First of all, congratulations! Your Apple holding grew 77% last year. As if that weren’t astounding enough, Tesla’s stock price soared 720%! The gains you experienced in either of these stocks in such a short period of time are truly record-breaking! I’m not interested in debating whether you were an investment genius or merely a…
Read more

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…
Read more

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…
Read more

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…
Read more

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…
Read more