Ready, Set, Go: Carry Your Financial Life With One Hand
Can you condense your many essential financial and legal documents into one portable file container? With many records now stored online, this goal is more attainable than ever. The following ideas can help you pare down the paper documents that...
How You Frame the Investing Question Matters
It’s my experience that there are two keys to being able to maintain control over those urges that get investors into trouble. The first is to understand financial history. That means knowing that stocks are high risk investments, subject to...
What Building Towers Say About Future Stock Returns
Behavioral finance is a fascinating field, providing us with many insights into investor behaviors that help explain many of the anomalies that financial theory cannot explain on its own. It also helps explain many of the mistakes investors make. Among...
Professor Eugene Fama Discusses the Evolution of Finance
As a member of the BAM ALLIANCE, we are proud to share the news that Eugene Fama, the "father of modern finance" and professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, was recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences along with fellow professors Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller for their "empirical analysis of asset prices."
Pass the Pecan Pie: Starting the Caregiver Conversation With Your Family
The holidays are coming, and a similar scenario will play out all over the country as adults return to their childhood homes to celebrate with their parents and grandparents. The baby boom generation is now on the precipice of retirement....
The American Funds Advantage?
I was forwarded an article that American Funds published touting the superiority of its funds relative to index strategies. The piece contains statements like this: “Some investment managers, American Funds among them, have distinguished themselves with a proven track record...
Know-Nothing Investors Outperform Know-Somethings
All but the most diehard proponents of the efficient-markets hypothesis accept the fact that with valuable inside information, one can earn abnormal returns. That leaves this question: Does access to information that is publicly available provide investors with a sufficient...
Don’t Put All Your Eggs in Warren Buffett’s Basket
No investor’s portfolio should consist of just one company — even if that company is Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) and its CEO, Warren Buffett, is donned an oracle. For those investors thinking I’m wrong, I hope you’ll consider four logical reasons...
The Million Dollar Question: “How Am I Doing?”
You may have seen the television ads that pose the big question: “What’s your number?” The number refers to the balance you need in your investment account to live comfortably in retirement. If these ads make you wonder how you...
Former Vice Chair Explains the Financial Crisis
The effects of the financial crisis are still with us. And many books have been written about it. Alan Blinder’s new book “After the Music Stopped,” which focuses on the why it happened, is the best I’ve read so far....
