It’s a little hard to believe, but I read more and more in the popular press about maximizing Social Security benefits. One of the best-selling books this year is called ‘Get What’s Yours: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security’ by Laurence Kotlikoff. I tried to read it earlier this year and admit that even I found it was pretty dry, and I think it’s fairly obvious that… Read More
A little more than a year ago, I attempted to answer the question, ‘which stock sector is best?‘ The answer, of course, is that it depends. It depends on what time horizon you are evaluating, whether you care about overall performance, risk-adjusted performance and so forth. My conclusion to that article is that no sector is ‘best’ and the best strategy is to have diversified exposure to a basket of… Read More
It’s Friday in the summertime, so I thought I would do something a little light and easy today. I was reading an article by a St. Louis Federal Reserve economist titled ‘What Drives Long-Run Economic Growth?‘ I’ve been writing about short-term economic issues like the impact of the cold weather on the first quarter and when the Fed might raise interest rates (June, September or January?), so the long-run idea was appealing. The author,… Read More
Last week, I wrote that the emerging market stock indexes that Vanguard tracks will be adding mainland China A-shares to their index (click here and for a refresher). On Tuesday, MSCI, the world’s most popular index creator for non-US stock indexes announced they would not be adding Chinese A-shares to their emerging markets indexes. MSCI believes there are too many regulatory issues related to non-Chinese owners that could make owning… Read More
When people ask me how long their time horizon ought to be when investing in stocks, I usually say 10 years. It occurred to me the other day that either I’ve never really looked into this in a very detailed way or I’ve forgotten about it. In either case, it’s now time to look. To answer this question, I looked at rolling returns for the S&P 500 since 1926 for… Read More
Long-term interest rates have moved up swiftly in recent weeks. On April 20th, the 10-year German government bond had a yield of 0.06 percent. Around that time, I couldn’t stop writing about negative interest rates (see here and here) because the 10-year Swiss government bond yielded -0.13 percent along with the government bonds of a half-dozen other European countries at shorter maturities. I read at one point that one-third of all outstanding… Read More
Not too long ago, someone sent me an advertisement for an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that tracks the global airline industry. The ticker for the ETF is very cute: JETS. Personally, I think an index that tracks the airlines industry is nuts. Although it can’t be attributed to anyone specifically, it’s been said that the airline industry, in its entire history, has never made any money. I don’t have the data… Read More
