A NEW TYPE OF MUTUAL fund has captured investors’ attention. Known as buffer funds, they’re so appealing that one industry analyst has referred to them as “candy.” Why? As The Wall Street Journal describes them, buffer funds offer investors “the chance to chase stock returns while also protecting against a potential market slide”—a seemingly ideal combination, especially for those in or near retirement.
But funds like this are complicated—they rely on options strategies.

Like many of you I have read Jonathan writings  from WSJ to Humble Dollar . I have been content to just enjoy reading without comment. After Jonathan health news and his  hopes Humble Dollar will continue I decided to get off the sidelines and have started to add my 2 cents worth (which is only worth about half a cent these days) on some of the posts. This is my first post. What first got you interested in investing?

In two previous posts (“The Morningstar Experience” and “Your Morningstar Freebee”), we looked at how readers considering investment in a Vanguard fund can consult the helpful information in Morningstar’s esteemed advisory service. We demonstrated how they might consult this resource to monitor their investments and evaluate their performance. Today, we’ll illustrate how to decide whether the holdings of the fund meet the reader’s objective. Once again, the fund examined is Vanguard’s Small-Cap ETF (symbol VB, or VSMAX for the mutual fund alternative).

Morningstar, that indispensable fund advisory service, has a freebee, but it’s missed by many folks who could benefit mightily from its wisdom and data. True, to monitor your holdings via the invaluable Portfolio Manager, you’ll have to pony up the $249 admission price. But many investors are unaware they can pull up comprehensive analyses—both quantitative and qualitative—of their individual mutual funds and ETFs without a subscription.
Why would Morningstar allow you to squeeze in without paying for its coveted fund reviews?

In yesterday’s post, “Navigate Your Portfolio in Morningstar in 20 Minutes,” we introduced the highly respected advisory service and walked through how to enter your funds into its Portfolio Manager platform.  We put special emphasis on Morningstar’s hallmark 5-Star Ratings, enumerating some of the system’s strengths and weaknesses. You have access to the Stars without a subscription by simply searching for your fund, but other information on Portfolio Manager and the invaluable X-Ray tool we will navigate today does require one ($249 annually).

When it comes to managing my fund investments, Morningstar has been my crème de la creme for about 25 years.  It’s comprehensive, hugely informative and reasonably user friendly. It is one of the most responsible and ethical services around, periodically evaluating its usefulness both quantitatively and quantitatively.
Another thumbs up—Morningstar neatly complements Humble Dollar. It encompasses both traditional topics of personal finance like saving for retirement and sophisticated treatment of how to clear long-term investing hurdles like an unlucky sequence of returns.

“I can’t believe that the great mass of investors are going to be satisfied with an ultimate goal of just achieving average returns.” That’s what Fidelity Investments Chairman Edward C. Johnson III told The Boston Globe in 1976, the year Jack Bogle helped launch the index-fund revolution by opening Vanguard Group’s S&P 500 fund to investors.
Since then, of course, indexing has enjoyed stupendous growth, and today investors have more money in index mutual funds than in actively managed funds.

I wrote recently about my attempts to improve my asset location. Now, I’ve even consulted an AI chatbot, Perplexity, on the subject, and it produced a surprisingly good answer—it even knew I was asking about taxes when I forgot to use the word tax in my question.
As part of the plan I wrote about, I’m preparing to buy another stock ETF for my taxable account from the proceeds of a Treasury bill maturing soon. I will sell an identical amount of a stock holding in a Traditional IRA and place the proceeds in bonds.

THE YEAR’S MIDPOINT is here, with the stock market on track for its second consecutive year of above-average gains. This has many investors asking about rebalancing. Below are some commonly asked questions.
What is rebalancing? Let’s say that, to get the right mix of risk and return, you’ve settled on an asset allocation of 50% stocks and 50% bonds. Now, suppose the stock market rises 10%. This would lift stocks to some 52% of your total portfolio,

Adam Grossman recently wrote a good piece about “barbell” strategies.
A barbell—literally—is a metal bar with weights on each end like you see in a gym or an old Popeye cartoon. There are no weights in the middle, just on the opposite ends.
In investment terms, a to implement a barbell strategy is to overweight assets at opposing ends of the spectrum. A common approach is to create a barbell of bond funds with short-term maturities and those with long-term maturities and not much in the middle.

This HumbleDollar guide explains mutual funds and ETFs. Which do you favor, and why? Do you choose differently depending on whether the investments are in a taxable brokerage account, a traditional pretax account such as an IRA or 401(k), or a Roth account such as a Roth IRA or Roth 401(k)?
Mine are all mutual funds, in all three types of accounts. Initially that was because ETFs weren’t available when I started investing. Now it’s because I don’t wish to deal with bid-ask spreads,

I only own two individual stocks. I have shares in the company I retired from in my 401(k) and shares in my current company in my Roth IRA. Returns so far this year: 93% for my old company and 122% for my current employer. Did you ever buy stock in your employer’s company, and how long did you hold it?

I am shocked. When sifting through Morningstar for an international index mutual fund, I naturally turned to Vanguard’s popular Total International Stock (VTIAX). I noticcd its expense ratio is .12, uncharacteristically high for the definitive purveyor of low-cost funds.
My eyebrows raised, I thought I should take a peek at a comparable Fidelity offering. I discovered the behemoth fund group sponsored a contraption named the Zero International Index fund (FTIHX). Incredibly, that zero refers to the expense ratio.

BACK IN 1987, Nassim Nicholas Taleb was a trader on Wall Street. But unlike most of his peers, Taleb wasn’t pinning his hopes on a market rally. Instead, he’d positioned himself to benefit from a market meltdown. On Oct. 19, just such an event occurred. For no apparent reason—in the midst of an otherwise strong market—the S&P 500 dropped 23% in a single day. The result: Taleb made a fortune—enough to retire at age 27.

I have 10% of my portfolio in I-Bonds, 10% in Short term treasuries. With interest rates likely to go down, would long/intermediate bond funds make sense?