ABOUT 10 YEARS AGO, Steve Edmundson, manager of the Nevada state pension, became a folk hero in the investment world when The Wall Street Journal profiled him in an article titled, “What Does Nevada’s $35 Billion Fund Manager Do All Day? Nothing.”
It was an exaggeration to say he did “nothing,” but Edmundson definitely did things differently. Since the 1980s, the trend among pension and endowment managers had been to follow in the footsteps of Yale University’s David Swensen.

FRENCH HISTORIAN Alexis de Tocqueville toured the U.S. in the 1830s and chronicled his observations in a book titled Democracy in America. What mainly impressed him was Americans’ focus on trade and commerce.
They have a “purely practical” mindset, he wrote, and concluded that “the position of the American is quite exceptional.” In the years since, others have picked up on this concept of “American exceptionalism.”
Despite recent political and economic crosscurrents,

I’M TRYING MY HAND at retirement. It isn’t going so well.
As a teenager and when I was in my early 20s, I would take to the couch and happily spend the day consuming a novel. Could I do that at age 62? It seems not.
At some point over the past four decades, I lost the ability to do things solely for my own enjoyment. It seems the endless demands of work, family and household chores have crushed my inner self-absorbed teenager.

IT’S BEEN AN UNUSUAL year—to say the least—for investment markets. After rising earlier in the year, U.S. stocks and bonds have dropped in recent weeks. Market leaders like Apple and Nvidia have been among the hardest hit. The U.S. dollar has also dropped, helping boost the value of international shares, and gold has continued to hit new all-time highs, despite inflation cooling.
What can we learn from all this? I see seven lessons.
1.

YOU MAY BE FAMILIAR with Peter Lynch. In the 1970s and ‘80s, he was one of the most visible figures in the investment world. As manager of Fidelity Magellan Fund, he achieved the best track record, by far, among his peers. He shared his wisdom in a series of popular books for individual investors.
Among the ideas for which Lynch is best known is the notion of “diworsification.” As its name suggests, Lynch argued that diversification simply for the sake of diversification isn’t always a good thing.

I’M ALL IN FAVOR of striving. But I’ve also belatedly come to see the appeal of acceptance.
Should we strive for more, or should we accept what we currently have and what’s currently on offer? As I’ve noted in earlier articles, there’s great pleasure in striving. We love the feeling of making progress, even if our achievements don’t make us happy for long. It’s an instinct we no doubt inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

WHEN STEWART MOTT graduated college in 1961, he received $6 million from his father, an auto industry entrepreneur who was one of the founders of General Motors. On top of the $6 million, a family trust began paying Mott an annual stipend of $850,000.
That allowed Mott to spend his adult life pursuing a variety of eccentric endeavors. He funded research on extrasensory perception. Inside his Manhattan apartment, he built a 10,000-square-foot garden, along with a chicken coop.

OSCAR WILDE ONCE made this observation: “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” In other words, the only way to truly learn something is through experience.
When it comes to investing, this is easier said than done because learning through experience can be expensive. As Warren Buffett once quipped, “It is good to learn from your mistakes.

WE WANT OUR STOCKS to behave like bonds, and our bonds to behave like cash investments. That leads to all kinds of portfolio contortions—some of them damaging to our investment results.
Remember, risk is the price we pay to earn higher returns. Many folks want those higher returns, but they’re anxious to avoid risk. Chalk it up to loss aversion: We get far more pain from losses than pleasure from gains.
Result? Think about stock-market strategies like purchasing equity-indexed annuities and writing covered call options.

IN 1774, AMSTERDAM businessman Abraham van Ketwich created a new type of investment. After raising money from a group of individuals, van Ketwich built a portfolio of bonds. He deposited the bonds in a metal box in his office, which three people then secured using three different locks.
Van Ketwich’s fund could be considered the world’s first index fund. How so? For starters, the bonds purchased were broadly diversified across industries and geography. Second,

IN THE ANCIENT WORLD, before the invention of the printing press, a strategy for remembering information was to build a so-called memory palace. The idea was to associate words with images. Even today, this is how participants in memory competitions can achieve feats like reciting a thousand digits of pi.
Similarly, when it comes to personal finance, I’ve found that certain images can help illustrate important concepts. These are the ones I rely on the most:
1.

IN THE 1990s, Mark Cuban started one of the first internet companies, a video streaming service called Broadcast.com, and later sold it to Yahoo for several billion dollars. With some of the proceeds, he bought the Dallas Mavericks NBA franchise and sold that as well, taking home another several billion dollars.
And for 16 seasons, Cuban appeared on the reality TV show Shark Tank, in which entrepreneurs present ideas to a panel of prospective investors.

NINE MONTHS AGO, Jonathan Clements shared with readers that he’d been diagnosed with an incurable form of cancer. It was devastating news, especially for longtime readers, many of whom regard Jonathan not only as a journalist but also a friend. I count myself among them, so I was grateful that Jonathan agreed to sit for an interview to share more about his background, his early years and his current thinking. 
You’ve joked that,

THE U.S. STOCK MARKET has historically delivered similar returns under both Democrat and Republican administrations. For that reason, my view is that investors shouldn’t worry too much about who occupies the White House, and I tend to stay away from investment discussions that involve politics.
But sometimes, the news coming out of Washington dominates the headlines in a way that can’t be ignored. Such is the case today. Moreover, with the stock market faltering recently,

WHEN I STARTED writing about personal finance in the late 1980s, my focus was on giving “actionable” money advice. Here, at the end of my career, I’m more interested in offering thoughts that’ll help folks with all areas of their life, financial and otherwise.
I’m not sure how many articles I have left in me. Fingers crossed, it’ll be many more than my current diagnosis suggests. But whatever the case, here are four thoughts that I’d like readers to remember:
1.