THE INVESTMENT WORLD is full of storytellers. And while these folks might be entertaining, they generally aren’t very helpful. There’s one category of stories, however, that I do think is useful: They’re what I might call investment fables. They’re apocryphal stories that likely aren’t real. But they’re helpful nonetheless because each carries a useful lesson. Here are some of the more popular ones.
Consumer choice. In 1999, Richard Mille and a partner launched a company to make wristwatches.

THE WAY INVESTORS think about the stock market may be entirely wrong.
Intuition tells us, and academic research confirms, that a company’s stock price should respond to important news and information. When a company announces a new product, for example, its stock should go up. And when results fall short of expectations, it should decline. 
But a new paper titled “The Inefficient Pricing of News” calls this idea into question. The authors found that investors respond much more slowly and inconsistently to market news than previously thought.

EARLIER THIS SPRING, Emil Verner, an economist at MIT, made an observation: The stock market, he said, seemed to be exhibiting “excess tranquility.” Despite an ongoing war, inflation and other negative headlines, investors seemed surprisingly unfazed. The market was on track for its fourth year in a row of positive returns. Through May, it had gained 11%.
But no sooner did Verner make this observation that the market did begin to wobble. Last Friday,

I WAS RECENTLY asked about strategies that high earners can use to reduce their tax bill.
Most people know the usual options. They contribute to a 401(k), fund a health savings account or make a Roth IRA contribution through the backdoor method. Business owners may have additional opportunities through retirement plans and business structures.
But there’s another strategy worth knowing about: the Mega Backdoor Roth (MBDR).
The MBDR allows some workers to put far more money into Roth accounts than the usual contribution limits permit.

A WHILE BACK, I was speaking with a fellow who had recently retired. He shared this observation, only half-jokingly: “Working was easy,” he said. What he meant was that financial management during our working years is more straightforward than it is in retirement. We earn and save and hope that our savings grow. But when we get to retirement, it becomes more complicated to know exactly how to manage those savings.
In the 1950s,

JONATHAN CLEMENTS’S final book was released this week. Titled Money and Me, it traces the arc of Jonathan’s nearly four-decade career as a personal finance columnist.
Money and Me starts with the story of a man named George Cope, who was a nineteenth century tobacco baron. At the time of his death in 1888, Cope was one of Britain’s richest men. But within just two generations, his fortune was gone.

ECONOMICS IS KNOWN as “the dismal science,” and perhaps for good reason. Oftentimes it can be abstract and overly academic. There are, however, certain economic concepts that can be helpful to individual investors. Below are two that I see as especially important.
When it comes to the government’s ability to control—or least influence—the economy, there are two main levers. The first is fiscal policy, which refers to Congress’s (as well as state and local governments’) ability to levy taxes and to spend money. 

I WAS SCROLLING through social media recently and saw somebody dismiss retirement accounts as “paper wealth.” The argument was familiar: Your money is locked away and you’re waiting for permission to access it.

There’s a grain of truth here. Retirement accounts do come with rules. But much of the discussion online ignores how flexible these accounts actually are. More important, it ignores the enormous tax advantages.
Most people today will likely live well beyond age 59½.

BACK IN 2010, at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, a shareholder challenged Warren Buffett. Noting that shares of motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson had nearly tripled over the prior year, he asked Buffett why he had chosen to buy the company’s bonds rather than its stock. Buffett’s reply was a two-minute masterclass in how to think about investments. It’s worth walking through it point by point.
To start, Buffett acknowledged that hindsight can be cruel.

RETIREMENT IS LIFE’S most expensive purchase. During our working years, we deprive our present selves of immediate pleasure by refusing to spend money for nicer cars, a bigger house or a vacation to boast about. Instead, we squirrel away those saved dollars with an eye toward keeping the future us fed, clothed and living indoors. 
At age 64, after decades of choosing to save and invest a large chunk of each paycheck, rather than spend it,

AN UNUSUAL STORY hit the news this week. GameStop, the struggling video game retailer, announced a bid to buy eBay. The offer was unexpected, but what surprised investors more was the economics of the proposed deal. eBay is many times larger than GameStop, making it difficult to understand how GameStop would be able to finance the acquisition.
GameStop has offered $56 billion for eBay, comprised of cash and stock. For the cash portion, according to its May 3 press release,

OUR FIRST GRANDCHILD recently arrived, which naturally has us thinking about the smartest ways to build a strong financial foundation for her future. In 2019, I wrote Take a Break, which outlined saving strategies on behalf of children. Since then, the landscape has changed with the introduction of Trump accounts and Roth-conversion pathways for 529 accounts. 
Families have four tax-advantaged savings approaches on behalf of young children plus the Roth IRA option once the child has earned income – 529 education savings account,

IN THE INVESTMENT world, May 1st is a notable day. It was on May 1, 1975 that the Securities and Exchange Commission deregulated the brokerage industry. For the 183 years prior to that, trading commissions on the New York Stock Exchange had been fixed at uniformly high rates. But when deregulation arrived, competition got going. That’s when discount brokers like Charles Schwab got rolling, and over time, May Day, as it’s now referred to,

IN 2020, ELECTRIC car maker Lucid Motors brought in revenue of $4 million. Five years later, sales had risen impressively, to more than $1 billion. In 2025 alone, sales grew 68%. That sounds like a success story, and through that lens, it is. And yet, over that same period, the company’s stock dropped more than 89%.
What happened?
A better question is: What didn’t happen? Despite growing sales, the company has struggled to turn a profit.

IT’S BEEN MORE than six years since Covid first entered our vocabulary. It goes without saying that investors have experienced a lot, and for better or worse, recent market events provide some useful lessons. The first has to do with the nature of the stock market.
What drives stock prices? Open a finance textbook, and the answer will be clear: The value of a stock should equal the sum of the company’s future profits.