In a research note late last year, AQR’s Cliff Asness described what long-term means when it comes to the markets (emphasis mine): Basically, we know a lot more about volatility than the level of returns over the short term (and remember five years is still pretty short-term). I think we all know this already, and…

Paul Sullivan of the New York Times had an excellent article this week that concerns how people really think about finances and the impact they can have on our lives. In the piece he talks to Barnaby Riedel, a researcher who’s been trying to figure out how money and investments fit into a person’s overall financial…

Morgan Housel wrote a great piece this week called What’s Wrong With Finance where he laid out four problems that stem from the fact that finance is strange in so many ways. Here were his four problems: Problem No. 1: Extreme bias toward action, mostly due to exploitative fee arrangements. Problem No. 2: An overuse…

Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio had everyone in the financial industry talking this week when he put out a client note on the potential risks from the Fed raising rates too quickly. Specifically, Dalio made reference to the 1937 scenario where the Fed acted prematurely in the aftermath of the Great Depression which sent the economy and…

The National Institute on Retirement released a study last week that further reinforced the idea that a large majority of people are struggling to save for retirement. This was the stat that really grabbed my attention: Eighty percent of working households have less that one year’s worth of their annual income saved. Even scarier is the…

The latest SPIVA mutual fund scorecard was released last week and it was more of the same from the past few reports — the majority of active mutual funds underperformed their respective benchmarks over the past 1, 3, 5 and 10 year periods. These numbers are well-documented at this point so I’ll spare you the…

A few weeks ago I urged readers to get used to the fact that recessions are a fact of life that they need to get used to every 4-10 years or so. I shared the following table with each recession since the late-1920s: The next logical step from here is the see how stocks performed in…

There are now 10,000 baby boomers retiring a day in the U.S. And the projections say another 10,000 are likely to retire every single day for the next 19 years. By my count, that’s roughly 70 million in total. Future retirees are starting to come to grips with this reality. I get at least a…

William Bernstein joined a number of prominent investors by offering a sobering outlook for the future performance prospects on a traditional U.S. stock/bond portfolio: ETF.com: As you take measure of markets, what are the key takeaways right now? Bill Bernstein: Well, I would say that the expected return of a balanced portfolio is the lowest…

A reader asks: I took one piece of advice from a close friend that the market was too high and that I should go to cash and wait for a correction. I am still waiting. How do I proceed from the position I have of feet embedded in concrete? Since I started this website, this is by…