“You can’t predict. You can prepare.” – Howard Marks I received a decent amount of comments and questions on my recent post on the 60/40 portfolio. Some were constructive, but others missed the point so I thought I would take the time to clarify a few things. These are my thoughts on using historical data to…

“Money is not the most important thing in the world. Love is. Fortunately, I love money.” – Jackie Mason

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” -Albert Einstein I feel that one of the greatest signs of intelligence is the ability to explain complex topics in a plain and simple manner that people can understand. This is what makes Warren Buffett such a genius. That’s not to say that…

“Scale coupled with automation can basically bring costs down to zero.” – Herbert Moore Two articles grabbed my attention this week that highlight the fact that things continue to improve for individual investors, specifically on the cost front. The first one came from Larry Swedroe on Seeking Alpha.  Swedroe reviewed a recent academic study on…

“Diversification is always working; sometimes you’ll like the results and sometimes you won’t.” – Larry Swedroe Traders get to use cool sayings like, “let your winners run but cut your losers quickly.” Long-term investors need to periodically do the exact opposite and sell their winners to buy their losers. Mean reversion rests on the premise of…

“It is high time for costs to be recognized as a crucial factor in determining the future returns that funds earn.” – John Bogle These are the Vanguard fund performance results against their peer group by category through December 31, 2013 over various time frames: You can see that Vanguard funds outperform the majority of…

“Don’t do something; just stand there.” – Jack Bogle

“Understand that just as it is complicated to make things simple, it is simple to make things complicated as well.” – Anonymous

“Think like an investor and not like an economist or politician.” – Richard Bernstein According to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), since 1857, the U.S. has experienced 33 recessions that lasted an average of 17 months. That means that there’s been a recession in one out of every five years, on average. In…

“Hire an advisor because it is very hard to see the errors in your own behavior & it is easy to see the errors in someone else’s behavior.  Very few people need to hire advisors because of the size of their calculators.  They need an advisor to help them behave correctly.” – Carl Richards