Investing

I’m gifting a Wall Street Journal article on the share of AI company debt in the bond market. Just as AI is becoming an ever-growing share of the S&P500, it is becoming a bigger share of the bond market. I have already shifted money from the S&P500 to the rest of the market, and to an international fund, now I’m wondering whether I should do the same for bonds.
Since my asset allocation is 50% stocks,

As a younger reader not of traditional retirement age, I am interested in learning more about the financial subscriptions HD readers are willing (or would recommend to others) to pay for such as financial periodicals, journalism, software, etc. For example, I have enjoyed for years Wall Street Journal and some Bloomberg journalism. I didn’t find Kiplinger subscriptions to be of value to me. There have been some discussion threads that mentioned free retirement calculation software that I appreciated.

WHERE YOU PUT your investments can make a huge difference for your after-tax wealth. 
As you know, we have 3 main investment accounts:

Taxable account. A traditional brokerage account where you are taxed every time you dividends or sell investments at a gain.
Tax deferred account. Traditional 401(k), 403(b), and traditional IRAs allow taxes to be deferred to the future. You pay taxes when your investments are withdrawn, and generally come with an immediate tax deduction.

I began contributing to an IRA in the 80s, buying certificates of deposit at the local bank. Pretty soon I began thinking about investments. I knew almost nothing about the stock market, still, I knew I needed to be in it. I remember watching the nightly news, where the anchors always reported what the DOW did that day, never a mention of that other thingy…. What was it called…. The S&P500? 
I started reading up on the stock market,

From Benjamin Graham in 1972: “Any approach to moneymaking in the stock market which can be easily described and followed by a lot of people is by its terms too simple and too easy to last.”
 
Why wouldn’t this apply to indexing?

About  a year and half ago I posted the following article. (It benefited from the wonderful editing of Clements.)  Given investors will soon start receiving distributions from mutual funds, I thought I would repost it. The original post and comments can be found here.
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,

LAST WEEK, OPENAI founder Sam Altman sat down for an interview with venture capitalist Brad Gerstner and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Both are investors in OpenAI, so it seemed like a friendly audience. But Gerstner posed a question that seemed to make Altman uncomfortable.
Since introducing ChatGPT three years ago, OpenAI has posted impressive growth, but Gerstner wondered whether the company was, nonetheless, getting ahead of itself.
“How can a company with $13 billion in revenues make $1.4 trillion of spend commitments?” Gerstner asked.

Goodness. A trillion dollars—$1,000,000,000,000.00 That’s a massive potential compensation package and an awful lot of zeros. I guess if you’re already worth 400 billion, you might as well take a leap of faith and shoot for the stars. I really doubt Elon Musk will hit all the numbers to unlock the full amount. The sales and profit targets seem very ambitious, maybe even beyond Musk’s ability to achieve.
Although I personally think the possible compensation package is an obscene amount of money,

I’m quite engaged with the Humble Dollar community and occasionally post articles on the forum. I’m also a keen reader of personal finance articles and books. Being a former business owner with a nearly 40-year-old degree in business and finance, I’m very interested in commentary and the goings-on in the business and finance world. But here’s the strange thing: I’m not massively engaged with my own retirement portfolio. I hardly ever think of it and rarely check its performance.

In an Oct. 27 Morningstar article “The Case for a ‘Good Enough’ Portfolio,” Christine Benz asks the question, “Are you an optimizer or a satisficer?” [satisfice = satisfy+suffice] Do you continually search for ways to improve your portfolio, or are you happy with good enough? Reasons exist for each; no criticism implied for either.
I’ve been a happy satisficer for decades. I’ve made a few tweaks, mostly to adjust to changing life circumstances.
What about you?

SOME YEARS AGO, the scientist Edward Fredkin identified a quirk of human behavior.
When it comes to making decisions, Fredkin found, we tend to allocate our time inefficiently. Suppose, for example, you’re at the grocery store, looking for something basic like paper towels. In a big supermarket, there might be a dozen or more choices. The result: Because there are so many options, it can be hard to choose among them. In the absence of big differences,

I noticed in one of the responses to a recent article that someone expressed some concern about investing in ETFs as opposed to Mutual Funds.  I thought if might be helpful to talk about this topic.  To help open the discussion here is a link to FINRA’s page on the topic:
https://www.finra.org/investors/insights/etf-vs-mutual-fund
Just one more advantage not mentioned in that summary, is that gifting mutual fund shares is hard to do, whereas gifting ETFs is relatively easy.  

When I started taking QCDs and RMDs, several years ago, I called Vanguard each time. Then, last year, I was able to do the whole thing on the website. Naturally, I expected to be able to do it on the web site again this year.
I started with the QCDs. I found the description of what I was supposed to do after a search on the website. I found the correct location. The options presented bore no relationship to the instructions,

STOCK MARKET INVESTORS are enjoying yet another strong year. The S&P 500 has gained about 14% so far, shrugging off, for the most part, uncertainty over tariffs, interest rates and the latest government shutdown.
Should this worry us?
Since ancient times, soothsayers have been attempting—without luck—to forecast the future. As it relates to investment markets, the frustrating reality is that no one knows what the future will bring. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do.

ROTH IRA IS A powerful account. It grows tax-free and withdrawals are tax-free during retirement. Roth IRA also has income limits.
For 2025, if you are filing your taxes as single and make less than $150,000 ($236,000 if married filing jointly) of modified adjusted gross income, you can contribute a maximum amount of $7,000.
But if you make $165,000 (single) or $246,000 (married jointly), you are ineligible to contribute to a Roth IRA directly.