Golden Advice That Suits Any Investor
I receive a lot of press releases, but few are as useful as the one that hit my inbox on Friday. It arrived after the markets closed, so I wasn’t able to act on it, but I’m sharing it with you today i [...]
Why More Choice Can Be Bad For Investors
We’re accustomed to thinking of choice as a good thing. But behavioural economists now understand that too many options can lead people to make poor decisions—or sometimes no decision at all. In her o [...]
Why Passive Investors Aren’t Really Lazy
A couple of weeks ago, Balance Junkie wrote a post called Why This Is No Market for Couch Potatoes. The main argument of the post—one that has been made many times before—is that passive investing is [...]
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
I’ve never been shy about criticizing actively managed mutual funds, but I’m starting to think this debate is getting old. More than that, I feel like it’s driving a wedge between people who should be [...]
Ask the Spud: Can You Time the Markets?
Q. Have you ever done any calculations into the optimal time to purchase index funds or ETFs based on broad market indicators? I’m essentially talking about buying during market dips and corrections, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Does Rebalancing Boost Returns?
Rebalancing your portfolio has two potential benefits. The first is that it helps control risk by keeping your asset allocation more or less consistent. The other advantage—assuming you have the disci [...]
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 [...]
