“THE CHINESE PLAY the long game. We play checkers, they play chess.”
You hear such sentiments from Americans a lot. It’s one of the narratives that draws foreign money to China. The story is so good, it distracts investors from an important fact: The oldest China exchange-traded fund, the iShares China Large-Cap ETF (symbol: FXI), has lost a quarter of its value since peaking in 2007. Yet somehow—helped by Chinese government pressure on index providers—China’s weight in the emerging markets indexes is higher than ever.

INDEXED ANNUITIES have been taking the insurance world by storm. According to industry sources, sales of indexed annuities—also known as equity-indexed annuities or fixed-indexed annuities—topped $70 billion last year and estimates for 2020 call for continued growth in the market.
On the surface, indexed annuities seem simple enough: You deposit a lump sum and earn interest based on stock market returns, with a guarantee that your annual return will never be less than zero.

I’VE BEEN WRONG many times, as I’ve noted in earlier articles. But the past few months have made me—and maybe you—look like an investment genius.
I’ve had some nice “wins” since March 13, when I started buying the stock market dip. Does that make me brilliant? Of course not. Was I “right”? That depends on how I made my decisions. A quick profit doesn’t necessarily mean I made the right call.
Too often, when we analyze our investment moves,

THIS PAST WEEK, I received an email from a reader—let’s call him Tom. He described his experience during this year’s unruly stock market. After the market dropped in February and March, he said, the stock side of his portfolio lost a lot of its value. He decided to rebalance—that is, to buy more stocks so his original asset allocation would be restored. That is just what I would have done. But the key question—always,

AS MY PERSONAL and financial life gradually became more orderly in the months after my husband’s death, I found myself wrestling with one particular investment: My late husband had spent the bulk of his working life with Union Pacific and, like longtime employees at so many companies, he’d accumulated a significant number of shares. What should I do with those shares?
My husband and I occasionally discussed the dangers of overweighting company stock—something that often happens when shares are used for the employer’s 401(k) matching contribution or they’re granted as part of incentive pay packages.

I’VE BEEN MANAGING my own finances for a long time. Along the way, I did some things right that served me well and some things that didn’t—including three big blunders.
My money-management journey started when I got into a new middle school that was 12 miles from home. The daily commute involved a short bus ride to the nearest railroad station, a 20-minute trip on a suburban train and then a quick walk. To save money,

THEY’VE LONG BEEN endangered, but 2020 may mark their demise: After four decades of falling interest rates, it seems safe investments offering attractive yields have finally disappeared.
At 0.7%, the payout on 10-year Treasury notes is below the 1.2% expected inflation rate for the next decade. High-quality corporate and municipal bonds offer more generous after-tax income, but hardly enough to excite investors. In the years ahead, the yield-obsessed will no doubt turn to riskier fare—high-dividend stocks,

CHINA’S CRUSHING of Hong Kong’s independence is just the latest aggressive move to raise my hackles—and make me question the wisdom of investing there, as well as in much of Asia. Which puts me in a tough position, since the Pacific Rim represents nearly 70% of the emerging markets indexes.
I hear you saying that politics shouldn’t factor into investment decisions. True, if returns are your only consideration, political and moral issues don’t belong in the conversation.

TOTAL STOCK MARKET index funds have 3% or 4% of their money in real estate investment trusts, or REITs. That means many investors—including many HumbleDollar readers—already have some exposure to REITs. But is it enough? For many, I think not.
I’m talking here about publicly traded U.S. equity REITs, not mortgage REITs or non-publicly traded REITs. Yes, the right allocation to real estate can be complicated by whether you own your home or have other real estate holdings.

CONVERSATIONS ON Twitter aren’t known for their civility. Still, it came as a surprise last week when, out of the blue, author Nassim Nicholas Taleb launched a broadside against investor Clifford Asness, calling his work “crap,” along with other insults.
Asness wasted no time firing back, calling Taleb “very wrong and clearly both nuts and a world class terrible person.”
From there, the insults escalated: nasty, overrated, unoriginal, illogical, pretentious, emetic. That last one I had to look up in the dictionary.

DID I GET SPOOKED? Or did I respond rationally? Possibly a little of both. After buying as the stock market plunged from its Feb. 19 peak, I sold shares into the rally from the March 23 low, though my portfolio remains strongly tilted toward stocks.
Waving the caution flag may even turn out to be the right call over the short term. Still, most of us—me included—shouldn’t be in the business of making market calls,

WITH EVERYTHING that’s been going on recently, one story that’s received less attention is the ongoing spat between the White House and the board of the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). As of a few days ago, there had been a ceasefire in the debate, but it isn’t over. It’s worth understanding what’s at stake—because the underlying issue has been a recurring theme in the investment industry.
If you aren’t familiar with the TSP, it’s one of the retirement plans available to federal government workers.

INVESTING IS A GAME of subtraction—and I’m not talking about this year’s stock market decline.
Wall Street sells the fantasy of market-beating returns, using it to seduce investors into adding new stocks and funds to their holdings. Result? Performance-chasing investors cobble together badly diversified portfolios that they imagine will beat the market, while overlooking the hefty costs that Wall Street charges. This is a strategy that’s almost guaranteed to make heaps of money—for brokerage firms and money managers.

IT’S BEEN AN unpleasant seven weeks for the stock market. Is it over? I have no clue. Still, last week’s rally offered investors at least a temporary respite. My suggestion: Use this moment to think about the market’s recent rollercoaster ride—and how you’ve handled it emotionally.
Financial experts distinguish between risk capacity and risk tolerance. It’s a useful distinction. Risk capacity is our objective ability to take risk based on our personal situation, notably the reliability of our paycheck and our investment time horizon.

HERE IS WHY I DON’T trade, and don’t make big market bets, and why you shouldn’t, either.
Headlines last Monday at 6 a.m.: Nation Braces for Brutal Week, At Least a Fourth of U.S. Economy Goes Idle, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson Hospitalized.
Headline at 9:30 a.m.: Dow Surges as Tech Stocks Rally
I got spooked last weekend. It was epic. I was actually scared after days of hearing about the bungled federal response to the pandemic and about states fighting over medical supplies.