THOSE WHO REGULARLY read posts on Bogleheads.org—and I’m guessing a good chunk of HumbleDollar readers do—know that the Bogleheads’ philosophy is to:

Never time the markets.
Buy only broad-market index funds via either mutual funds or exchange-traded funds.
Invest 25% to 75% of a portfolio in stocks using such funds, with the rest in bonds, and thereafter rebalance as needed. How big a percentage should you put in stocks? That’s based on risk tolerance.

IN THE INVESTMENT world, there’s no shortage of data. But how useful is all that data? To help get to an answer, let’s consider four questions:
1. When the economy is strong, is that good for stocks? The simple answer is “yes.” According to textbook finance, the value of any company should represent the sum total of its future profits. When the economy is strong and profits are higher, that should be good for stocks.

“SOME PEOPLE automatically sell the ‘winners’—stocks that go up—and hold on to their ‘losers’—stocks that go down—which is about as sensible as pulling out the flowers and watering the weeds,” argued Peter Lynch in his 1989 book One Up on Wall Street.
My father worked for Sears for 30 years, delivering washers, freezers and other appliances. Sears rewarded employees with stock, even delivery men like my dad. Over time, through splits and spin-offs,

AMONG THE MORE notable studies published in recent years is a paper by Hendrik Bessembinder titled “Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?” His key finding: Between 1926 and 2016, just 4% of stocks accounted for all of the U.S. market’s net gain. As a group, the other 96% delivered returns that were no better than Treasury bills, which returned just 2% a year over the period.

It was a surprising result. The implication: Diversification is even more important than most investors realized,

“IT’S TOUGH TO MAKE predictions, especially about the future.” That’s one of the more amusing quotes attributed to Yogi Berra, but there’s also a lot of truth to it. When it comes to financial markets, the track record of those making forecasts is not good.
That’s why a rational approach to decision making is to avoid predictions, and instead base choices only on an assessment of where things currently stand. But even that approach can be fraught: Financial trends have a habit of reversing when least expected.

YOGI BERRA IS MY favorite guru. His quip, “It ain’t over till it’s over,” pretty much sums up my losing battle with technology stocks.
The saga all began with an upbringing that bred a need for achievement that could never be satisfied, coupled with a prohibitive anxiety over risk-taking and failure. This family tape has played over and over again in my head as I’ve struggled to steer a course as a mutual and exchange-traded fund investor.

IN APRIL 1985, SENIORS in my high-school French program returned from a week in Paris and two in a La Rochelle lycée. They shared photos of the class in front of the Eiffel Tower. They detailed differences between French and American high schools. And they rhapsodized about the mighty U.S. dollar.
“France is dirt cheap.” The speaker extracted a Sony Walkman from her backpack. “This cost $30 less than it does here.”
I sat up.

THOU SHALL NOT TIME the market. Thou shall not consider macroeconomic trends when allocating capital. Thou shall not listen to pundits on CNBC. Thou shall not engage in security analysis. Thou shall not dabble in options or individual stocks. Thou shall not shoot for the moon.

These are just some of the commandments sent down from on high to today’s index-fund investors.

As one of those investors, I assume that financial markets are more or less efficient,

GOLD REACHED A NEW high last week, climbing above $2,200 for the first time. Year-to-date, gold is up 8% and, since the end of 2021, it’s gained more than 20%, outpacing the S&P 500. This raises two questions: Can we expect the rally to continue? And does gold deserve a place in your portfolio?
To answer these questions, let’s start by looking at the drivers of the recent rally. The first factor is interest rates.

LET’S START WITH a contention that’ll get nods of agreement from the vast majority of HumbleDollar readers: Your portfolio’s core holdings should be total market index funds.
But which funds?
Frankly, the differences among the most popular total market index funds are modest and perhaps not worth worrying about. Still, worry we do. As I see it, which ones you choose depend on what you’re most focused on. Here are four key considerations:
Low cost.

I GREW UP DURING the muscle car era. That was when Detroit automakers became aware of the baby boomers’ buying power.
The boomers, of whom I’m a proud member, didn’t live through the Great Depression. We had television, frozen foods, Mattel toys and a car in every driveway. Prosperity is what we were used to, and we loved it. It seemed everyone had jobs, so there was money to spend.
My friends and I felt that having a nice car was the key to getting that special girl.

AMONG THE QUOTES wrongly attributed to Mark Twain is this one: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
This quip highlights one of the challenges of personal finance: that the data and the conclusions we rely on for decision-making can never be accepted with absolute certainty. That’s for a few reasons.
First, because the world changes and markets change, our approach must change as well.

INVESTING IS MESSY. Get used to it.
In the financial markets, you’ll typically pay a high price for certainty. That price is paid in lower investment returns, and sometimes also in greater financial hassles. Yet I see investors paying that price again and again.
Consider equity-indexed annuities. Investors imagine they’re getting stock market returns without any downside risk. But in truth, what they’re buying is an overhyped investment that captures only a portion of the stock market’s gain,

THIS IS MY FIRST contribution to HumbleDollar. It may well be my last, for I am no longer old. Rather, I’m ancient and on my way to being archaic.
The vicissitudes of investing are behind me. I now invest for fun, for the data analysis, for following the impact of macro world events on economies, for the thrill of the market rollercoaster, for the intellectual challenge, for the exercise of discipline,

I’M NOT A SAVVY investor, nor do I pretend to be. Some people get paid to analyze and make predictions about stocks, often for people like me. How reliable are their opinions? I’m not so sure.

Take the newsfeed about my largest single stock holding, the utility Public Service Enterprise Group (symbol: PEG), that I got late last month from my Fidelity Investments account:

“Guggenheim Downgrades Public Service Enterprise Group to Neutral From Buy,