Could Your Investment Fund Be Terminated?

Could Your Investment Fund Be Terminated?

The short answer is yes. If a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) becomes unprofitable, fund company management may choose to shut it down. And given how competitive the fund market is, with well over ten thousand funds available today, this happens more often that you might think. What are the risk factors? One of…
Read more

The Value Of A Financial Plan

In its 2024 Modern Wealth Study, brokerage firm Charles Schwab & Co. asked some 1200 Americans to grade themselves regarding a few personal finance questions. Over a third of all respondents gave themselves a grade of D or F on the level of savings they’ve accumulated and on their preparedness for retirement. Interestingly the grades…
Read more

The Consequences Of Investing At The Worst Time

I previously wrote about the impossibility of successfully beating the S&P 500 through market timing. But many people are still afraid to invest in stocks, especially when the market is setting new highs, for fear of buying just before a major market drop. If you can’t time the markets, what can you do to avoid…
Read more

Why Doesn’t Market Timing Work?

Of all the schemes investors have come up with to try to avoid losses and/or to beat the market, market timing is probably one of the most seductive. It seems obvious that when something significant occurs in the U.S. economy or elsewhere in the world, you’d expect the market to react accordingly. Wouldn’t that be…
Read more

Why Does The Media Prefer The Dow?

Tune in to any news channel on TV or pick up any newspaper and the one U.S. stock market benchmark that you will inevitably find reported is the Dow. Yet the Dow – more formally called the Dow-Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) – is not especially representative of the broad stock market. Or for that matter…
Read more

Some Facts About Dementia

Long-term care planning is an important part of overall retirement planning. Seniors face the uncertainty of a possible need for help with some aspect of their daily living activities due to accident or physical or mental health decline. And the latter problem is disturbingly common. According to the University of Michigan one in ten adults…
Read more