I’ve spent the past few weeks skimming all sorts of 2017 market outlooks. Lots of people are looking for answers, but most investors aren’t even bothering to ask the right questions. I don’t know what’s going to happen so here are 10 questions I’m pondering going into the new year: 1. Is President Trump going…

“The first product of self-knowledge is humility.” – Flannery O’Connor By the end of the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman were two of the most respected men in America. They were the architects of the Union’s victory over the Confederate army. However, after the war, they took very different paths. Both were…

Here are my 2016 Financial Market Awards winners. The Worst Start to a Year Ever: The S&P 500 through its first 28 days this year Michael Batnick put this one together for our latest client call: It didn’t last… Best Streak: The S&P 500 is up 8 years in a row. This one is a repeat winner….

Being the “investment guy” in the family means I’m often approached during the holidays or at parties with questions about the markets. My most recent question was about a sector fund investment and its prospects going forward. I’m sure you could come up with any number of intelligent-sounding narratives to describe which sectors will perform…

“If you don’t know when you’re wrong, you certainly don’t know when you’re right.” – Adam Robinson I love finding new ways to explain old topics. The world is constantly changing but the basic principles are almost always the same. So whenever I read or hear a novel explanation of an age-old topic I’m always…

Last week in my 20 Rules of Personal Finance post I talked about the importance of getting the big purchases right: 8. Get the big purchases right. I know I shouldn’t be so judgmental but whenever I see $50-$70k SUVs on the road or enormous McMansions the first thing that pops into my head is, “I…

A reader asks: Have you ever written anything about getting a late start to saving for retirement? My wife and I are in our early 50s and have very little saved. What do we do? This reader is definitely not alone in this situation. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, around half of all…

These were my favorite books I read in 2016: NON-FICTION Smarter, Faster, Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business Duhigg discusses the science behind motivation and the systems that can actually help people change their behavior which goes far beyond the typical lifehacks and shortcuts. He shows why motivation is a skill…

Meb Faber asked a bunch of us bloggers to give him our top 3-5 most read blog posts of the year. I looked back at my trusty Google Analytics for the first time in a while and discovered that two of my top three in terms of readership were personal finance-related posts. I’ve always said…

“The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns.” -Benjamin Graham Investors spend a lot of time trying to figure out what returns the markets will give them in the future. It feels like a weekly occurrence that I see another fund firm or well-known investor trot out their forecasts…