FREE NEWSLETTER

Healthy Choices

Steve Abramowitz  |  Apr 25, 2023

YOU’VE PROBABLY never heard of Carolyn Lynch. Shopping for groceries, she noticed a new display of panty hose packaged in colorful plastic eggs. She bought a pair, tried them on and loved them. She told her husband, Peter Lynch, the celebrated manager of Fidelity Magellan Fund and vocal advocate of “investing in what you know.” He promptly bought the stock. L’eggs became one of the most successful women’s consumer products of the 1970s.
I recently had my own L’eggs moment.

Read More

Changing My Mind

Adam M. Grossman  |  Apr 23, 2023

A FEW YEARS BACK, I related a story about the comedian Joan Rivers. Her daughter, Melissa, likes to joke that her mother was always very consistent. Wherever she was, she would always drive at 40 miles per hour, whether it was on the highway, in a school zone or in the driveway.
This is funny, but it also illustrates a key challenge for investors. On the one hand, it’s important to be consistent. But at the same time,

Read More

Don’t Go Away

Steve Abramowitz  |  Apr 14, 2023

EMBARRASSED BY YOUR impulse to try the “sell in May and go away” gambit? Don’t be. You’re in good company. Selling stocks in the spring and returning in autumn was a favorite pastime of London financiers and bankers, who abandoned the steamy city for cooler vacation destinations. They resumed stock trading around St. Leger’s, the day of the last leg of English horse racing’s Triple Crown.
The tendency of global stock markets to rise less in the six months from May to October,

Read More

Saved by Compounding

Philip Stein  |  Apr 13, 2023

IF I MADE A LIST of all the dumb things investors do, I likely committed them all. I chased performance, sold stocks in a bear market, invested in things I didn’t understand—you get the picture.
Yet, despite the numerous setbacks I suffered before I matured as an investor, I was able to retire comfortably. How was that possible? My conclusion: compound growth. Indeed, I believe compounding is a surer way to wealth than picking market-beating investments.

Read More

Risky Business

Adam M. Grossman  |  Apr 9, 2023

OPEN A FINANCE textbook, and you’ll find discussions of volatility and beta, value-at-risk, the Sharpe ratio, the Sortino ratio, the Treynor ratio and many other quantitative tools for measuring risk. But what should you make of these metrics? Are they an effective way to control risk in your portfolio?
These tools do have decades of research behind them, and they can be useful. But I believe they’re also incomplete. Worse yet, they can be misleading.

Read More

Paid With Pain

John Lim  |  Apr 5, 2023

INVESTING IS PRETTY simple. If you don’t need to touch your money for 10 years or so, a good chunk of it can be invested in a globally diversified basket of stocks, preferably using very low-cost index funds. The likelihood that your stock holdings will have lost money after a decade is quite low, and exceedingly low if your holding period is 15 years or longer. Moreover, your investment is likely to outperform all other asset classes,

Read More

Building a Barbell

Adam M. Grossman  |  Apr 2, 2023

IN THE WEEKS SINCE Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) disintegrated, there’s been a fair amount of post-mortem analysis. In the end, two factors drove the bank’s demise.
First, SVB’s customer base was concentrated among venture capital-backed technology companies. Because of that, nearly 90% of deposits topped the FDIC threshold and were thus uninsured.
Second, owing to 2022’s rise in interest rates, SVB’s bond portfolio took a hit. That sparked concern about the bank’s solvency, prompting depositors to overwhelm the bank with withdrawal requests.

Read More

Chasing Yield

James Kerr  |  Mar 31, 2023

THREE YEARS AGO this month, in the middle of the pandemic-driven market meltdown, I went on a dividend-stock buying spree.
I had just turned 60 and was looking to step away from the corporate world in 18 months’ time to take up a second-act career as an author. As part of my retirement plan, I had a sizable money-market account that I planned to live on for a few years before I started taking Social Security and pulling from my retirement accounts.

Read More

Gift of Knowledge

Craig Stephens  |  Mar 30, 2023

MY UNCLE GAVE ME one share of Chevron for my 20th birthday. It was 1995, and he was the stock transfer agent for the company, overseeing its dividend reinvestment plan (DRIP). The share was a modest $48 gift, but the accompanying advice became the foundation of my investing career for the 27 years since.
As a young kid, I would comb through the business section of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, monitoring the performance of my dad’s two mutual funds.

Read More

Buffett’s Other Guru

Dan Dawson  |  Mar 27, 2023

PUBLISHED IN 1958, Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits by Philip Fisher was the first investment book to make The New York Times bestseller list.
Never heard of Fisher? Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett points to two key influences on his investment thinking: legendary value investor Benjamin Graham—and growth-stock proponent Phil Fisher. Indeed, I’d argue that Fisher’s words of advice on bonds, dividends and war scares are as relevant now as they were in 1958.

Read More

Time for a Ladder?

Chris Cagle  |  Mar 27, 2023

I’M A 70-YEAR-OLD retiree with a conservative fund portfolio. I have 65% in short- and intermediate-term bonds, Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) and cash, with the other 35% in stocks.
Last year was a rough one for retirees. Rising interest rates and unexpectedly high inflation resulted in a losing year for stocks and bonds. My bond funds lost some 10%. It was one of the worst annual losses for bonds ever. Bonds have only lost value in five of the past 45 years,

Read More

Better Than Buffett?

John Yeigh  |  Mar 23, 2023

IN AN EFFORT TO identify the simplest, most resilient lifetime investment portfolio, author and investment analyst Chris Pedersen concluded that a minimum of two funds is required. His recent book, 2 Funds for Life, summarizes his back-testing study to find a simple yet effective portfolio. The book is available free at PaulMerriman.com.
Pedersen found that a 90% allocation to a Vanguard Group target-date fund coupled with a 10% allocation to a small-cap value fund provides meaningful diversification across stocks and bonds,

Read More

Not Bonding

Steve Spinella  |  Feb 27, 2023

I’VE SPENT THE PAST 10 years or so without any bonds or bond funds in my portfolio. What am I missing? And why did this happen?
Investing in bonds directly was always confusing to me. There are coupon rates, bond ladders, bond ratings and so much more. In the beginning, I just found it easier to ignore all the confusion. I know that bonds, in aggregate, represent a greater investment pool than stocks, but I just kept putting it off.

Read More

January Junkie

Steve Abramowitz  |  Feb 24, 2023

REMEMBER THAT PLANE ride when the woman next to you was consumed with the Times crossword puzzle? Every so often, she would grimace in frustration and rapidly tap the pencil against her forehead. But after a few deliberate sips of red wine, she returned to her obsession.
I have my own fetish. It’s called the January effect.
As December winds down, the tendency of stocks to rise in January becomes a favorite topic of market pundits.

Read More

No Simple Stories

Adam M. Grossman  |  Feb 19, 2023

I’VE OFTEN COMPARED the stock market to a Rorschach test. Depending on your perspective, what’s happening can look very different. But even in a market full of Rorschach tests, one company’s stock stands out: Tesla. Some people see it as a world-class company that’s changing the world. Others see it as a company led by an erratic genius that one day will inevitably fade—like MySpace or Polaroid.
Recently, a blogger named Alex Voigt wrote that Tesla’s head start in electric vehicles “will soon make Toyota look like what it is—a loser.” He then added for emphasis: “Dead man walking.”
Is Voigt right or wrong?

Read More
SHARE