Retirement Watch Weekly
Trusts to Beat State Taxes
People with income and wealth are more concerned these days with beating state taxes than federal taxes. That is especially trust for residents of states such as New York and California with very high tax rates. This Bloomberg.com piece shows how people who are considering asset sales, especially of businesses, are moving assets to trusts […]
Two Stories of Retirement
This long article from Bloomberg.com tells the story of a father a daughter. The father is in his 80s and living well off his pension and savings. His daughter is 61 and barely making it financially. The story is sad but tells the tale of how retirement can turn out very differently based on timing […]
A Bullish (But Not Too Bullish) Case for the Stock Market
For some time now I’ve been linking to arguments by stock bulls. I do this partly because my recommended portfolios have reasonable stock positions and partly because bearish arguments are easy too find and are overexposed. Investors need to see the opposing arguments. So, here’s a summary of bullish arguments from Barry Ritholz. As my […]
Looking for a Stock Market Correction
Barron’s drew a lot of attention over the weekend for its interview with Ned Davis. (Subscription might be required.) The highly-respected researcher said he anticipates a 20% correction coming in U.S. stocks. But his forecast isn’t as bad as the headline indicated. First, he doesn’t expect a long, deep bear market. He thinks when the […]
More Criticism About the Shiller P-E Ratio
About the only stock valuation measure that now indicates stocks are well above historic average values is the Shiller Price-Earnings ratio, known formally as the CAPE for Cyclically-Adjusted P-E ratio. It takes a 10-year inflation-adjusted average earnings to compute the P-E ratio instead of the last 12-months’ earnings or projected 12-months’ earnings. I’ve linked to […]
Investment Innovations – Smart BETA and Risk Factor Investing
James Montier of GMO takes apart the latest investment innovations. He says that the financial industry continues to come up with great ideas that it says will be great for investors, but in practice the innovations don’t stand up to their hype. In this essay he takes a look at smart beta, risk factor investing, […]
Helping the Grandkids with Financial Literacy
One of the periodic features in Retirement Watch is focused on ways to help grandkids. I rarely see anything about that in other publications, though I know that a number of grandparents regularly look for ways to help their grnadkids. That’s why I was attracted by this article from The New York Times. It points […]
The Rational Stock Market Crash
One of the better interviews with Eugene Fama, promoter of the efficient market theory and co-winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics, recently was in Fortune. It does a good job of tracking Fama’s thinking and how it changed over the years. As Fama says, a lot of people misrepresent his work and think […]
