Ben Carlson

Gathering Investment Lessons From the Headlines

Just as everyone projected, interest rates have fallen off a cliff since peaking at more than 3.2% last fall: Just kidding. Basically no one saw this coming: The decline has caught nearly everyone by surprise. In January, none of the 69 economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal predicted yields would fall below 2.5% by…

Some Advice For New Investors

In today’s edition, Michael Batnick, Ben Carlson and Downtown Josh Brown answer a very simple question that doesn’t necessarily have a simple answer. “Where should a new investor begin?

Why Do We Need Inflation?

A reader asks: Why do we need inflation? This is a good question because wouldn’t we all be better off if prices were to fall? It’s not always that easy.

David Swensen & a Target Date Fund Walk Into a Bar

Morningstar’s John Rekenthaler shared a wild statistic about Yale’s endowment fund in a piece published yesterday: The fund’s reputation, however, owes to its earlier accomplishments. In the 10 years from mid-2008 through mid-2018 (the latter being the date of the fund’s most recent report), Yale gained an annualized 7.4%. During that same time period, the…