Investments

In retrospect, Financial-Planning’s slide show was another bit of distraction from the real work of building brilliant portfolios for long term investing.

Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) have at least a dozen significant benefits over mutual funds and only a few disadvantages.

There is no such thing as a risk-free, guaranteed investment. Everything has risks.

Bear markets are often a precipitous decline followed by a slower and steadier recovery. Volker’s Bear is rare in that a slow and steady decline was followed by a sharp precipitous recovery.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) changed the rules and required all financial institutions to move pricing their money market from a stable $1.00 price per shares to a floating net asset value.

Do mutual funds with 5-star Morningstar ratings have better future returns?

Politics matters less to our financial success than the ordinary decisions we face every day.

In anticipation of adjusting our yearly gone-fishing portfolios, I reviewed the performance of five US large-cap Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs).

Bonds had positive returns for the year despite returns peaking at the end of July and falling for the rest of the year.

In 2016, Energy and Materials had some of the best returns of the year.

2016 was a good year for stocks in general with a number of noteworthy details. Resource stocks performed the best despite being the worst-performing asset class in 2015.

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

The S&P 500 had another good year, ending up 11.96%. The S&P 500, however, only represents half of the US Stock asset class, and Small- and Mid-Cap stocks performed even better.

It is difficult in investing theory to determine which narratives have the appropriate underlying evidence to support them and which narratives are not worth following. Often it is necessary to be both a mathematician and a skeptic to filter out what is even worth considering.

“I am no longer an advocate of elaborate techniques of security analysis in order to find superior value opportunities.”

A good narrative describes what happened in the past. And even though past earnings may have something to do with current share prices, they don’t have anything to do with future share prices.

Why do our portfolios systematically overweight healthcare stocks?

Beware of reading too much into three days of market movements.

On the surface it seems like option 3 (VHT) is the best deal. Is there anything I am missing?

Energy’s low correlation with nearly every other major asset class means even very conservative investors should consider over-weighting Energy stocks.

We allocate a portion of our managed portfolios to foreign stocks, and Hong Kong is the highest ranked country on the latest edition of the Index of Economic Freedom.

I receive dire predictions with such frequency that were I to act on even a fraction of them I would never be invested in the markets.

Return comes with an element of risk. There is no safe investment which also pays a good rate of return.

This Bear market is considered one of the greatest challenges to retirement planning.

Many advisors and most investors don’t really understand the math on how to compute investment returns.

Our minds are wired to quickly generalize on perceived trends and react to them.

Bear Markets are unpredictable, but there is no reason that they should be a cause of distress.

The future may be uncertain, but the markets are quite reliable in the long run.

The larger the spread, the more likely you should neither buy nor sell the asset.

Most investors think that whenever you buy or sell a security the money is immediately deducted or deposited into your account. This is not true.

Too much leverage is risky because it endangers meeting your goals.

Continually curating a list of low cost funds is valuable for long term investors.

“It is always a difficult experience for investors to stay in markets.”

“Historically there has been a wide variety of returns from US and International stocks, and when one does poorly often another does well.”

Index investing seeks to track the return of a portion of the market. The opposite is active management.

David John Marotta was interviewed on radio 1070 WINA’s Schilling Show discussing three big investing mistakes.

We don’t recommend high yield bonds because they do nothing good for your overall portfolio.

David John Marotta was interviewed on the Schilling Show discussing how the markets performed last year and lists 4 mistakes to avoid.

Gold sounds like it should provide a safe haven of your purchasing power much more than it has actually done so.

Taking inflation into account changes nearly everything about financial planning.

While volatility can make a fund more attractive on the way up, it can also make a fund less attractive on the way down.

The stock is more likely to go up than down, but how volatile are the markets really?

Here is a review of Marotta’s 2015 Vanguard Gone-Fishing Portfolio and a description of our changes for 2016.

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

We do not recommend using stop loss orders. Now, it appears that the New York Stock Exchange agrees.

We’ve written about how to select securities but in this article we are going to apply those principles to the process of selecting a specific fund for a specific sector of the economy.

While many investors say they want a low-correlation portfolio, they don’t want to actually experience a low-correlation portfolio.

While Santa Claus usually brings something positive for the markets, it isn’t enough to worry about jumping in and out of your investments.

“Nothing has provided greater risk control over the long term than equities, which are historically without principal risk over 30-year periods…”

The Journal of Financial Planning featured a nice column by Harold Evensky entitled “These Innovative Research Papers Deserve Your Attention.”