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…
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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…
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Imagine you are the unluckiest investor on the planet. You tried to do all the right things. You used a highly-diversified stock market index fund for your investments rather than trying to pick individual stocks. You received a $10,000 bonus at work thirteen times over the last eighty years (you are a long-lived workaholic) and…
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As part of his bid for a second presidential term, one of Donald Trump’s assertions is that he is responsible for the greatest stock market gain of any president. Putting aside his usual hyperbole, has the stock market in fact done better under him than under past presidents? And more interestingly, can we use historical…
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A key role of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is to protect the public not only from fraudulent investments but also from misunderstanding the risk associated with otherwise legal ones. The Securities Act of 1933 promulgated the initial rules that publicly traded securities were required to follow in order to help ensure their investment…
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After a big market downturn, when things have settled down and volatility has moderated to something resembling normal, you may find yourself holding numerous investments whose current values are well below the amounts you had originally paid for them. Your inclination might be to hold on to them until their values come back to at…
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