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Imagine you are the unluckiest investor on the planet. You tried to do all the right things. You used a highly-diversified stock market index fund for your investments rather than trying to pick individual stocks. You received a $10,000 bonus at work thirteen times over the last eighty years (you are a long-lived workaholic) and…
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As part of his bid for a second presidential term, one of Donald Trump’s assertions is that he is responsible for the greatest stock market gain of any president. Putting aside his usual hyperbole, has the stock market in fact done better under him than under past presidents? And more interestingly, can we use historical…
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A key role of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is to protect the public not only from fraudulent investments but also from misunderstanding the risk associated with otherwise legal ones. The Securities Act of 1933 promulgated the initial rules that publicly traded securities were required to follow in order to help ensure their investment…
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After a big market downturn, when things have settled down and volatility has moderated to something resembling normal, you may find yourself holding numerous investments whose current values are well below the amounts you had originally paid for them. Your inclination might be to hold on to them until their values come back to at…
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Probably everyone these days knows who Bernie Madoff is. He “made off” (pun intended) with about $50 billion by scamming at least 5,000 people. Unfortunately there are many other unscrupulous financial professionals who, because their chicanery is on a much smaller scale, tend to fly under the regulatory scrutiny radar. And when their fraudulent activity…
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