Navigating the financial markets can often feel like you’re in a labyrinth, with news outlets, analysts, and every ‘guru’ on the internet vying for your attention, each one painting a picture of the market landscape teeming with endless opportunities for extraordinary gains (or horrific losses). But there’s an easy way for investors (whether you’re focused on retirement or not) to cut through the noise. The financial markets absolutely are monstrously complex things. Pretty much everything that you can imagine goes into the markets – and drives security prices. And we can largely ignore all of ..read more

Investing is deceptively simple. Until it’s not. As investors, we want to start with the market portfolio—that is, by definition, the most efficient portfolio. But we’ll also want to customize our investments to address our specific situation. For instance, the global bond market is substantially bigger than the global stock market, but most retirement-focused investors’ portfolios are more heavily tilted towards stocks than bonds. There are all sorts of reasons for this (some better than others). But the basic fact is that we (and you, specifically) are different from the average investor. An ..read more

This report features world capital market performance and a timeline of events for the past quarter. It begins with a global overview, then features the returns of stock and bond asset classes in the US and international markets. The report also illustrates the impact of globally diversified portfolios and features a quarterly topic. Download Quarterly Market Review Have any questions about the review? The post 2023 – Q4 Quarterly Market Review appeared first on Retirement Researcher ..read more

Much has been written about how the current generation of young people are transitioning to full adulthood. Some take a very negative view characterizing the transition as “slow” while others take a sympathetic view, reasoning that that the transition is more difficult to make than it was for prior generations given that the cost of education and housing have both grown faster than inflation over the past several decades. Without passing judgement one way or the other, it is worth recognizing that the transition to full adulthood has changed.  Becoming an Adult Let’s start by examining so ..read more

This report features world capital market performance and a timeline of events for the past quarter. It begins with a global overview, then features the returns of stock and bond asset classes in the US and international markets. The report also illustrates the impact of globally diversified portfolios and features a quarterly topic. Download Quarterly Market Review Have any questions about the review? The post 2023 – Q3 Quarterly Market Review appeared first on Retirement Researcher ..read more

There are a lot of cliches in retirement planning. And a lot of them are cliches for a good reason – they’re good advice. But not always, and more than a few of them are right for the wrong reasons.  One of those cliches is that with investing you need to focus on the long term to reduce the risks from investing. It is absolutely true that investing is a long-term activity, but is that second part true? Do stocks (and other types of investments) get safer the longer you hold onto them?  What Does Long Term Even Mean? Before we start looking at whether stocks are safer in the long run ..read more

There was a time when your retirement was largely paid for by your employer. If you met the age and years of service requirements, you knew exactly what your retirement income from your employer would be for the remainder of your life. For most non-unionized private sector workers, those days are gone. Today the responsibility of preparing for your retirement life stage falls squarely on your shoulders. This is a relatively new situation.  In the early 2000s, more workers at large private sector companies had access to a traditional pension plan than those that only had access to a define ..read more

Inflation is a fact of life. It’s also not so great for retirees. In fact, it’s one of the biggest risks that retirees face. By constantly eating away at the value of our savings and income, inflation will slowly reduce our purchasing power in retirement – if we don’t do anything about it. To put this in perspective, $100,000 today will buy the same amount that $57,000 would buy in 20011. The purchasing power of a dollar has been nearly cut in half in only 23 years. Hopefully your retirement will be significantly longer than that. This means that we need to figure out how to deal with the ..read more

If you’ve read any of my previous articles, you know I’m not a fan of active management. The numbers show that it simply doesn’t work. There are a whole bunch of arguments against active fund managers, but one of the most damning is that winners don’t seem to repeat. Past performance doesn’t indicate future performance – it’s not just something the killjoy lawyers make everyone say. What someone did in the past doesn’t tell you what they will do going forward (outside of some specific situations). Individual active managers could potentially beat the market consistently (though it’s tough to i ..read more

Every four years we talk about how this year’s Presidential election is the most important ever. Along the way, people make a whole host of sweeping statements about how picking their team will lead to all of the good things happening, but picking the other team will lead to all of the bad things happening (which is true by the way). And, true to form, everyone has already started telling stories about how voting for their candidate will inevitably lead the financial markets going up, and voting for the other guy will cause the economy to melt down (with varying degrees of reasonableness and c ..read more