Why 2022 Was The Worst Investment Year In History

Why 2022 Was The Worst Investment Year In History

The year 2022 will go down in my book as the worst year in history for the U.S. investment markets. Why do I assert that so strongly? It’s because of what happened to bonds. The S&P 500 lost -18.1%, making 2022 merely the seventh worst year since 1926. But that wasn’t the main story. The…
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What A Difference A Year Makes!

If I had told you a year ago that Facebook’s stock price would drop by more than 70% in 2022, what would you have thought? That I’m crazy? Well, that’s exactly what occurred. From 2014 through 2021 an investment in Facebook (now Meta) would have cumulatively outperformed an investment in the S&P 500 by nearly…
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Five Investment Fallacies

Over my many years as a financial planner I’ve pretty much heard it all when it comes to investment beliefs and expectations. Here are five of the more interesting investment fallacies I’ve encountered. A stock split is a buy signal (false).  A stock split is nothing more than a company’s attempt to reduce the price…
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Is Active Management Better During Downturns?

There are two ways mutual funds can be managed. Actively-managed funds are those whose management teams attempt to generate a better return than the average return produced by the asset class in which the fund invests. Passively-managed funds simply try to achieve the average return. Because active funds require more analysts and/or complex software algorithms…
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How Bad Was The First Half Of 2022?

Pretty bad. I’m not referring to the war in Ukraine, or the surge in COVID infections, or supply chain disruptions, or the growing number of gun deaths in the U.S. I’m talking of course about the capital markets. The negative 21% performance of the S&P 500 during the six-month period ending on June 30th ranks…
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Why Some People Make Bad Financial Decisions

When I was a teenager I was a fan of science fiction. I recall reading one story about an attempted takeover of the world by a bad guy using warrior robots. His nefarious plan was thwarted by the good guy who discovered a way to cause the robots to self-destruct. The solution involved feeding conflicting…
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