Why Good Things Sometimes Happen After Bad News
One of the secrets to being a successful investor is the ability to keep your head during a bear market while everyone else around you is losing theirs. To do that, you have to understand that bad news doesn’t necessarily...
My Take: In Honor of the World Cup, a Look at Goaaals!
Neal Merbaum Meet Ben, the CEO of a fictional company. One day, he calls his employees into a conference room for a meeting and starts to assign tasks. “Mark, start typing a letter. Marge, create a spreadsheet. Frank, organize a...
Did You Sell in May?
One of the more persistent investment myths is that it is a winning strategy to sell stocks in May and then wait to buy back into the market around November. The oft-repeated catch phrase is, “Sell in May and go...
Can Past Performance Predict Future Performance
Larry Swedroe Most investors are well aware of the SEC’s warning that past performance isn’t an indicator of future performance. That warning often leads to questions like: “If past performance isn’t predictive, why do you believe that the past outperformance...
A Forward-Looking Assessment of Interest Rate Risk
By Thomas J. Emmerling and Jared Kizer Much has been written about the risks that rising interest rates pose to fixed income portfolios. However, much of this analysis has been simplistic or focused on historical periods, which are of little...
Protecting Against Inflation: Evaluating Inflation Hedge Misconceptions and Strategies
By Jared Kizer The financial media are full of conjecture about which strategies might effectively hedge inflation risk or not. Here we explore which asset classes, if any, have been effective at protecting against inflation risk. First, it is helpful...
Why Do Investors Keep Buying Actively Managed Funds?
An overwhelming body of evidence shows that actively managed mutual funds underperform their appropriate risk-adjusted benchmarks. In addition, little to no evidence points to persistence of performance beyond the randomly expected, which means past performance isn’t prologue. That’s the reason...
From the Sharpie of Carl Richards: A Great Source of Happiness
Carl Richards, director of investor education for the BAM ALLIANCE, explains in his book The Behavior Gap on the difference between financial planning and life planning: “I spend a lot of time talking and writing about worst-case scenarios: investors behaving...
Happy in Retirement: The Power of Planning
A recent Northwest Mutual study shows a connection between being a disciplined financial planner and being happy in retirement. The study shows that highly disciplined planners — those who know their goals, have detailed plans to meet them and don’t...
Make Positive Changes to Increase Happiness
Dan Solin is a New York Times best-selling author of the Smartest series of books. The following excerpt from his latest book, The Smartest Sales Book You’ll Ever Read, shows how you have the power to increase your level of...
