Retirement Watch Weekly
How to Handle a Stock Market Bubble
This thoughtful essay discusses several cases in which smart, successful investors lost money because they caved in to recent trends. The fundamentals of the investments didn’t meet their criteria, but they invested anyway, because they saw other people making a lot of money and wanted to join the party. It turns out they bought at […]
The Frye Festival Scam
Most of you probably haven’t heard of the Frye Festival. I hadn’t heard about it either until last week when the stories came out that it was a scam. You should read this story and this story to learn the details. There are important lessons here for consumers and for investors. This was a very […]
The Dividend Growth Investing Myth
Do stocks with consistently increasing dividends earn higher long-term returns than other stocks. That’s the accepted wisdom. Take a look at this article from Meb Faber. He argues that the dividend growth dominance is based on a chart issued by a market research firm that used an unconventional method of computing the returns. Once a […]
Retirement Exodus to Sun Belt Accelerates
After pausing for a few years due to the financial crisis and other factors, the number of Americans moving from the Northeast and Midwest to the South increased in 2016. The number of people moving south still is a small amount of the Baby Boomer population, and most people stay near their long-time residences after […]
A Danger of Index Investing
A reason many people invest in index funds is to reduce some risks. They don’t want the risks that their manager is too heavily invested in a stock that goes bad, for example. But there are special risks of index investing. One of those risks is due to changes in the index or how it […]
Why We Pick the Wrong Investment and Mutual Fund Managers
Maybe the reason most investment managers underperform the indexes is that investors, both individual and institutional investors, do a poor job of selecting managers. That’s the thesis of this blog post from Ben Hunt of Salient Investors. He says that most investment decisions are made by engaging in data mining first and them developing a […]
Politics Whipsaws the Markets
Interesting changes continue to occur in the markets, and they show the importance of balanced portfolios. Remember, after the election, the dollar and U.S. stocks rose. The rise in U.S. stocks was focused primarily in smaller, domestic-oriented companies. The larger U.S. companies with multinational activities suffered, while stocks of companies outside the United States also […]
Stock Market Valuations at 1997 Levels?
You’ve probably seen a number of reports indicating that U.S. stock indexes have valuations above or near historic highs. Here’s an alternate view. The Leuthold Group uses six measures to value U.S. stocks. In aggregate these measures show that stock valuations are around the levels of 1997. That could mean the current rally has about […]
