If you make the mistake of watching the stock market on cable TV, the drumbeat of nearly every minute of airtime is this: Anyone can pick stocks. It’s easy. It’s not a surprising message. The bulk of advertising on financial TV is from big Wall Street firms and brokerage houses. They too rely heavily on the… Continue reading →

As you read this, the furor over the DeflateGate scandal will have subsided and the intense roar of a million corner sports bars will be dying down following the most revered of American holidays, Super Bowl Sunday. As always, the best team wins these things. But there’s the rub. As with all high-stakes sports events,… Continue reading →

Money is a real puzzler for most of us. We work hard to get it and there never seems to be enough. When we manage to scrape together a pile of money, we worry about losing it. It’s even more mysterious when you’re an outsider, which I once was. Having made a bit of it… Continue reading →

Amid the relentless news coverage about how unready Americans are for retirement, it can be easy to miss the bright spots. As Charle​y Ellis points out in his new book, Falling Short: The Coming Retirement Crisis and What to Do About It, many people mistakenly take the easy way out of jobs, leaving at 62 — the earliest possible… Continue reading →

For all the talk about “smart” money and “dumb” money in investing, you would think that money had a mind of its own. A curious twist in the year-end results of some hedge fund tracking ETFs, however, shows just how strikingly random a year’s returns can be. As Burton Malkiel points out, the relevance of a given year’s performance vs.… Continue reading →

A popular article making the rounds on the Internet refers to 2014 as “the year that nothing worked.” I beg to differ. Patient investing through a low-cost portfolio of index funds worked just fine. I have no quarrel with the author of the piece and find his commentaries informative, which is what online content should be.… Continue reading →

Mitch Tuchman, Managing Director of Rebalance, relates the life events that shaped how he thinks about long-term investing. Continue reading →

Every year in the investing business a load of flashy new books comes out, each penned by a young money manager or market observer looking to make his or her mark. Some sell well, often in direct relation to the author’s appearances on financial TV shows. Some disappear in short order and end up in… Continue reading →

If you want bad news about your prospects for retirement, it’s pretty easy to find. Just click on any financial news site and you’ll find headline after depressing headline. The statistics are dismal, but there is good news to be heard and it comes through loud and clear in a new book by Charley Ellis, one… Continue reading →