Adam M. Grossman

STOCK MARKET INVESTORS are enjoying yet another strong year. The S&P 500 has gained about 14% so far, shrugging off, for the most part, uncertainty over tariffs, interest rates and the latest government shutdown.
Should this worry us?
Since ancient times, soothsayers have been attempting—without luck—to forecast the future. As it relates to investment markets, the frustrating reality is that no one knows what the future will bring. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do.

BARRY RITHOLTZ’S NEW BOOK, How Not to Invest, offers investors a cautionary tale—many of them, in fact.
Ritholtz has been in and around the investment industry for more than 30 years—as a trader, a journalist and, most recently, as cofounder of a wealth management firm. 
In short, he is no stranger to Wall Street. His conclusion? It can be a minefield.
Bad actors like Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff are well known.

LARRY ELLISON, THE 81-YEAR-OLD cofounder of Oracle Corporation, recently became the world’s wealthiest person.
Oracle, a software company, isn’t nearly as large as its peers. So how did Ellison’s net worth manage to surpass that of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and the founders of other much larger companies?
The answer is simple: In the nearly 50 years since Oracle’s founding, Ellison has almost never sold a share of his company’s stock. According to an analysis by Smart Insider,

HUMBLEDOLLAR FOUNDER and longtime Wall Street Journal columnist Jonathan Clements passed away earlier this week. He was 62.
I reached out to several of Jonathan’s close friends and colleagues to ask for their remembrances. Taken together, they paint a picture of someone who was as beloved by his peers as he was by his readers.
As Jason Zweig put it, “I have just lost a friend, and so have you.”
Christine Benz,

FOR MANY INVESTORS, talking about bonds is about as interesting as watching paint dry. They aren’t nearly as interesting as stocks. But if you have a portion of your portfolio allocated to bonds, or plan to, it’s a topic worth some discussion.
The bond market is actually much larger and much more diverse than the stock market. For most investors, though, there are just a few types of bonds to consider. We can examine each in turn:
Total Bond Market
Perhaps the most well known type of bond investment is a total-market fund.

WHEN IT COMES to financial decisions, there are, as I’ve argued before, two answers to every question: what the calculator says, and how you feel about it. There’s a fly in the ointment, though: Calculator answers might appear to be based in logic, but they’re still imperfect.
Why?
Ian Wilson, a former executive at General Electric, explained it this way: “No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all knowledge is about the past,

“INVESTING IS SIMPLE,” observed HumbleDollar’s editor Jonathan Clements. “To be sure, you can make it ludicrously complicated.” And, indeed, Wall Street does just that.
According to a recent analysis by Bloomberg, the fund industry rolled out more than 640 new exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the first half of this year—an average of more than three a day. There are now more ETFs in the U.S. than there are stocks (4,300 vs. 4,200).

NEW RESEARCH CAN help with an age-old question: When constructing a portfolio, how much risk is too much? Especially today, with the market again near all-time highs, this is an important issue.
On the one hand, we could dismiss this concern by noting that all-time highs aren’t as uncommon as they might seem. According to one analysis, the U.S. stock market has been within 5% of an all-time high on 44% of trading days since the 1950s.

ANDREW CARNEGIE USED to say that competitors were welcome to tour his factory, to see his production line up close. Why? Because of Carnegie Steel’s massive scale and complex operations, he was confident no one would ever be able to replicate what he’d built.
Hedge fund manager Seth Klarman is a modern-day Carnegie. Klarman founded the Boston-based Baupost Group in 1982, and while performance numbers aren’t publicly available, the firm’s track record is believed to be among the best in the industry.

ONE OF THE MARKET’S worst-performing stocks over the past year was, not long ago, one of its best. Novo Nordisk is the Danish company that pioneered the hugely popular weight-loss drug Wegovy, also known as Ozempic. After it hit the market in 2021, the company’s stock rallied, tripling over the following three years. Since then, however, things have been far more challenging. Over the past 12 months, the stock has dropped 60%.
This highlights a key challenge for investors: On the one hand,

EARLIER THIS SUMMER, Congress passed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act—GENIUS, for short. This sounds obscure, but it’s a story worth following. The GENIUS Act’s purpose is to promote the growth of—and to regulate—a new type of financial instrument known as a stablecoin.
What’s a stablecoin? It’s similar to a cryptocurrency but differs in one important way: Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have exhibited wide price swings. That makes them interesting to investors but less-than-useful as currencies for everyday transactions.

IN THE ANCIENT WORLD, before the invention of the printing press, the most common way to retain information was to build what’s known as a memory palace. The idea was to link words to images, because images are easier to remember.
I’ve found that this strategy works well in personal finance, and earlier this year I described some of the images that I rely on most. Below are several more.
1. Back in 2011,

STOCK MARKET Investing requires a near superhuman ability to withstand pain. That’s the conclusion of a recent report by investment researcher Michael Mauboussin.
Mauboussin surveyed all stocks trading on U.S. exchanges over a 40-year period, between 1985 and 2024. He found that the median stock experienced a decline of 85% at one point or another. Worse yet, more than half of these stocks never fully recouped their losses. The median stock recovered to just 90% of its prior high-water mark.

A PLANE’S ALTIMETER measures the airplane’s altitude. It’s a critical instrument—so important, in fact, that planes are typically outfitted with two. That’s for redundancy, in case one fails. In addition, because different altimeters work better in different conditions, the two readings offer pilots multiple points of reference.
I was speaking recently with a retired pilot, who explained this to me and asked how he could apply the notion of redundancy to his finances. It was a good question,

OVER THE JULY FOURTH weekend, a friend asked me what I thought about the new financial instrument known as a “stock token.” Developed by the online broker Robinhood, a stock token is designed for investors to buy stakes in private companies such as OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT. It’s a novel concept because private company investments are typically inaccessible to individual investors.
Despite the appeal, I urged caution. Why? These tokens may not perform as expected because they aren’t the same as actual equity in a company.