Investments

“Has the focus on expense ratios caused the public to lose focus of more critical financial measures, such as performance?” Actually, expense ratios and 12b-1 fees should get even more attention than they are getting. Here’s why.

It is common for investors to be surprised by movements in their portfolios, but it is harder to determine if these movements mean that anything should be done.

The real return of the stock market going forward is often debated.

The Marotta Investment Committee typically builds portfolios with average expense ratios of about 0.24%.

If you own these fund families with your Ameriprise Advisor, perhaps you should consider switching to a fee-only financial advisor.

There is always an excuse to delay doing something that involves risk. They close the show reminding you not to wait. Invest now.

Neither the dire pessimism at the start of the Bull Market of the 1990s nor the blind optimism at the end were warranted.

Portfolio construction is extremely important to achieving your long-term goals. Don’t risk those goals by assuming that individual stock-picking is a superior strategy.

Knowing that rebalancing boosts returns is useless unless you have the time, discipline, and nerve to follow through and actually execute the trades.

“Buy on the dips” is a good strategy only because of the first word.

Market corrections are so common as to be largely ignored by long term investors.

Schwab’s presentation is designed to show a real time accounting of your portfolio’s value. It is not designed to report on your portfolio’s performance.

To make the strategy of jumping in and out of the markets successful would require a precision only achieved by luck.

Ten years after our original article we review how sage the advice was.

Run, do not walk, away from outrageous claims.

Any movement out of the stock market can cause you to miss future market appreciation.

There are as many as 60 different stock markets around the world.

There are always those who discount the power of having a diversified portfolio in favor of putting everything in whatever is going to go up the most.

There is very little news that helps us reach our life goals or impacts our lives in a positive way.

For investors who began working in 1970 and retired 45 years later in 2015, cash lost 83.83% of its purchasing power.

Any decision to differ from the cap-weighted global default is a choice.

Predicting future inflation is difficult at best.

U.S. Large Cap is currently valued at the historical average again after taking into account the expected increase in corporate earnings.

Truly diversified portfolios don’t move in sync with the Dow.

It is important to remaining disciplined during volatile markets.

“Think of a stock as a machine that generates cash every few months.” Smaller companies that you have never heard of usually have a better return than the better known larger companies.

This Bear market has one of the largest single day losses.

Although volatility is often unwelcome by investors, it can provide profitable returns.

2017 was such a good year for the stock markets that it set a record.

A question from our readers, “Should I choose to have dividends reinvested or should I receive them in cash and then reinvest them myself?”

Or do they go up indefinitely, albeit interrupted by some significant corrections?

I have gradually been writing a series of articles on each Bear Market to show how quickly they correct and how high the subsequent Bull Market rises.

See how much market return you lost to poor fund choices and how much you lost to high expense ratios.

Let’s use some of the publicly available information about HubSpot, Inc. (HUBS) to see what factors the stock shares.

When the client asked my mother, “What is the quickest way to double my money?” she did not hesitate before she answered.

In retrospect, Financial-Planning’s slide show was another bit of distraction from the real work of building brilliant portfolios for long term investing.

Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) have at least a dozen significant benefits over mutual funds and only a few disadvantages.

There is no such thing as a risk-free, guaranteed investment. Everything has risks.

Bear markets are often a precipitous decline followed by a slower and steadier recovery. Volker’s Bear is rare in that a slow and steady decline was followed by a sharp precipitous recovery.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) changed the rules and required all financial institutions to move pricing their money market from a stable $1.00 price per shares to a floating net asset value.

Do mutual funds with 5-star Morningstar ratings have better future returns?

Politics matters less to our financial success than the ordinary decisions we face every day.

In anticipation of adjusting our yearly gone-fishing portfolios, I reviewed the performance of five US large-cap Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs).

Bonds had positive returns for the year despite returns peaking at the end of July and falling for the rest of the year.

In 2016, Energy and Materials had some of the best returns of the year.

2016 was a good year for stocks in general with a number of noteworthy details. Resource stocks performed the best despite being the worst-performing asset class in 2015.

In 2016, the average return of the best investment products of the Freedom Six outperformed the Vanguard FTSE Developed Markets ETF by 6.75%.

The S&P 500 had another good year, ending up 11.96%. The S&P 500, however, only represents half of the US Stock asset class, and Small- and Mid-Cap stocks performed even better.

It is difficult in investing theory to determine which narratives have the appropriate underlying evidence to support them and which narratives are not worth following. Often it is necessary to be both a mathematician and a skeptic to filter out what is even worth considering.

“I am no longer an advocate of elaborate techniques of security analysis in order to find superior value opportunities.”