Your Risk Tolerance May Be Harmful To Your Investment Health

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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Is Social Security In Jeopardy Post-Election?

Quite a number of seniors have approached me recently expressing anxiety about Donald Trump’s becoming the President-elect. Besides their fears about a second burst of inflation due to threatened higher tariffs as well as the existential threat to U.S. democratic norms and institutions based on his past actions, probably the number one concern involves Social…
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‘Tis the Season for Giving

For some, the end-of-year holidays engender thoughts of helping those less fortunate. For others, it’s a time to develop strategies to save on taxes. Charitable giving allows you to achieve both goals. However, what if you would like to help but don’t yet know to which charities you would like to contribute? One of the…
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