I’m getting ready to take my annual RMD (minus QCDs), which seems like a good time to take a look at re-balancing my portfolio. My stock percentage has crept up from 50% to 53%, and while I’ll take my RMD from my stock funds, I’m not going to spend it, so it will be going into Total International (VTIAX) and Total US (VTSAX) funds in taxable.
About 10% of my funds are in a CD ladder and a money market fund in taxable.

IS IT WORTH OWNING international stocks? There’s far from universal agreement. The traditional argument for investing outside the U.S. is straightforward: diversification—since domestic and international stocks don’t move in lockstep, and sometimes diverge significantly.
At the same time, however, international stocks have lagged behind their U.S. counterparts for so many years that it’s been trying the patience of even the most tenacious investors. Domestic stocks have outpaced international stocks in eight of the past 10 years.

When I moved from London to New York City in 1986, I didn’t have a job lined up. But after a panicked search, I landed a position at Forbes magazine—as a so-called reporter, the title given to lowly fact-checkers. Almost two years later, I escaped that drudgery when I was promoted to staff writer and assigned the mutual-funds beat.
At the time, the fund world was a cesspool of dubious practices and misinformation, which was bad for investors but good for curious journalists.

The Beatles got it right. If your life has been anything like mine, it’s been a “long, winding road.” It’s undoubtedly been an interesting journey, fraught with more health and relationship hardship than you had planned for. Chastened by the vicissitudes of life, you’re ready to head home and write the last chapter.
Retirement beckons and you’re smug. After all, you saved diligently, invested wisely and amassed a nest egg far in excess of what you had ever dreamed possible.

I inherited a considerable number of old 25 cent coins, pre-1965 vintage so they have much more value in silver content.  I don’t want to leave the coins to my kids to deal with but is now a good time to sell for cash, trade for gold or silver 1 oz. coins or bars.  Trying to decide if this current trend continues or if the next move is more downward.  Any suggestions???

Hello Everyone,
Although I’ve read a lot about the benefits of maintaining a varied portfolio to reduce risk, I’m not entirely sure how to balance my assets. I now have a combination of stocks, bonds, and cash because I’m relatively new to investing, but I’d like to improve my strategy.
While I’ve heard about a number of strategies, such as the 60/40 rule (60 percent equities and 40 percent bonds) and age-based allocation changes, I’m interested to know what has been most successful for other members of this group.

WHY IS IT THAT GREAT companies don’t always make great investments? This is a conundrum that’s long puzzled investors because it so clearly flies in the face of intuition.
Indeed, today’s market leaders—companies like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft—are impressive businesses, and their stocks have delivered equally impressive performance, so much so that they and their peers have been dubbed the “Magnificent Seven.” The others in this group are Google parent Alphabet, Facebook parent Meta,

The new kid’s back in town and he’s a bully. Remember active mutual funds, those dinosaurs of yesteryear? Get ready, because here come actively managed ETFs. In 2019, there were only 350 of those guys but now that number has swelled to over 1,600. More than 400 active ETFs were launched in 2023 and another 200 through June of this year. Remarkably, actively managed ETFs gobbled up over 20% of the asset flow into ETFs by midyear.

THE BEST WAY TO WIN a contest for the largest tomato is to paint a cantaloupe red and hope the judges don’t notice, or so says an old adage.
What does that have to do with managing money? Newspapers and magazines frequently interview mutual fund managers who have beaten their competitors, and perhaps the S&P 500 as well. Fund-management firms will even run ads touting the performance of these funds.
These interviews sometimes prompt me to do my own research.

ABOUT ONCE A WEEK, someone will say to me, “I don’t understand bonds.” Sometimes, they’ll state it in stronger terms: “I don’t like bonds.”
Fundamentally, bonds are just IOUs. If you buy a $1,000 Treasury bond, you’re simply lending the government $1,000. The Treasury will then pay you interest twice a year and return your $1,000 when the bond matures. That part is straightforward. What’s more of a mystery is why we should own bonds and what we should expect from them.

Sequels are made by film studios trying to capitalize on the success of the original release. Rocky II became another blockbuster for MGM Studios. J.P. Morgan’s Nasdaq Equity Premium Income ETF (JEPQ) is an audience-pleaser right in our own backyard. It’s the glitzy younger sister of the star of the active ETF world, J.P. Morgan’s Equity Premium Income ETF (JEPI).
Like most sequels, the new technology-oriented fund borrows a good bit from its predecessor. It’s on a pace to be just as big a moneymaker,

My investing strategy is closely aligned with the game of darts. Aim and hope my picks land in the right place. Does it work?
I make no claim to investing acumen. However, I am proof that even those who know little of what they are doing with no patience for nitty gritty analysis can make money. 
Since all my investments are with Fidelity I used their analysis of my account to evaluate where my darts landed.

If you’ve ever wondered whether Vanguard’s S&P 500 or total stock market fund is the better core holding in your portfolio, you’re probably not alone. Each ETF has over 400 billion in net assets, each has an expense ratio of .03, each has essentially the same dividend (1.25%) and each is categorized by both Vanguard and Morningstar as large blend. Both funds trade at very high volume, making the spread on purchases and sales all but nonexistent.

The search for a bond substitute has been about as lunatic as Don Quixote’s quest for a fantasy world. Why a substitute for the Great Diversifier anyway? Because when interest rates move higher, bonds and stocks disintegrate in tandem. In the scourge of 2022, Vanguard’s total bond ETF lost 13%, not much better than the broad market’s -18%. Seeming more like de-worsification than diversification, the twin collapse spooked adherents of the venerable 60/40 portfolio.
But almost all of the vaunted replacements for bonds put forward by fixed-income detractors have come to naught.

I MAY BE WRONG, but I’m pretty sure Vanguard Group doesn’t have a secret plan to control the U.S. banking system. Not everyone is so confident, however.
There’s a federal regulation that no investor can buy more than 10% of the shares of a U.S. bank without regulatory approval if it’s seeking to “control” the bank. Thanks to the popularity of its index funds, Vanguard funds collectively owned 12.5% of State Street’s shares as of June 30.