Retirement Silver Bullet #1: Move
You’ve heard that baby boomers, as well as Generations X and Y, are behind on theirretirement savings, right? These demographics are regularly bludgeoned in the media and by the financial industry’s marketing machine for their negligence in saving for the future....
Retirement Silver Bullet #2: Work
In the first of this two-part series, we discussed the amazing amount of leverage you can gain — even in the case of an apparently floundering retirement scenario — by moving from a higher cost-of-living area to a lower one. I fully recognize,...
Three Facts You Don’t Know About Mutual Funds
Mutual funds are a huge and profitable business. According to the Investment Company Institute, at the end of 2013, $30 trillion worldwide was invested in these funds. More than half that amount was invested by approximately 96 million Americans in U.S.-based...
How to Profit From the Coming Correction
In November 2013, I wrote an article in The Huffington Post, addressing the phony “debate” among pundits over a possible market correction. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed that day at 15,967. On July 7, 2014, it closed at 17,024. In...
Small Value Returns Persistent
It’s been well documented that small value stocks have provided some of the highest returns to investor portfolios over time. The following table provides annualized returns for various equity classes over the 87-year period from January 1927 to December 2013....
Don’t Pay Any Mind to Financial News Gurus
It has long been my view that much of what passes for “financial news” is little more than an infomercial for the securities industry. It also serves to feed the egos of self-confident pundits, who feed viewers a daily grist...
Beware Hot High-Dividend ETFs
The low-interest-rate environment we’ve been experiencing for six years now has led to the increased popularity of high-dividend investment strategies. But the popularity of a strategy, however, can sow the seeds of poor future returns. This occurs because cash flows...
Do Rising Rates Spell Doom For REITs?
As we have discussed many times, much of the conventional wisdom on investing is simply wrong. For our purposes, we can define conventional wisdom as those ideas that are so commonly accepted that they go unquestioned. Today, we’ll look at...
The Long And Short Of The Low-Volatility Anomaly
As far back as the early 1970s, research has shown that the lowest volatility stocks have provided better returns than the highest volatility stocks. These findings run counter to economic theory, resulting in the low-volatility anomaly. The academic research, combined...
Who’s in the Driver’s Seat? Having Real Conversations With Older Relatives About Diminishing Driving Ability
By Sylvia Nissenboim Recently, a friend and I spent a week at the Grand Canyon. Upon our return, a family member picked us up at the airport. Our stories of the challenging excursion ended abruptly as we swerved...
