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…
Read more

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…
Read more

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…
Read more

There has been much speculation recently as to when the Fed will raise interest rates.  The concern is that volatility in bond prices will spike and investors that have become used to bonds as a stable source of income will freak out.  If you haven’t started to worry about this, is now the time to…
Read more

Are you paying your broker or the manager of your actively-managed mutual fund to generate a higher return for you than you think you can get from lower-cost passively-managed index funds?  According to Larry Swedroe and Andrew Berkin, authors of a new book entitled “The Incredible Shrinking Alpha,” you’re wasting your money. The term alpha…
Read more