The current retirement system leaves much to be desired. There are a decent number of people taking advantage of tax-deferred savings vehicles but it’s a fairly small number that ever reaches millionaire status in these accounts. In Fidelity’s defined contribution plan, there are roughly 157,000 people who have saved at least $1 million in their 401(k)….

Trend-following is a strategy that got a lot of attention following the financial crisis. It’s something my views have evolved on over the years. There are a lot of misconceptions out there about what the typical trend-following signals actually mean. There’s much more nuance involved than simply looking at the moving average of the price…

I do a lot of reading and research during the week which brings me into contact with lots of graphs, charts and tables. Here are four that stood out this week along with some comments. This chart from Goldman Sachs (h/t Sam Ro) shows how ownership of the U.S. stock market has evolved over the…

The S&P 500 hasn’t had a negative return for nine years now. There’s been some volatility in 2018 but overall things have been going pretty well for a while now. When things are going well in the markets it can become easier for investors to focus on the minutiae. Instead of focusing on the big…

The Fed has now raised interest rates 6 times in the past 3 years. Savers, it appears, aren’t being punished nearly as much as they were in the past. But holders of long-term bonds could be punished if those rates ever decide to join the party. Two-year treasures have gone from 20 basis points or so…

One of the oldest tricks in the book for good financial salespeople (and those in any industry really) is to talk over people’s heads using jargon that makes it hard for others to understand them. Jargon is the often the preferred method of the financial community to make themselves sound more intelligent. ‘Just trust me, I…

I wrote the following piece for Bloomberg a couple weeks before the start of the stock market correction that saw stocks fall 10% or so. If you’ve been listening to the podcast, we went over some of the answers to these questions but this was still far too short of a time frame to make…

The stock market got interesting again this week. Volatility is back after having gone missing for the past 18 months or so. I saw the following words spewed across the financial media this week: turbulence, fear, pain, panic, distress, agony. It’s still a little early for all of that. As of the close on Thursday,…

Useful benchmarking is one of the hardest things to do for institutional investors because of the way they structure their portfolios. Take a look latest asset allocations for college endowment funds from the annual study done by the National Association of College University Business Officers (NACUBO): Alternative investments are now the biggest allocation for all…

There’s never been a better time to be an investor. Expenses are coming down. It’s cheaper than ever to trade. Strategies that were once reserved for large institutional funds at exorbitant fees are now available to every investor through low-cost mutual funds and ETFs. The sheer amount of data and computing power available has completely leveled…