Investments

If you’re thinking about buying an I Bond, make sure it fits properly into your financial plan, and you aren’t just chasing the high interest rate.

Both are U.S. debt obligations which are adjusted by the Consumer Price Index, but they do so very differently.

Home bias is the tendency of investors to invest a majority of their assets in companies domiciled in their home country.

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.

Rather than trying to time your investments based on one or the other, the advice is simple. Stay the course. Invest. Rebalance.

Currently, 12-month inflation is 8.58% and the crowdsourced expected inflation is 2.88%. Here’s what to do.

Stay the course. Rebalance. Don’t peek.

Inflation is like the rain. You must prepare in advance in order to stay dry.

The S&P 500 saw an intraday bear market today, dipping over 20% down from a prior high and then correcting back before the day’s close.

We think holding your next seven years of spending in relatively safe bonds is always a good idea. But holding too much in bonds may not keep up with inflation and is not ideal for your long-term investment strategy.

Any of these ETFs or mutual funds seem like they could be a good one-fund pick for the long haul.

We anticipated Consumer Staples to have a lower expected return but a larger risk-adjusted return and we expected Biotechnology to have very volatile returns with lower correlations to the other sectors. Both of those things happened in 2021.

The estimated advantage of Franklin funds during 2021 was 0.40% or $118,955.

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.

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.

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.

This article is part of my series where I review how Freedom Investing performs for the quarter.

While many have been following the domestic returns and recovery, fewer investors know how well foreign investments did this past year.

You are not obligated to vote just because you own shares.

The value of a stock is simply what people are willing to pay for it.

Our Gone-Fishing Portfolios are free to use portfolios that take advantage of the no-transaction-fee, low-cost ETFs or mutual funds of each major custodian. Over the years, we’ve changed the funds and the allocations as new research or securities reveal improvements.

Looking closer into each asset class, here’s how our top six asset classes performed between January 1 and December 31, 2020.

There are three clear options: future value schedule, a product array, or a large table.

When you get out of the markets, you have made a huge gamble with your retirement money, and now the stakes are high.

Individual sectors of the economy have reacted very differently to the pandemic.

“No decent planner would ever create a plan that didn’t account for frequent market drops.”

Those who flat-lined to cash or who waited to invest their cash until the markets looked better missed out on the recovery.

In short selling, a bankrupt stock is the best thing that can happen, but the worst thing that can happen is that the stock price will rise.

City real estate will be a little less expensive and suburbs and the countryside will be a little more expensive.

This data shows that there is no historical justification for selling to cash during volatile market movements.

They vary in the slope, depth, and duration of the downturn.

On Tuesday, June 9, 2020, David John Marotta appeared on Radio 1070 WINA’s Schilling Show with Rob Schilling to talk about the markets.

Should investors get out of the markets during an election year?

There are many possible futures which could produce any number of outcomes that would be normal market volatility.

Dare to be dull. When you rebalance instead of following the crowd, you set yourself up for greater expected returns and are the definition of being a contrarian.

Gold is extremely volatile and still doesn’t do much more than vaguely keep up with inflation. You can do better.

Diversification means always having something to complain about. Recently, it has been energy.

Sometimes, you don’t get a second chance to be brave.

I knew the market was going down, but I accidentally took Bogle’s advice and didn’t peek at my own accounts.

Diversification is important. Diversification did not eliminate losses, but it did lose less and recover more quickly.

While the appreciation allocation helps you achieve your financial goals, introducing a stability allocation into your portfolio can prevent your portfolio from running out of money.

This disappointment with good stock market returns explains their need to criticize stock buybacks.

You don’t have to time the market to make money in the market. In fact, timing the market is usually a losers game as the market often pushes your emotions to do exactly the wrong thing.

A recovery after a significant downturn in the markets is often market by steep growth.

“Sell the bounce” is never a good strategy because of the first word.

Market returns are out of your control. These thirteen actions are in your control.

Convert something today. Convert because the markets are down, or maybe convert just because you likely won’t regret it in 30 years when the markets will likely be up a lot more than they are now.

Now that we are in the midst of a bear market, investment returns are down 20% or more and Schwab’s personal value chart makes it look even worse.

During a down market like this one, now is your chance both to harvest capital losses as they occur and rebalance your portfolio.

There are two critically important investment principles during retirement: 1) Stay calm and 2) Rebalance.