A few weeks ago I wrote about The Psychology of Sitting in Cash and a reader left a great comment about how he has tried to solve this problem in his own portfolio using the financial crisis as an example:

One of the most heavily debated topics in retirement planning is figuring out the safe withdrawal rate. The general rule of thumb is 4% of your portfolio, but if you have the bulk of your assets in tax-deferred accounts such as a 401(k) or IRA, the government makes it easier on retirees to figure out…

I’ve been writing a lot lately about personal finances because it seems like every week another report comes out showing how ill-prepared people are when it comes to their financial situation. My friend James Osborne asked me if I really think people can be taught to live within their means. I do think it’s possible,…

Just when I think things are slowly turning in favor of the financial consumer, I’m reminded of Wall Street’s old ways of doing things like putting fees, profits and margins ahead of client interests. There were three things I saw this week that showed Wall Street’s old guard isn’t going to go down without a…

“Risk is the permanent loss of capital, never a number.” – James Montier Risk management is something every investor realized they needed following the 2007-2009 financial crisis. The same thing will happen when the next bear market hits. But too many investors learn the wrong lessons or take misguided advice about how to approach risk….

Like many I watched the Master’s golf tournament this past weekend. On Saturday, Phil Mickelson finished the day five under par to set himself up in third place going into the final round. For some reason, in Mickelson’s post-round interview, the CBS analyst asked Phil what his wardrobe plans were for the next day. Mickelson said he…

One of the common misconceptions I’m starting to hear from investors is that because we’re in a low interest rate environment, stocks either can’t or won’t fall very far from these levels. This is the TINA (there is no alternative) argument that says because over the longer-term bonds returns will be much lower from today’s…

Dean Mathey was a successful investor who served as chairman of the investment committee at Princeton from the 1920s through the 1940s. Late in his career he privately published a book called Fifty Years of Wall Street that included a section with nine lessons learned during the Great Depression, It was reprinted in the book The Investor’s…

In August of 2007, we had one of the first truly large market dislocations that preceded the financial crisis. All at once, a large group of the biggest quantitatively managed hedge funds all started to get crushed at the same time. In just a couple of weeks, strategies that had worked brilliantly for years stopped…

There’s an old saying that stress is the difference between where you are and where you would like to be. If that’s the case there are a lot of people still trying to get to where they would like to be when it comes to their finances.