HOW WOULD YOU LIKE to earn a guaranteed 6.7% or more on your money without taking any risk? Although it sounds too good to be true, that’s exactly the opportunity that will be offered on Nov. 1. The investment? Series I savings bonds.
I bonds are 30-year bonds issued by the U.S. Treasury, which are available to anyone who opens a free TreasuryDirect account. These bonds are the quintessential risk-free asset. Backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S.

IN JULY 2020, I rolled over my old 401(k) to an IRA. Between maxing out my 401(k) contributions for many years and strong investment performance, the balance was significant.
I initially invested half the money in a combination of stock market index funds and a bond market ETF. For the remaining balance, I set up an automatic investment plan that invested a modest amount in stock index funds every two weeks. While long-run market returns argued for investing all the money in stocks right away,

VANGUARD GROUP today announced significant price cuts for its fleet of target-date retirement funds. Currently, investors can own a Vanguard target fund for the seemingly low cost of 0.12% to 0.15% a year, equal to $12 to $15 for every $10,000 invested. The new price tag will be just 0.08%, effective February 2022.
It might not seem like much, but the price cuts announced today will deliver an aggregate savings of $190 million to investors in 2022,

EVEN INDEX FUND investors need the occasional psychological boost—which brings us to the ongoing S&P Index Versus Active (SPIVA) study’s mid-year review, which was published last week. The data from S&P Dow Jones Indices, a division of S&P Global, serve as a reminder that picking winning stocks and funds is mighty hard.
I used to serve on a 401(k) committee. I’d keep an eye on the active funds included in our investment lineup. Returns looked good.

THERE’S A LITANY of investment sins. But one may top them all. I’m guessing it’s one you haven’t given much thought to. Until recently, neither did I. The cardinal investment sin: selling your winners too soon.
From 1926 to 2016, more than half of all U.S. stocks—57.4% to be exact—returned less than one-month Treasury bills. In other words, you were better off putting your money into risk-free T-bills than owning these stocks. In fact,

AFTER DEPARTING the U.S. stock market for the greener pastures of emerging markets, I recently hit a pocket of turbulence. Although emerging market stocks are virtually unchanged year to date, they fell as much as 12% in August compared to the recent highs reached in February. By contrast, the S&P 500 is up 17% for the year, with barely a pullback along the way.
The travails of Chinese stocks explain much of this underperformance.

AT 40 YEARS OLD, I missed out on the phenomenal early years that allowed Berkshire Hathaway to return nearly 3,000,000% since 1964, versus a “mere” 23,500% for the S&P 500. Yet my investment time horizon is still long—and that’s a huge advantage as an investor.
How should I use that advantage? As I write this, Berkshire’s total stock market value is roughly $650 billion. By contrast, one of the stocks my wife and I bought—Boston Omaha—is worth less than $1 billion.

BEHAVIORAL ECONOMISTS long ago discovered that the pain we feel from a $1,000 loss is about twice as great as the joy we feel from a $1,000 gain. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky documented the phenomenon and coined the term “loss aversion” in 1979. That was just a few years before I began investing.
Since then, I’ve made a discovery about my own psychology: I’d rather underperform in out-of-favor stocks than risk losses in glamorous ones—because my gut tells me that the more something is celebrated,

LIKE MANY READING this article, index funds constitute the lion’s share of my family’s investments. But I also own small positions in two individual stocks: Boston Omaha and Markel.
Why have I strayed from a 100% indexing approach? Both companies are conglomerates—multiple businesses that function as a single entity. Conglomerates should—in theory—be able to deliver slightly higher returns, thanks to the business efficiencies and synergies they realize. On top of that, they can offer some of the strengths of a mutual fund: diversification plus intelligent capital allocation.

OTHERS MIGHT BE hoping to add to their wealth by picking the next hot stock. But here at HumbleDollar, we’re much more concerned about subtraction.
The goal: Keep more of whatever the financial markets deliver by minimizing investment costs and avoiding unnecessarily large tax bills. This is a reason to favor index funds. But even if we index, we need to be alert to another threat—that posed by the person in the mirror.

STEPPING INTO the HumbleDollar confessional, I admit to dabbling in a few high-fee, low-liquidity investments. It goes against much of what I stand for. But on occasion, I, too, reach for yield and the promise of returns uncorrelated with stocks. Before the chastising begins, please know that these speculative stakes total less than 3% of my portfolio. The rest is invested mainly in funds with expense ratios under 0.15%—and some have zero costs.

I HAVE A RELATIVE—let’s call her Jane. Last year, in the early days of the pandemic, Jane had the foresight to buy shares in vaccine maker Moderna. With the benefit of hindsight, it was a smart decision.
But it wasn’t a difficult one, in Jane’s view. It was no secret that the company was working on a COVID-19 vaccine. It was also clear that vaccines would be in high demand. That made the investment case clear.

PETER LYNCH, the famed Fidelity Investments’ mutual fund manager, used to advise investors to “buy what you know.” But many of today’s investors have other ideas.
Obscure cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens have taken the financial social media by storm. Most investors have heard of bitcoin, ethereum and dogecoin. But a new set of coins have emerged—cardano and solana are the hot trades. Meanwhile, JPEG and GIF image files are changing hands for ridiculous amounts of money.

MORE AND MORE investors are using environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria to direct their investment dollars toward companies fighting climate change. An obvious question: Do companies that deliver “green” innovations earn high ESG scores?
It seems not. The authors of a recent study from the European Corporate Governance Institute found that:

Companies with lower ESG scores are producing more and higher-quality innovations designed to mitigate climate change.
A sizable percentage of recent U.S.