From the highs reached in early spring, the S&P 500 is now down roughly 12%. International stocks (MSCI EAFE) and small caps (Russell 2000) are down even more, as both have fallen roughly 17% from their 52-week highs.

Last week I looked at how duration affects bond market returns and volatility (see Understanding Bond Market Duration & Volatility) and received a number of questions and comments about intermediate-term bonds. The conclusion many readers came to from my post is that intermediate maturity bonds are the sweet spot in terms of balancing out risk…

If I had the power to go back in time and tell the past version of myself from ten or fifteen years ago about Twitter I don’t think I would be able to explain it to myself. It’s one of those things that really makes no sense until you get a feel for it and…

“Simplicity has a way of improving performance through enabling us to better understand what we are doing.” – Charlie Munger Tren Griffin tells a great joke in his new Charlie Munger book that describes the needless complexity many intelligent people try to inject into the decision-making process: Too many people take a situation and create complexity…

One of the most important things you can do as an investors is focus on what you control. This is true when building a portfolio or investment plan, but it also concerns how you think about what’s going to happen in the future. Setting realistic expectations is one of the more under-appreciated aspects of surviving…

I’m a huge fan of standing on the shoulders of giants to learn as much as I can from others. When I started this website a couple years ago one of the first things I did was study the writing styles and websites of some of my favorite blogs. The two that I spent the…

In the early 1900s, Thomas Edison’s factory that housed the majority of his many inventions and projects was destroyed by a fire. At age 67, it contained his life’s work. The next morning, while searching through the rubble, Edison told his son, “There is great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank…

I received some great feedback on my post from my post earlier this week on the challenges involved with beating the market (see: Something Most Investors Simply Cannot Accept). But some people seemed to misinterpret my message. The point of showing the statistics on the underperformance of active management is not necessarily to convince someone…

It’s been forever and a day since the Fed last raised rates so I keep seeing headlines or hear people say some variation of the following: There’s a huge group of young traders and investors who have NEVER lived through a rising rate environment. There are other examples people use as well — a highly inflationary…

All eyes are on the Fed this week as everyone is focused on whether or not they’ll finally raise short-term interest rates. The game of will they/won’t they has been playing out for some time now as it’s been nearly a decade since the Fed last raised their benchmark Fed Funds Rate.