I recently bumped into my friend Mike, a pilot and former lacrosse teammate who I hadn’t seen in years. After catching up about family and friends, he reminded me that our last conversation had included him asking about where to invest, to which I asked him “What is your greatest financial fear?” I had explained …
More than half of Americans report that either no one taught them about money or that they learned how to handle finances on their own. Combine that lack of formal training with a desire to improve personal money management and you create as much potential for trouble as for profit. It’s hard to know who …
Welcome back to the intersection of fear and greed, the place that investors go to at times when stock markets are acting frothy and volatile and/or flirting with new highs. With both of those conditions currently in play, it’s the place where a lot of investors now find themselves. The question is whether they have …
The stock market has more than doubled since pandemic lows in March of 2020. It appears to have learned how to deal with coronavirus better than people have, shaking off every bit of bad news to stay positive and keep rolling despite real concerns. Even as hospitalizations and deaths related to Covid-19 have been climbing …
Two recent surveys highlight problems that American consumers and investors are having now, not with the market but with their own behavior. Finding the real lessons in each of these studies involves looking past the headlines and digging deeper, so let’s pick up the shovel and search for the hidden gems that people should really …
It’s easy to overcomplicate your investments, and hard to fix that problem. Investment portfolios age, grow and change with their owners. Many people gather investments and amass a collection without managing positions, selling and trimming to concentrate on strategy. It might be easy to solve that problem if there were rules for everyone to follow, …
Simplifying your finances isn’t so simple. That was clear from the response I got to a recent column on cleaning up a portfolio, consolidating accounts, getting rid of extraneous dribs and drabs of money and clearing out the clutter. And I got that big response without ever going into the nitty gritty of investment performance, …
On Monday [July 19], the stock market had its worst day thus far this year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost roughly 725 points, 2.1 percent, its biggest one-day loss since late October 2020. The Standard & Poor’s 500 lost 1.6 percent for the day; the Nasdaq Composite Index declined about 1.1 percent. It felt …
I recently reconnected with Dave, a former colleague who lost his job as the economy was reopening from the pandemic. He’s actually a few years younger than I am, but doesn’t think he can get another job that he’d enjoy in his field, nor does he want a job that forces him to commute and …
Investors haven’t been losing money in this stock market, they’ve been losing their minds. They have disconnected with reality and checked into an alternative universe, a land of milk, honey and above-average stock returns. Way above average. According to the latest Global Survey of Individual Investors from Natixis Investment Managers, U.S. retail investors now expect …
