IT’S COME TO THIS: I’m writing an article discussing the virtues of EE savings bonds. To be sure, I’m not currently planning to buy them myself. But they could make a fine investment for more conservative investors who are happy to sit tight for the next two decades.
Yes, the current yield on EE savings bonds is a mere 0.1%. But if you hold EEs for 20 years, the Treasury Department guarantees that your savings bonds will double in value,

IF YOU TOOK AN economics class in high school or college, you might see its usefulness as limited to helping with your grade point average. But the basic ideas you learned can still be valuable. Take this introductory microeconomics question: In a typical transaction, who has more power, the buyer or the seller?
When I started teaching economics many years ago, I gave the nod to buyers. Invoking the notion of “consumer sovereignty,” I’d explain to students that buyers have the power to vote with their feet—by walking to another store.

WE HAVE MUCH TO learn about the coronavirus, but we already know a great deal about financial risk—and, indeed, recent weeks have offered a brutal refresher course. What insights can we draw from investors’ reaction to this awful epidemic? Here are eight timeless lessons:
1. The greatest risks are those we never see coming.
Some risks are predictable, such as stock market volatility. Others are less probable but widely known, like the possibility of a recession.

MY LAST JOB IN mainstream journalism was in 24-hour TV news. When a big story broke, we dropped everything. The viewers, we were told, were only interested in one story. Today that story is COVID-19, better known as the coronavirus. Next week—perhaps even tomorrow—it could be something completely different.
Human beings are finely attuned to what we see as immediate threats. It’s how we evolved. But it isn’t always helpful. The reality: The chances of any of us catching the coronavirus,

I’M STRUCK BY HOW calmly I’m taking this fast-and-furious coronavirus selloff. The human toll is getting worse every day, and the economic and other consequences could be catastrophic. But I’m not tempted to sell. I’m also not in a hurry to buy the dip, though admittedly my pulse quickened Friday afternoon when the market was down 15% from its Feb. 19 high.
There’s absolutely no way to know what will happen first: Whether I’ll regret not buying the dip or Dustin Hoffman will knock on my door in a biohazard suit.

AMID THE PAST WEEK’S stock market downturn, many people are asking two questions:
“How bad will it get?”
“How long will it last?”
I can’t answer these two questions, and nor can anybody else. But I have an answer to a third question: “What should I do?” Below are seven thoughts:
1. Ask financial advisors what they recommend at a time like this and most will offer the same advice: “Don’t panic.” While I agree,

HERE’S THE LEAST surprising thing you’ll read this week: You can’t control the financial markets. They’re driven by news—and we simply don’t know what news we’ll get in the weeks and months ahead, whether it’s about the spread of the coronavirus, its impact on the global economy or something else entirely.
But don’t despair: There’s also much that we can control, including how much we save and spend, the amount of investment risk we take,

I’M WRITING THIS just before 6 a.m., following a few days during which world stock markets caught their own version of the flu. Frankly, I can’t sleep thinking about what’s happened—and especially about the investors who panicked and locked in their losses, just like so many folks did in late 2008 and early 2009.
It took me a few minutes to muster the courage to look at my 401(k). When I did,

AS A TEENAGER, I started to invest by buying a boring old target-date retirement fund. But from there, I became an avid watcher of CNBC while studying finance in college. Indeed, my first financial love was technical analysis. Even today, when markets turn volatile, I’m as susceptible as the next investor to turning on financial cable TV to check out the supposed carnage.
Still, as time has worn on, my perspective has grown longer term and away from day-to-day market movements.

WHEN MY YOUNGEST son graduated college, he had two solid job offers. One would have allowed him to live at home for free and the other was halfway across the country. Guess which one he picked?
In fairness, the job far from home was more interesting to him and provided a great start to his career. I remember him sitting down with his mother and me, and telling us he was planning to move to Texas.

IMAGINE COVID-19 caused the U.S. economy to shrink 4%. What sort of drop in share prices might this trigger?
As it happens, we already know the answer. Over the 18 months through mid-2009, U.S. inflation-adjusted GDP slipped 4%. Investors—panicked over what the future might bring—drove down the S&P 500 stocks by a jaw-dropping 57%.
In retrospect, this seems like a bit of an overreaction.
To be sure, late 2008 was a wild time. It felt like the global financial system was on the verge of total collapse.

MY THREE FAVORITE words in response to questions about investing and trading: “I don’t know.”
Nothing underscores that sentiment more than bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. I work on a trading floor, where it pays to have an opinion on just about every tradable asset. But I’m the oddball on the floor. I roll my eyes when I hear blanket market predictions and the latest hot stock tip. I’m even on a personal crusade to remove CNBC from the TVs at work.

“FOLLOWING THE market’s recent banner year, should we just sell everything and get out?” I got that question recently, and it’s entirely understandable. Since hitting bottom in 2009, U.S. share prices are up fivefold, including the S&P 500’s 31.5% total return in 2019. 
Individual investors aren’t alone in asking this question. A few weeks back, at an industry conference, James Montier delivered a presentation in which he compared the U.S. stock market to “Wile E.

AFTER YEARS OF handwringing, you finally concede that it’s all but impossible to beat the market over the long haul, so you shift your portfolio into index funds. Next up: the truly tough decisions.
Almost every writer for—and reader of—HumbleDollar is a fan of indexing, and there’s no doubt that index funds are a wonderful financial tool. But how will you use that tool? Let the bickering begin.
The differences of opinion show up among the articles we run on HumbleDollar.

IN EIGHT YEARS, my wife and I will be age 72—and we’ll be locked into required minimum distributions from our retirement accounts for the rest of our lives. Nearly all of our savings are in tax-deferred accounts.
At that juncture, we’ll also have begun Social Security payments. The upshot: Our tax rate will jump significantly and, thanks to the combination of required minimum distributions (RMDs) and Social Security, our income will easily exceed our expenses.