It wasn’t that long ago that people expected a common 60/40 investment portfolio (that is, 60% stocks and 40% bonds) to return close to 10% without a lot of volatility. Good luck getting that kind of return today. Why? It’s primarily because bond interest rates have hit their lowest point in generations and have remained…
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A couple of months ago I wrote about the consequences of investing at stock market highs. Or rather the lack of consequences. See https://www.cognizantwealth.com/2020/10/20/is-trying-to-time-the-market-worth-it/. Here’s some additional data demonstrating why the fear of investing when stocks are highly valued is misplaced. J.P. Morgan Wealth Management logged each of the days on which the S&P 500…
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A headline in the San Jose Mercury News caught my eye the other day: “State’s COVID-19 case rate explodes.” One would get the impression that half the population of California is sick with COVID. While the media does tend to overdramatize events, the data they reported is correct. The latest weekly rate of new infections…
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One key watchword in the investment world is diversification. I suspect that a large majority of investors would probably agree as to the importance of this approach for managing investment risk as well as the risk of running out of money in retirement. In our firm’s case we diversify not just across different asset classes…
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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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