One of the appeals of having a portfolio of stocks and bonds is their tendency to move in opposite directions, especially when stocks fall. In fact, there have only been eight times that stocks and bonds both fell for consecutive months and only once did they both fall for three consecutive months. The data above…

The S&P 500 is now up 270% from the lows made in March 2009, but how many people were actually able to harvest those gains? In the 89 months since the market bottomed, investors have had had a barrage of distractions thrown at them. From the Sequestration to the Fiscal Cliff and from China to…

One of the most common ways to distort the truth in investing is to move the goal posts. For example,  Commodities are a great investment; From 2000 through the middle of 2008, they returned 231%, compounding at 15% a year. Over that time the S&P 500 earned nothing. See, by cherry picking the data, you’re not…

The first investing book I ever read was The Intelligent Investor, the one that is updated with Jason Zweig’s commentary. And since that time, I have read and learned more from Jason Zweig than anybody else alive. But it wasn’t until recently that I first read his book Your Money & Your Brain. I wasn’t…

After five years and seventy different verses, Leonard Cohen finally released Hallelujah in 1984. The mega hit that we know today came onto the scene with a deafening silence, it was an absolute failure. Cohen was performing a few years later, and musician John Cale, who was in the audience, was enthralled by the song….

Fifty-seven thousand, five hundred and twelve. That’s the number of global funds launched between January 2005 and 2013. Just to be clear, that is not the number of funds in existence over that period, it’s the number of brand new funds. This mind blowing number comes from an excellent new Morningstar study, The Rise and Fall…

Everybody who ever invested a dime in the market had a mentor. And if they didn’t have one when they started, it probably didn’t take long before they went searching for help. Jesse Livermore said “there is nothing new on Wall Street,” and because there is nothing new, lessons learned 10, 20, and even 100…

There are few things that active and passive investors agree upon, but you won’t find too many people on either side of the aisle who supports closet indexers. Pretty much everyone is in full agreement that mutual funds that look like their benchmark and charge high fees should disappear yesterday. If you are going to…

The amount of time between the scary events taking place in our country and all over the world seems to be narrowing at a rapid pace. The human tragedies that the world is experiencing are unthinkable and beyond sad to watch. But looking at the market’s response to crisis, we learn that no financial decisions,…

William Bernstein has an interesting stat on the really, really long-term returns of stocks, in his book Deep Risk. The second half of the twentieth century was extraordinarily kind to global investors, but the first was not. Brian Taylor of Global Financial Data Inc. notes that during the tragic half century between 1899 and 1949,…