Lesson Learned? Investors who reacted emotionally to market movements have been humbled yet again. When U.S. stocks (measured by the S&P 500 index) fell 13.97% in last year’s fourth quarter, most of us felt in our gut like the market was in the midst of a major bear market collapse. The downturn would continue into […]
I’ll take my chances… Chances are, you’ve already heard or read endless predictions about… everything. The direction of interest rates. Market returns and whether the markets will go down or up. When the next recession will hit. The movements of the cryptocurrency markets. If the market gurus were being honest, they wouldn’t give us definitive […]
What’s the best strategy for navigating choppy investment markets? The classic advice is to hang on for dear life. But is there a better option? Taming the Roller Coaster A recent article by Michael Batnick of Rithold Wealth Management helpfully reminds us that we have experienced two VERY choppy market periods since 1999. Buy […]
A full month into a historic government shutdown. A full month into a historic government shutdown, after 800,000 government workers have missed their second paycheck, two things are clear: 1) Economists and political pundits had no expectation that the impasse would past this long. 2) The impact on the U.S. economy cannot be calculated with […]
Doesn’t everybody use the internet? Actually, if you look at internet usage acrossthe global economy, you find that the citizens of wealthier nations like Sweden,Australia, Canada and the U.S. are far more likely to have internet access than lesswealthy nations like Tanzania, Indonesia and India. You can see from the graph that GDP per capita […]
Your First Impression You only have five seconds to make a good first impression, right? Or maybe it’s 10 seconds, or 13. A study of 2,000 Americans commissioned by Dollar Shave Club (you might consider the source), the actual time it takes to make a first impression is actually 27 seconds, and […]
Government Shutdown Consequences As the U.S. government shutdown enters its second week, you might wonder how so many shuttered government agencies and laid-off federal workers will affect the economy and your portfolio. The good news is that the economic impact, overall, is likely to be small. In late 2013, a similar government shutdown, spanning 16 […]
This was the year the long, seemingly endless bull market came to a crashing halt– and U.S. investors finally, for the first time since 2008, experienced the normal definition of a bear market.The bottom fell out in the final month of the year, which started with a decent chance of another year of overall annual […]
Here’s a question that a lot of older Americans ask themselves from time to time: I’m over age 65. Can I still make a contribution to an IRA or a Roth IRA? Can I reinvest some or all of my required minimum distribution in an IRA or a Roth IRA? The answer, generally, is that […]
If you’ve looked at your portfolio performance statements, line-by-line, you might have noticed that your U.S.-based stock ETFs and mutual funds are doing really well, but your overall portfolio is not showing quite the same generous returns. Are you the only one? The answer is no; we are coming off of a remarkable decade […]
