Just finished my annual investing phone call with my daughter. We hold this meeting annually before she files her taxes to make tweaks to her portfolio for the upcoming year. With Vanguard she has a brokerage account, traditional IRA , and a Roth IRA. She also has a 401K, and HSA through her work. These I am all familiar with.
The one component of her portfolio I am not familiar with is Acorns. I hadn’t paid much attention to this component as it was just rounding of purchases from her credit card.

THIS MONTH MARKS the five-year anniversary of the start of the pandemic. That makes this a good time to look back and ask what lessons we might learn.
In early 2020, when COVID-19 was first identified in the U.S., the stock market dropped 34% in the space of just five weeks. But later in the year—after the Federal Reserve stepped in with its bazooka—the market rebounded, ending the year in positive territory. For full-year 2020,

I was recently reading a bit on the iShares offering iBonds, essentially laddered bond ETFs.
https://www.ishares.com/us/strategies/bond-etfs/build-better-bond-ladders
The advantage I see is that these are not perpetual bonds like an ETF (as in the ETF will cease to exist as of the maturity date and return the money) and, unlike an individual bond offering, are slightly more diversified. They also come in silos of flavors (U.S. government, corporate, municipals and TIPS).
I think (am not sure) that at maturity the number of shares multiplied by the final NAV will be returned (happy to hear if anyone has more insights into how this works).

Over the last year or so, I have been on the lookout for an ETF that is by itself dedicated to the beleaguered but recently resuscitated 60/40 portfolio. Surprisingly, it’s been a long and tedious slog.
At 80 and beset by assorted health challenges, I am realistic in supposing that I will pass before my younger and healthier wife. I know Vanguard’s Wellington (VWELX) would fit the bill, but Alberta will have enough responsibilities to shoulder without having to worry about any mutual fund restrictions or redemption fees that might someday be imposed.

I decided 10 days ago to make a small (0.2% of my portfolio) in Ethereum through the Fidelity ETF. I decided on Ethereum over Bitcoin only because Ethereum had fallen in price quite a bit at the end of January.
Just curious how many of you have any crypto investments and if so how much of your portfolio and which crypto currencies (all Bitcoin?)
I must say that I’m a little more exposed to this industry as my son is with a cryptocurrency brokerage and digital asset organization.

THERE’S A CHANGE coming in the way many of us invest. But for background, it’s important first to look at a related—though seemingly mundane—investment concept known as tax-loss harvesting.
To understand how tax-loss harvesting works, consider a simple example. Suppose you purchased a stock in your taxable account for $10, and it subsequently dropped to $8. That would be unfortunate, but there’d be a silver lining: You could sell the stock to capture the $2 loss for tax purposes and then reinvest the proceeds in another stock.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the Fidelity ZERO series of funds. These are broad stock index funds, which is good, and they have zero fees, which is better. The downside, if it even is one, is that they track Fidelity proprietary indexes rather than industry standard ones. Fidelity also has outstanding standard index funds that track the industry standard broad indexes for low fees. My question to myself, and to anyone who cares to opine: is the difference worth any fee at all when I can pay zero?

We have been discussing the value of a 60/40 investment portfolio in HD as a way to balance risk/reward over the long term.
A report I read today suggests an all-equity portfolio, with a focus on international stocks, could be the key to maximizing retirement wealth compared to  60/40 allocation or target-date funds. It says an all equities portfolio is the far better way to build the largest nest egg possible for retirement; to generate a larger paycheck in retirement;

An exercise I find useful — certainly more useful than trying to predict the future — is to ask myself, what are the main risks to my portfolio? Sometimes we have more riding on one potential outcome, or at risk from another, than we realize.
The list of major risks is long, but higher-than-expected inflation and interest rates are pretty high up. Other than underweighting the mega-cap tech stocks for fear they will fall back to earth,

Throughout my career, I’ve always worried about coming across as too much of a cheerleader for Vanguard Group. Still, it’s hard to argue that this morning’s press release is anything but good news: Vanguard announced fee reductions affecting 168 share classes across 87 funds. I imagine most HumbleDollar readers stand to benefit.
A few examples:

Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund-Admiral Shares drops from 0.05% to 0.04%
Vanguard Treasury Money Market Fund-Investor Shares falls from 0.09% to 0.07%
Vanguard International High Dividend Yield Index Fund-Admiral Shares drops from 0.22% to 0.17%
Vanguard Total International Stock ETF declines from 0.08% to 0.05%
Vanguard Total World Stock ETF dips from 0.07% to 0.06%

We all have our own journey of discovering finance literacy. Some of us may be fortunate to be raised in a financial literate family, either immediate or extended one; while some of us may learn the hard and expensive way, by making financial mistakes.  I learn about being frugal and working hard to better our own life from my parents, who both never had the chance to finish middle school growing up in a rural area in China back in 1950’s.

MARVIN STEINBERG was a psychologist who founded the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling. During his career, he made some uncomfortable observations about the behavior of stock market investors. In many cases, he felt, investors’ behavior veered awfully close to gambling.
This is the sort of observation that seems like it could be true, but it also seems difficult to quantify. That’s why a recent study by Morningstar analyst Jeffrey Ptak caught my eye.
Ptak wanted to examine investors’ experience with so-called thematic funds.

It seems all conventional wisdom says, as we get closer to retirement, gradually shift the allocation (mix) of your portfolio from equity funds to bond funds. I subscribe to the Boglehead investing methodology and agree with much of what Mr. Clements, and many others, have written on this site. My wife and I have been investing much of our savings in Index funds over the past 15 years. We are truly blessed and should be financially independent,

One of the main principles of investing is the Risk vs. Return trade-off, which according to investopedia.com:
Risk vs. Return trade-off states that the potential return rises with an increase in risk. Using this principle, individuals associate low levels of uncertainty with low potential returns, and high levels of uncertainty or risk with high potential returns.
It is a principle that every investor needs to understand before they buy their first stock or preferably their first broad-based low-cost index fund (BBLCIF).

I posted this on Bogleheads and got some good suggestions. I welcome the comments and suggestions of the HD audience as well.
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I serve on the board of a large (60k members) non-profit. I am on the Finance Committee which, among other things, monitors our investments. We sold real estate in 2024 that doubled the size of our investment portfolio to $3M. We also requested proposals for investment advisory services and selected a firm to provide those services.