IS A DEGREE FROM AN elite school the golden ticket? I recently read Jeffrey Selingo’s excellent book Who Gets In and Why—and came away with some fascinating insights.
Selingo says experience and skills often trump where someone went to college. Each year, 1.8 million students graduate from four-year colleges, with 54,000 leaving with a degree from an elite institution. Simple math confirms employers must fill jobs with more than just graduates from elite schools.

TRAVELING DURING the holidays? As we drive east out of Ohio and into Pennsylvania, we know to fill the gas tank before we cross the border. According to the Tax Foundation, Pennsylvania has the third-highest gasoline tax in the country, behind California and Illinois, and about 20 cents per gallon higher than Ohio.
All states have to balance their budget. But they take very different approaches. This provides 50 experiments in taxation—and those taxes influence our behavior.

I STARTED MY CAREER with a little-known engineering company called SAI. It’s now called SAIC, short for Science Applications International Corp., a publicly traded and internationally renowned technology firm. But when I started in 1980, there were only a few thousand employees and several small, independently run offices scattered across the country.
SAI was started in 1969 by Dr. J. Robert Beyster, a nationally recognized expert in nuclear physics and national security. He started the company with the dual tenets of technical excellence and employee ownership.

MY EXPERIENCE WITH COVID-19 began on March 4, 2020. That morning, I got off a plane in Buenos Aries. While standing in line with my passport, I noticed several people wearing masks, so I put one on as well. Back then, we were being told to go about our business. “It’s like a bad cold.” If only.

We boarded our ship for a 30-day cruise, which I documented in five articles for HumbleDollar.

GIFT CARDS ARE BIG business. More than $28 billion is expected to be spent on gift cards this holiday season, with an average value of almost $50 per card, according to the National Retail Federation’s winter holidays report. This season, consumers want gift cards above all else, says the survey, and restaurants are the most popular category.
I’ve changed my mind about gift cards. I used to think they were a ridiculous way to show appreciation.

A FEW WEEKS BACK, Jonathan Clements wrote an article reminding readers that they, too, likely made financial missteps in their younger days. His article was in response to comments by HumbleDollar readers about the perceived lack of financial discipline shown by those currently in their late teens and early 20s.
Before my recent career change, I would’ve had the same opinion as many readers. With my new job teaching accounting to undergraduates,

INVESTMENT RESEARCH has overwhelmingly shown that active stock strategies perform poorly over long periods compared to buying index funds and simply collecting the market’s return.
There’s still some debate about whether the best active managers are a smart bet—and whether we can count on them continuing to perform well. But there’s no question that active stock management, on average, has destroyed value for clients.
Yet active strategies remain popular with both individual investors and their wealth managers.

INFLATION CONTINUES to sizzle. November’s Producer Price Index (PPI) rose 9.6% from a year earlier. Even after removing food and energy, PPI was up 7.7%. Both figures are the highest since 2010, when such data were first compiled.
This follows last week’s Consumer Price Index report, which showed inflation climbing 6.8% over the past 12 months. Since consumer prices lag producer prices, we can expect little relief from inflation in 2022.
All this must be foremost on the minds of Federal Reserve members as they meet this week.

NATIXIS INVESTMENT Managers just released its 2022 institutional investors’ outlook. The firm surveyed 500 portfolio managers, asking their thoughts on what the next year might look like in the financial markets. The managers—who oversee $13.2 trillion of assets—were generally optimistic, but didn’t expect the recent torrid pace of stock market gains to continue.
The survey found that 35% of institutions plan to decrease exposure to U.S. stocks, allocating more to developed European and Asian markets,

INTEREST RATES HAVE been low for years, with 10-year Treasury notes now yielding some 1.4%. How about dividend-paying stocks instead? Many pay twice what Treasurys currently yield, though obviously with more risk. My strategy: Instead of a classic 60% stock-40% bond mix, I’ve landed at roughly 70% stocks, with another 15% to 25% in individual stocks against which I’ve written call options.
By selling call options, I give the buyers the right to purchase the underlying stock from me at a specified price—the so-called strike price—at any time between now and when the options expire.

TIME IS IMPORTANT in investing—far more important than most of us seem to appreciate when we structure our portfolio’s asset mix.
Regular readers may remember that I believe we tend to focus too much on one part of our total portfolio, the securities we own. We often ignore other important parts of our total portfolio, such as Social Security, any pension plan, our homes and—particularly for the young—the present value of our future earning power.

SENIORS RECEIVING Social Security celebrated the recent announcement that their benefits will increase 5.9% this January. It’s the largest cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) in 40 years, and it’s based on a measure of inflation called the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W).
As the name implies, CPI-W is a “monthly measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by urban wage earners and clerical workers for a market basket of consumer goods and services.” The index jumped 5.9% between the third quarters of 2020 and 2021.

THE MARKET SEEMS to have found its footing when it comes to inflation. Friday’s Consumer Price Index report was roughly in line with expectations. Recently, there haven’t been any major shifts in the experts’ inflation forecasts. The bond market has also calmed down. Just a few weeks ago, the 10-year Treasury yield neared 1.7%. It settled at 1.49% on Friday.
Volatility could reemerge later this week, however. Data on producer prices post on Tuesday,

PSYCHOLOGISTS and biologists call it a supernormal stimulus response. Basically, organisms evolve in the direction of what’s good for them. There doesn’t seem to be an off switch to this instinct, however, so organisms can pursue these “good things” even to their detriment.
For instance, field researchers have shown that birds instinctually drawn to colorful eggs will roost on more colorful fake eggs—and ignore their own. And, no, humans aren’t immune to such mistakes.

GOT CHARITABLE giving on your mind? Join the crowd. Many folks donate at this time of year, with their charitable giving driven by the charities themselves.

As solicitations arrive, people decide on a case-by-case basis whether to pull out their checkbooks. But some folks follow a more structured process, and that’s the approach I favor. It includes asking these three questions:

1. How much ideally would you like to give? As a starting point,