THE YEAR’S MIDPOINT is here, with the stock market on track for its second consecutive year of above-average gains. This has many investors asking about rebalancing. Below are some commonly asked questions.
What is rebalancing? Let’s say that, to get the right mix of risk and return, you’ve settled on an asset allocation of 50% stocks and 50% bonds. Now, suppose the stock market rises 10%. This would lift stocks to some 52% of your total portfolio,

WE MET IN THE GALLEY, the cafeteria in Vanguard Group’s nautical lexicon. Jack Bogle shook my hand. My pulse raced.
I’d learned about Vanguard’s founder while working at Morningstar. I’d read about him in Jonathan Clements’s Wall Street Journal columns. And I’d devoured his first book, Bogle on Mutual Funds.
“Where’d you go to college?” he asked. “Good board scores?”
We sat down, tucked into our meals—some sort of industrial casserole for me,

“IS THAT INDIA or something? Where was that picture taken, Richie?”
“You’ll never guess, Stevie. Remember 266 Washington Avenue?”
“That brown brick, 114-unit apartment building in Brooklyn that Grandpa bought 75 years ago? Mommy said he saved for the down payment with money from the kosher butcher shop he opened after he got here from Poland. But didn’t we sell it in the 1970s? It looks like the Taj Mahal now.”
“Yeah, it’s obviously been spectacularly upgraded over the years.”
“How did you get the picture?”
“Robin and I were in New York last month and went to see it.

MY WIFE AND I TOOK a hiking trip last fall that included wandering through the foothills of the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. The leaves were just starting to change colors, something I so badly miss living here in Texas.
I returned exhausted and sore, yet mentally energized and invigorated. For the majority of the trip, we were untethered from technology: no cellphone service during the day, no newspapers or TV distractions, no political talking heads,

BACK IN 1987, Nassim Nicholas Taleb was a trader on Wall Street. But unlike most of his peers, Taleb wasn’t pinning his hopes on a market rally. Instead, he’d positioned himself to benefit from a market meltdown. On Oct. 19, just such an event occurred. For no apparent reason—in the midst of an otherwise strong market—the S&P 500 dropped 23% in a single day. The result: Taleb made a fortune—enough to retire at age 27.

BACK IN 2021, Keith Gill wasn’t well known. A video game enthusiast, he liked to spend time in his basement, day-trading and making videos. But with his online persona, Roaring Kitty, Gill drew a following that reached into the millions. He used that platform to direct attention to the shares of video game retailer GameStop, which was nearing insolvency. 

Gill’s videos drew enough attention in 2021 to cause a “short squeeze” in GameStop shares. The result: At least one hedge fund,

I SOLD A MUTUAL FUND in my taxable account that was up an average 6% a year over the past 10 years—and ended up with a tax loss. That’s right, I took a loss on this international fund, even though it had returned 6% a year. How does that happen?
Suppose you bought one share of a mutual fund for $12 on Jan. 3. Over the course of the year, the fund’s investments fare well.

ARE HEDGE FUNDS a good investment? To answer this question, let’s take a look at three well-known funds. The first is Renaissance Technologies.
Renaissance was founded in 1982 by academic James Simons, who’d been chair of the math department at Stony Brook University and, before that, a code-breaker for the U.S. military. Because he didn’t have a background in finance, Simons instead relied on mathematics, developing the first purely computer-driven trading system.
The result: As his biographer put it,

I BEGAN MY CAREER as a part-time employee for an engineering consulting firm. At the time, I was working on my master’s degree in mechanical engineering. I shifted to full-time when I’d wrapped up my coursework but before completing my research and oral defense.
Over the next four years, I finished that degree and passed the national exam to become a registered professional engineer. I also got married, and bought a dog, a second car and a house.

I’VE NEVER BEEN MUCH of a collector. As a kid, I tried collecting comic books for a short time. I found that, after I read them, I had little use for them. I stored the comic books in an open box in my closet, where their translucent sleeves attracted a thick blanket of dust but little interest.
Later in life, I started a small wine collection. I didn’t get too far. It turns out I drank the wine at a rate far quicker than I acquired new vintages.

THOSE WHO REGULARLY read posts on Bogleheads.org—and I’m guessing a good chunk of HumbleDollar readers do—know that the Bogleheads’ philosophy is to:

Never time the markets.
Buy only broad-market index funds via either mutual funds or exchange-traded funds.
Invest 25% to 75% of a portfolio in stocks using such funds, with the rest in bonds, and thereafter rebalance as needed. How big a percentage should you put in stocks? That’s based on risk tolerance.

IN THE INVESTMENT world, there’s no shortage of data. But how useful is all that data? To help get to an answer, let’s consider four questions:
1. When the economy is strong, is that good for stocks? The simple answer is “yes.” According to textbook finance, the value of any company should represent the sum total of its future profits. When the economy is strong and profits are higher, that should be good for stocks.

“SOME PEOPLE automatically sell the ‘winners’—stocks that go up—and hold on to their ‘losers’—stocks that go down—which is about as sensible as pulling out the flowers and watering the weeds,” argued Peter Lynch in his 1989 book One Up on Wall Street.
My father worked for Sears for 30 years, delivering washers, freezers and other appliances. Sears rewarded employees with stock, even delivery men like my dad. Over time, through splits and spin-offs,

AMONG THE MORE notable studies published in recent years is a paper by Hendrik Bessembinder titled “Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?” His key finding: Between 1926 and 2016, just 4% of stocks accounted for all of the U.S. market’s net gain. As a group, the other 96% delivered returns that were no better than Treasury bills, which returned just 2% a year over the period.

It was a surprising result. The implication: Diversification is even more important than most investors realized,

I HAVE NO IDEA HOW stocks will perform this year or next. But I have full confidence that a globally diversified stock portfolio will fare just fine over the decades ahead.
My optimism, it seems, isn’t shared by many HumbleDollar readers, who fear we’re facing some rough years for the economy and the stock market. How do I justify my optimism about the long term? Here are five reasons.
1. Heads I win,