had a +4.15% advantage, and Overall Freedom Investing had a -0.61% disadvantage.

Freedom Investing in Review (April 2023)
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This quarter, we saw that in 1-year returns ending April 30, 2023, Developed Freedom Investing had a -2.99% disadvantage, Emerging Market Freedom Investing had a +1.85% advantage, and Overall Freedom Investing had a -0.4% disadvantage.

2023 Index of Economic Freedom Update
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Last year, thirteen countries made our cut-off. This year, eleven do.

Using Franklin Funds in 2022 Saved Clients Over $360,000
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Reducing expense ratios by a theoretical 0.42% is a significant result. It is good to know that what works in theory has also worked even better in practice.

Freedom Investing By Quarter in 2022
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Here is a review of the performance of Freedom Investing in 2022.

Freedom Investing in Review (December 2022)
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This quarter, we saw that in 1-year returns ending December 31, 2022, Developed Freedom Investing had a +0.13% advantage, Emerging Market Freedom Investing had a +0.45% advantage, and Overall Freedom Investing had a +0.77% advantage.

Freedom Investing in Review (September 2022)
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This quarter, we saw that in 1-year returns ending September 30, 2022, Developed Freedom Investing had a -0.44% disadvantage, Emerging Market Freedom Investing had a -0.34% disadvantage, and Overall Freedom Investing had a +0.14% advantage.

Freedom Investing in Review (June 2022)
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This quarter, we saw that in 1-year returns ending June 30, 2022, Developed Freedom Investing had a -1.19% disadvantage, Emerging Market Freedom Investing had a +0.46% advantage, and Overall Freedom Investing had a -0.12% disadvantage.

A Closer Look at Freedom 100 Emerging Markets ETF (FRDM)
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FRDM is interesting, but using our country specific funds plus a low cost Vanguard Emerging Market fund allows us to emphasize freedom for as low a cost as possible.

Freedom Investing in Review (March 2022)
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This quarter, we saw that in 1-year returns ending March 31, 2022, Developed Freedom Investing had a +1.44% advantage, Emerging Market Freedom Investing had a +2.07% advantage, and Overall Freedom Investing had a +1.28% advantage.

An Overview of Our Allocation Changes (March 2022)
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We are constantly reviewing our portfolios’ asset allocations in order to bring them more in line with our Investment Committee’s best practices. Here is a summary of our recent changes.

Best Sub-scores of Economic Freedom for Finding Higher Returns
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This year, we decided to analyze the predictive power of these sub-scores on overall future investment returns.

High Inflation, Low Fiscal Health, and What Comes Next for the U.S.
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At 4.0% inflation, cash will lose 82.88% of its value over 45 years. Such loss of value can ruin a retirement plan more so than any market returns. Your long term investments need to appreciate well over inflation. The best method to do that is to stay mostly invested in stocks.

Transaction Fees for Foreign Issues Changes Individual Foreign Strategy (January 2022)
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At the start of the year, purchases of all of these securities had no transaction fee at Charles Schwab. However in December 2021, Schwab added a transaction fee to some of the holdings.

Swap to Franklin Funds Saved Clients Over $100,000
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The estimated advantage of Franklin funds during 2021 was 0.40% or $118,955.

Individual Foreign Health Care in Review (December 2021)
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An initial equal weight strategy of these 26 companies implemented on January 1, 2021 and held without further buys or sells through December 31, 2021 had a +8.64% advantage over the foreign healthcare benchmark.

Freedom Investing in Review (December 2021)
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This quarter, we saw that in 1-year returns ending December 31, 2021, Developed Freedom Investing had a -0.12% disadvantage, Emerging Market Freedom Investing had a +1.27% advantage, and Overall Freedom Investing had a +0.21% advantage.

Introduction to Freedom Investing (Podcast)
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On Friday, November 5, 2021, Megan Russell was interviewed by Michael Morton of Financial Planning for Entrepreneurs podcast to discuss Freedom Investing.

Freedom Investing in Review (September 2021)
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This quarter, we saw that in 1-year returns ending September 30, 2021, Developed Freedom Investing had a +0.70% advantage, Emerging Market Freedom Investing had a +1.64% advantage, and Overall Freedom Investing had a +0.71% advantage.

Freedom Investing in Review (June 2021)
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This article is part of my series where I review how Freedom Investing performs for the quarter.

Overcome Your Biases and Invest Globally
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Home bias is the tendency of investors to invest a majority of their assets in companies domiciled in their home country. Recency bias is the tendency for humans to believe that what has happened recently will continue to happen in the future.

Freedom Investing in Review (March 2021)
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While many have been following the domestic returns and recovery, fewer investors know how well foreign investments did this past year.

2021 Index of Economic Freedom: Taiwan
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This means that in addition to the overall Emerging Market funds, we will have country-specific Emerging Market allocations to both Taiwan and Chile.

2021 Index of Economic Freedom: Hong Kong
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No one knows what the future holds for Hong Kong, but we needed to make a decision on whether it has a place in our Freedom Investing.

We Added Individual Stocks to Our Foreign Allocations (January 2021)
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We believe these 26 companies will be an effective weight to add foreign healthcare to our portfolios.

Risk-Return Analysis of Freedom Investing
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In this article, I am reviewing the quantitative measurements and performance metrics of Freedom Investing to see how its risk and return compare to the EAFE Index, its benchmark.

Hong Kong Still Has a Place in Freedom Investing
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Hong Kong has always been an anomaly: a tiny, extremely free country with an expiration date in 2047.

More Freedom Investing Added to Marotta’s Schwab IIP Asset Allocation (June 2020)
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As a result of new fund additions, we added five new country-specific funds to our Schwab Institutional Intelligent Portfolio asset allocations.

A 25-Year Review of Freedom Investing
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These findings together demonstrate how Economic Freedom seems to have been a valid factor for higher expected returns than investing in the EAFE Index alone.

How Can I View Global Market Movements By Country?
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There are as many as 60 different stock markets around the world.

Revisiting BRIC Countries 10 Years Later
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In 2003, the Goldman Sachs Global Economics Department predicted the economic and geopolitical influence of Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRIC countries) would become increasingly visible in the developed world. We revisit those countries here.

Three-Year Freedom Investing Returns (June 2018)
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The bonus in returns of countries with freedom over and above the MSCI EAFE foreign index ranges from 1.28% to 1.91%.

PIIGS Have Returned To Simply PIGS
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In recognition of its efforts to reduce its debt and deficit and Ireland’s return to the “free” category of the economic freedom index, I think the letter I for Ireland should be removed from PIIGS and it should return once more to just PIGS.

Your Portfolio May Be Missing Canada
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Under weighting Canada could have the effect of diminishing your returns. If your fund under weights Canada, consider switching to a lower cost fund which properly represents it.

Freedom Investing and Emerging Markets in 2016
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In 2016, the average return of the best investment products of the Freedom Six outperformed the Vanguard FTSE Developed Markets ETF by 6.75%.

BREXIT: Britain’s Independence Day
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The future may be uncertain, but the markets are quite reliable in the long run.

Why Invest In Chile?
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Adding a little bit of Chile to your portfolio can boost returns and reduce volatility.

States With Low Regulation Have 30% More Small Business Payroll Growth
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That is a tremendous advantage for businesses in states with less regulatory burden.

What Is The Correlation Of Freedom Investing?
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Should we have a “Free Countries Asset Class” or a “Foreign Stock Asset Class?”

Jack Bogle: Investing Outside The United States
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“We still have plenty of problems, but we’re much better than France, Britain and Germany.”

What Happened To The Australian Dollar?
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At first glance, AUNZ did not have great returns in 2014. But is that the whole story?

The Success of Freedom Investing
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It is a simple thought experiment. Would you rather invest in South Korea or in North Korea?

Returns from the Countries with Economic Freedom
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Freedom investing beat the EAFE Foreign index by 7.92% in 2014.

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