Review: The House That Bogle Built
In 1951, a Princeton University student wrote a thesis about the mutual fund industry. “Funds can make no claim to superiority over the investment averages,” wrote the scholar, who would go on to crea [...]
Letting You In On a Big Secret
Joel Greenblatt has a sense of humour—I’ll grant him that. In The Big Secret for the Small Investor (Wiley, 2011), he pokes fun at the crass title of his previous book, You Can Be a Stock Market Geniu [...]
Where Do Returns Come From?
You don’t need a lot of mathematical horsepower to be a Couch Potato investor. Indeed, simplicity is one of the strategy’s virtues: just keep your costs low, diversify widely, and stick to the plan. B [...]
The Making of a Couch Potato
I know very few people who began their investing lives as Couch Potatoes. Most started out in mutual funds or as stock pickers and, somewhere along the line, realized they were overpaying and underper [...]
Can Your Funds Outperform Over a Lifetime?
Advocates of active management admit that only a minority of mutual funds will outperform their benchmarks, but they argue there is still a significant probability of success. According to the data Ri [...]
Beating the Market Is a New Idea
Today we take it for granted that virtually all mutual funds and stock pickers are trying to earn higher returns than the overall market — or at least earn the same returns with lower risk. But Rick F [...]
How to Lower Your Rebalancing Costs
Last week I looked at why you should rebalance your portfolio, and considered the question of how often to do it. The frequency with which you rebalance often comes down to cost. If you’re using index [...]
How Often Should You Rebalance?
In my previous post, I looked at the reasons why investors should occasionally rebalance their portfolios. When a portfolio contains both fixed-income and equities, rebalancing is mostly about risk ma [...]
Why Rebalance Your Portfolio?
An important part of the indexing strategy is that you occasionally rebalance your portfolio back to its target asset allocation. I get a lot of questions about rebalancing, so I felt it was time to p [...]
Debunking Dividend Myths: Part 6
This post is the sixth (and last) in a series exploring the myths and misunderstandings about dividend investing. The goal of the series is to argue that many investors following a dividend-focused st [...]
