You’ve probably heard or read that you should periodically rebalance your investment portfolio.  That means selling assets from asset classes that currently exceed your target allocation and buying more in asset classes that lag, in order to maintain your target allocation over time.  The presumed benefit is higher returns, reduced portfolio risk, or both.  Unfortunately,…
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With interest rates at historical lows right now, the question facing bond investors is whether to buy individual bonds or bond mutual funds. Since bonds will drop in price when interest rates rise, common wisdom suggests that if you purchase an individual bond and hold it to maturity, you are guaranteed to get the full…
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According to Wikipedia, “Socially responsible investing (SRI), also known as sustainable, socially conscious, green, or ethical investing, is any investment strategy which seeks to consider both financial return and social good.” The idea of promoting social good through investment selection has been around for a long time, but gained worldwide prominence as part of the…
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With housing prices and rental rates reaching unprecedented heights in the Bay Area right now, it’s tempting to grab any spare cash you have and throw it at the first condo or house you can afford to buy. Indeed, the majority of residential rental property owners I’ve met over the last five years were non-professional…
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Despite the large number of mutual funds and ETFs that invest in equities, there are really only three primary strategies each of them follows. Let’s say you want to invest in the asset class comprising large cap U.S. stocks, whose benchmark is the S&P 500 index. You can invest in a fund that includes all…
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In 1989 author Michael Lewis, in his book Liar’s Poker, revealed that the role of a bond trader at Salomon Brothers, the biggest trading firm on Wall Street during the 1980s, was “to call someone he doesn’t know and try to sell that person something he doesn’t want.”  Dan Wheeler, the founder of Dimensional Fund…
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