Surprisingly Legal Tax Deductions

Surprisingly Legal Tax Deductions

It’s currently tax season again. Last year at this time I reported on unusual bogus tax deductions that various miscreants tried to get away with. This year I thought I’d provide the opposite: deductions that you might be surprised to discover are legal. Thanks to TurboTax and AARP for the information! The IRS allows numerous…
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Are ETFs Better Than Mutual Funds?

You’re probably familiar with mutual funds. They are arguably the most common type of investment choice for 401(k) and other retirement accounts. But ever since the first exchange-traded fund (ETF) appeared in 1993, investments into ETFs have been steadily overtaking those into traditional mutual funds. Why is this happening? Are ETFs better than mutual funds?…
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Your Risk Tolerance May Be Harmful To Your Investment Health

How can that be? Risk tolerance is the amount of risk that each person is comfortable taking with their investment choices. Just because yours is different from someone else’s doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Or does it? To better understand the issue, it helps to recognize that there are actually two ways that risk – as…
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The Futility Of Predicting Stock Market Returns

One year ago I wrote about the stock market predictions that major investment banks and brokerages seem to feel is a necessary part of their marketing (see https://www.cognizantwealth.com/2024/01/10/a-review-of-2023-stock-market-predictions/ ). Why they spend the time, effort, and money to come up with these guesses is a mystery to me, particularly because those predictions are almost always…
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Index Investing Requires Some Thought

At the turn of the 21st century the majority of mutual funds that invested in equities (stocks) utilized what is called active management. That is, fund managers chose some subset of all publicly-traded companies in which to invest and also decided when to rebalance the various positions held in the fund. The purpose was to…
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Can Trump Bring Prices Back Down?

Voters have many reasons for choosing a particular candidate during elections. According to a post-election survey at navigatorresearch.org, one of the biggest reasons Trump won was voter dissatisfaction with the economy under Biden, particularly the higher prices consumers had to endure as a result of the Covid-induced inflation. They seemed to have expected that Biden/Harris…
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