Investing

LAST YEAR, an unusual story made the news: The University of Chicago was reportedly looking to sell an entity known as the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP). The story came and went quietly, but it’s worth pausing to understand it.
CRSP’s origins date back to the 1960s. Its initial goal was to build a database of historical stock prices. This is harder than it might seem. Before trading was computerized, stock prices were maintained on paper.

I’m not cut out for individual share ownership. Through pure happenstance I’ve ended up holding shares in two separate companies, and the problem is I now feel obliged to make judgement calls. Should I keep them, sell them, how are they faring against their competitors? It’s all a bit of a hassle.
Compare that to my retirement portfolio, stuffed full of index funds representing thousands of individual businesses. I never give those a second thought. So why can’t I extend the same indifference to two measly company shares?

OVER THE PAST YEAR, a new term has entered the lexicon: “Sell America.” The idea is that investors are losing confidence in the U.S. economy due to persistent deficits and concerns about other policy choices. Owing to these fears, some investors are pulling money out of U.S. stocks and reallocating to international markets. Others are opting for gold and silver. The result: In 2025, for the first time in a long time, international stocks demonstrably outpaced domestic equities,

Last February, just before I retired, I was wrestling with how to generate my retirement income. I flirted with the idea of moving 25% of my portfolio into a Vanguard UK equity income fund. I thought deeply about it—the fund historically yields above 4%, and combined with an annuity I was considering, it would have nicely solved my paycheck dilemma.
Eventually I decided against it, mainly because of the concentration risk. Betting that heavily on a single economy felt like too many eggs in one basket.

With online savings accounts still paying pretty good interest rates and with Fidelity’s money market SPAXX paying good rates as well, why bother with bonds?

WHAT’S THE BEST way to manage your investments?
A new book titled Your Perfect Portfolio helps answer this question. I spoke this week with the author, Cullen Roche.
Adam Grossman: The title is Your Perfect Portfolio with an emphasis on your. 
Cullen Roche: I was very intentional about saying “your perfect portfolio” because everyone’s different, everyone’s unique. So I wrote this book with the intent of studying lots of different strategies and styles.

Like most investors, I learned early about the elegance of the 60/40 portfolio.
Sixty percent stocks for growth. Forty percent bonds for stability.
I studied why it worked. Stocks historically delivered long-term returns, bonds reduced volatility, and periodic rebalancing enforced discipline.  60/40 has proved itself as a durable framework. It wasn’t exciting, but it was resilient.
I understood its importance. It shaped how I thought about diversification, risk, and balance—and it still does.
For many investors,

Vanguard just announced that they cut expense ratios of many funds:
“Vanguard has lowered expense ratios for 84 mutual fund and exchange-traded share classes across 53 funds, amounting to nearly $250 million in fee reductions in 2026. ”
Some popular ones:
VBIL 0-3 Month Treasury Bill ETF from 0.07% to 0.06%
VIG Dividend ETF from 0.05% to 0.04%
VUG Growth ETF from 0.04% to 0.03%
VV Large Cap from 0.04% to 0.03%
VB Small Cap from 0.05% to 0.03%
Full list

LISTEN TO THE financial news, and you’ll often hear reference to “the VIX.” But what exactly is the VIX, and how important is it?
The VIX index is intended to be a measure of investor sentiment. For that reason, it’s often referred to as the market’s “fear gauge.” How can investor sentiment be measured? While the math is complex, it’s based on a straightforward principle: When investors get nervous, they look for ways to protect their portfolios and are sometimes even willing to pay for that protection.

Gold fever seems to be everywhere at the moment. My grandson asked me the other day, “Do you own any gold, Pops?”
I said no and asked why he was curious. Apparently, even ten-year-olds know that gold is having quite a run. Pushing through the $5,000 mark had captured his imagination.
There’s something amusing about being financially questioned by a ten-year-old who only recently discovered the tooth fairy isn’t real. I’ve been investing for decades, and I’m getting the third degree from a kid whose worldly wealth consists entirely of football cards and a bag of loose change.

Several times in the recent past I have extolled the HumbleDollar archives as a place to find some great information. I just came across a six year old Grossman article that is relevant today. Private Equity investments are finding their way into 401K and other investment vehicles that are accessible to common folk like you and me. Adam provides some great information about Private Equity, as well as some great questions to consider if considering such an investment. 

Charles Schwab SCHW -2.73%decrease; red down pointing triangle reported a 34% increase in quarterly profit after trading and net interest revenue climbed.

Net income rose to $2.46 billion, or $1.33 a share, from $1.84 billion, or 94 cents, in the same period a year earlier. Earnings per share were $1.39 excluding certain one-time items. On that basis, Schwab fell just short of analysts’ average estimates of $1.40 a share, according to FactSet.
Individual investors flooded into financial markets last year, buoyed by back-to-back years of strong returns and empowered by expanded access to new assets and product types.

I’d like to claim that skill, but alas it’s not true. I’m closer to being a saver with patience, but I have little patience with detail. If I was a civil engineer like my son, you would not want to drive over one of my bridges.
I truly admire HD writers who can delve into the nitty gritty of investing and those who understand it all. I’m still wondering what happened to the American Stock Exchange. 

Back in the day when people actually got magazines in the mail, there was an axiom that said: “When Time magazine has a bull on the cover, it is time to sell; when it has a bear on the cover, it is time to buy.”   This was an easy-to-follow contrarian indicator. If the bull or the bear are so clear that the non-financial press picks up on it, the trend must be long in the tooth.

In November 2025 CalPERS, a $600 billion pension plan, announced it would adopt the Total Portfolio Approach.
The model rethinks portfolio construction. “Instead of starting with a fixed split, such as 60% stocks and 40% bonds, it begins by examining how different investments behave…..The goal is a portfolio that behaves more predictably when markets get rough.”
“The Total Portfolio Approach (TPA) is a holistic investment strategy that integrates all assets into a unified portfolio, focusing on overall performance rather than managing asset classes in isolation.”
To accomplish this,