The new Martin Scorsese film The Wolf of Wall Street is riding high. It has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture. And, crucially, the movie has made money, an estimated $76 million over its production budget of $100 million. Billed as a black comedy, Wolf tells the story of a “pump and dump”… Continue reading →

Read enough about investing and eventually you run into this entertaining hockey metaphor: “Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is.” This arrestingly simple piece of advice was supposedly uttered by hockey legend Wayne Gretzky (a claim thoroughly debunked). It lives on, on countless web sites, many dedicated to investing advice.… Continue reading →

Every year, the well-meaning among us tackle a well-worn list of resolutions: Lose a few pounds, save bit more and so on. Often, resolutions are short-lived, to our dismay. It’s the same reason we fail to be successful at retirement investing: Old habits die hard. New habits are difficult to start. Yet habits tend to… Continue reading →

Traders use many measures to figure out when to buy or sell a given investment. Fundamentals, price-to-earnings ratios, even crazy things like Superbowl matchups. Yet you don’t have to know the inner workings of a company or predict the tectonic shifts ahead in the entire stock market. All you have to do is rebalance. Rebalancing… Continue reading →

Believe it or not, now may be the best time for small investors seeking to build a retirement — ever. Hyperbole? Maybe. But it might well turn out to be an understatement. Things might only get better for retirement investors. Consider the recent interview Jason Zweig at The Wall Street Journal had with James Cloonan,… Continue reading →

Do you expect to retire on the dot at 65? Sometime later? If you’re like an increasing number of American workers, the reality is likely to be a step-down process instead, according to a new study. University of Michigan researchers found that more than 15% of workers ages 60 to 62 are still earning salaries,… Continue reading →

We all rely on weather forecasts from time to time. It’s nice to know whether to toss an umbrella in the car or bring a jacket, just in case. But you know, deep down, that weather is to some degree about chance. The rain that’s clearly coming might fall five miles west of you, after… Continue reading →

The bad news for baby boomers has been hard to avoid. Dire predictions of a looming retirement catastrophe have piled up for several years. Now that reality is starting to hit — hard. Wells Fargo recently released its latest survey of middle-class retirement prospects, and the news is bleak. Among the outcomes expected by survey… Continue reading →

Wall Street certainly has made a lot of money over the years running the country’s 401(k) plans. Inevitably, time passes. So now they want to make sure they can make as much or more running your personal retirement IRA. Trillions of dollars are at stake as people leave work and roll over money into IRA… Continue reading →