From Wesley Gray at Turnkey Analyst comes a reminder about tax rates.  Tax rates are going up, and how your investment is taxed may be as important as how it performs.  

Source: The Economist, via Greg Mankiw. Americans, as well as citizens of many other advanced nations, now spend about twice as many years in retirement as they did a generation or two ago.  

Risk is fundamental to investing, but no one can agree what it is.  Modern Portfolio Theory defines it as standard deviation.  Tom Howard of AthenaInvest thinks investment risk is something completely different.  

Preparing for a loss in the coming correction: we would rather do it proactively and getting psychologically prepared before it happens.

We’ve written about the uselessness of forecasting in the past and even cited James Montier’s wonderful piece, The Seven Sins of Fund Management.  This citation comes from Mebane Faber’s World Beta blog.  Montier writes: The two most common biases are over-optimism and overconfidence. Overconfidence refers to a situation whereby people are su...

Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,
The legal claims on physical gold far exceed the amount of physical gold that the banks actually have by a very, very wide margin.  And right now the bankers are scared out of their wits because their warehouses are being drained of physical gold at a frightening rate.  So what happ...

Morgan Housel has a fun article at Motley Fool with a possible explanation for why investors are so clueless.  His argument, essentially, is that investors confuse the stock market with the economy.  If the economy is bad, they assume the stock market must be bad too.  Although it’s certainly true that many investors are confused [...]

One can use a tactical strategy to construct a high dividend ETF portfolio by carefully including a well selected candidate ETFs with high yields. A 6% to 7% yield portfolio is possible. 

Sadly, we are not making this up: as part of the BEA's latest revision to the way it calculates GDP, the government will no longer count the amount of pension funding that is actually allocated to retirement accounts (counted as wages in the GDP calculation): i.e., an actual cash outlay. Instead, what the Bureau of Economic Analysis will count are co...

The Leuthold Group’s Doug Ramsey on the psychology that drives bull markets: Cashing in on bull markets is not a matter of waiting for everything to line up, anyway.  There must be a set of intellectually appealing bear arguments keeping some players on the sidelines…it is these same players who will eventually drive prices even [...]

Research Affliliates published a very nice primer on financial repression on Advisor Perspectives.  It’s well worth reading to get the lay of the land.  Here’s how they define financial repression: Financial repression refers to a set of governmental policies that keep real interest rates low or negative and regulate or manipulate a c...

Goal based financial planning helps you to classify your needs into several categories. You then setup your investment portfolios based on these goals. 

Relative strength investors will be glad to know that James Picerno’s Capital Spectator blog has an article on the wonders of momentum.  He discusses the momentum “anomaly” and its history briefly: Momentum is one of the oldest and most persistent anomalies in the financial literature. The tendency of positive or negative returns t...

Martin Smith, an Emmy-winning correspondent for PBS’Frontline, is worried about his retirement — and yours.
 
In his excellent Frontlinedocumentary airing Tuesday, April 23, on PBS,...

Wall Street has made it far more likely that you will spend at least some of your golden years eating Fancy Feast.
A new Frontline documentary, "The Retirement Gamble," which first aired Tuesday...

We review portfolio rebalances for both ETF, mutual fund brokerage accounts as well as 401k accounts. We further show FolioFn's one-click basket rebalance feature. 

Interesting chart of the S&P vs. gold going back a few decades: Joe Weisenthal’s take: You can see that even with the recent upturn in stocks, relative to gold, gold has crushed stocks since 2000. Arguably, 2000 represented a peak in belief in the capabilities of humans. The internet inspired all kinds of crazy optimism [...]

Howard Marks makes a compelling argument for using relative strength (without even referring to relative strength): “If you are a value investor and you invest whenever you find a stock which is selling for one-third less than your estimate of intrinsic value, and you say, I don’t care about the macro, nor what I call [...]

Investors lately are in a frenzy about current income.  With interest rates so low, it’s tough for investors, especially those nearing or already in retirement, to come up with enough current income to live on.  A recent article in Advisor Perspectives had a really interesting take on current income.  

Investment manager selection is one of several challenges that an investor faces.  However, if manager selection is done well, an investor has only to sit patiently and let the manager’s process work—not that sitting patiently is necessarily easy!