From last weekend’s Barron’s: With nearly half of the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 paying a dividend yield greater than the 10-year Treasury bond’s recent 2.11%, investing in dividend-oriented mutual funds would seem like a good idea. But many funds promise more than they deliver, and investors are apt to be disappointed with…

“I’m only rich because I know when I’m wrong. I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes.” – George Soros One of the worst things about the markets is the fact investors get instant feedback on their decisions. Any time you make a purchase or a sale you can check up-to-the-minute price quotes to see if…

Rory Sutherland is Vice Chairman at Ogilvy & Mather, an international advertising agency whose founder, David Ogilvy, is said to be the inspiration for the Don Draper character on Mad Men. Sutherland is an expert on behavioral economics and human psychology. Sales and marketing departments were utilizing behavioral psychology on unsuspecting customers decades before it…

I’ve made the argument lately that I think even if bonds perform poorly from their current low yields that they could still serve a purpose as a portfolio diversifier (see here and here). Many readers have told me that, even though they understand the arguments I’m making, it doesn’t make sense to hold bonds in…

The following is a passage from The Quants by Scott Patterson: Meanwhile, a fund with ties to Nassim Taleb, Universa Investments, was also hitting on all cylinders. Funds run by Universa, managed and owned by Taleb’s longtime collaborator Mark Spitznagel, gained as much as 150 percent in 2008 on its bet that the market is far…

Bond investors are in constant fear of a replay of the 1970s when interest rates exploded higher in concert with sky high inflation, a double whammy of bad news for fixed income securities. But it doesn’t make much sense to compare the current set-up with that scenario. By 1970 the 10 year treasury yield was…

J. Lukas Neely from the Endless Rise Investor has a nice piece up that highlights the mistakes of 13 different investors and how they went about fixing them. Neely put together a really great line-up of people for this including William Bernstein, David Merkel and Tobias Carlisle to name a few.

I always like to apply the process of elimination when making financial decisions because figuring out what to avoid is where most of the value can be found in a long-term process.

The USA Today ran a story about a recent college grad who is saving and investing aggressively with the hopes of early retirement. He’s 23 now and would like to retire by age 40. Here’s more on his lofty goal: Frank’s goal is to save $900,000 by age 40. To make that happen, he wants…

From 1836-1928 the U.S. averaged a recession every 2.1 years. This included seven depressions (they were actually called panics back then) that led to an average contraction of 29% in business activity. Part of this had to do with the fact that the U.S. was on the gold standard at the time, but it’s also true that…