Most Investors follow the crowd down the path to comfortable mediocrity. – David F. Swensen Somewhere (I am not saying where) there is a picture of me at a high school dance, circa 1980. My hair is longish and parted in the middle. I am wearing a powder blue polyester suit with airplane wing collars…
The American Mosquito Control Association declares, “Mosquitoes cause more human suffering than any other organism.” Wikipedia quantifies this suffering, stating “Nearly 700 million people get a mosquito borne illness each year resulting in greater than one million deaths.” Those who escape the worst consequences of mosquitoes still don’t get off unscathed. Mosquitoes have ruined countless…
In the past I have written about “Save More Tomorrow,”, an innovative plan that uses the principles of behavioral finance to help people increase their retirement savings over time. Here is a link to my prior post, titled “Use the ‘Wimpy’ Savings Plan to Increase Your Savings Rate“. I recently ran across an interesting TED talk by Shlomo Benartzti,…
If you are a parent, and have had a child achieve the milestone of getting a driver’s license, you know how expensive it is to insure teenage drivers. If you have had both a boy and girl reach this milestone you probably also noticed that it was significantly more expensive to insure the boy than…
I have written before about Warren Buffett’s million dollar bet with New York asset manager Protégé Partners that the Vanguard S&P 500 Index Fund, over a period of ten years, would beat a collection of hedge funds selected by Protégé. The proceeds from the bet will go to charity. The bet was made in 2008…
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs… Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it… – Rudyard Kipling from his poem If In his classic book The Four Pillars of Investing, William Bernstein wrote, “The major premise of economics is that investors are rational and will always…
I advocate investing in low-cost index funds as opposed to trying to find actively managed funds that outperform the market. Many studies have shown that, over time, this will almost surely give you the best results. So how did this method work in 2014? The January/February issue of Money Magazine had some interesting statistics. The…
One of the most important financial decisions you will make is how to invest the money you are putting in your 401(k). Target date funds are the default option for most retirement plans, but in a prior post I showed that target date funds aren’t the best option for most people. If target date funds…
Stock markets have had a rough couple of weeks to start the New Year. They recovered a bit Friday but they are still down considerably since January 1. Although the year is young the Dow has already suffered several triple-digit losses, sometimes on consecutive days. When this happens people become restless and wonder what they…
William of Occam was a Franciscan friar, theologian, and philosopher who lived in England from 1287 to 1347. He is known to us today mostly from the problem solving principle he formulated known as Occam’s razor. Although he never said it this clearly Occam’s razor can be summarized as follows: The best solution to a problem…
