Walking my dog through the neighborhood last week, I came upon a friend who gave me his standard greeting for these occasional chance walk-bys: “What do you like in the market right now?” He knows I’m not handing out stock tips, but he usually follows it up by name-dropping, or we’ll spend a few moments …
Janet, a grandmother from New Orleans, wants to give a little something extra this year for the holidays, but doesn’t want to go to the mall to get it. She’s not shopping online for it either. She wants to buy her six grandchildren stock. “I saw something that said that a gift of stock is …
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, …
Jack is a recent college grad who did some work for me around the yard when he was in high school. I bumped into him the other day and, after a brief talk about his collegiate sports career, the conversation quickly turned to money. He was particularly proud of having bought his first individual stock …
One year ago this week, the shortest bear market on record bottomed out. Stocks lost 34 percent from the penthouse on February 20 to the outhouse on March 23, a span of just 33 days. The coronavirus in that time was going from a worry to a pandemic and, as a result, the economy was …
You don’t have to be a trader to be affected by them, and these days the chances that you will be are growing. A combination of factors are driving that: heightened interest in and trading action around “story stocks,” fewer stocks to trade, easy access to trading tools creating more active investors and more. Throughout …
In 35 years covering investments, I have seen “the end” countless times. Dividend investing purportedly was dying while the Internet bubble was inflating in the 1990s, buy-and-hold investing has been on the way out countless times in the last quarter century, asset allocation hasn’t worked as expected throughout the current bull market, international diversification is …
My father had one bad financial habit that he never got over. Over the years, he built a diversified investment portfolio that covered virtually all corners of the investment spectrum, except for one. He could never buy a small-cap mutual fund or invest in small or micro-cap stocks. Oh, he tried a few times, but …
