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Archive for the ‘Diversification’ Category

I recently came across a calculator developed by Morningstar to help families estimate future college costs and to determine whether they are on track with saving to meet the future costs of higher education. Let’s have a look at what this tool can and cannot do and how such a tool may be useful. The [...]

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One of the recurring themes in the financial press in recent years is a warning to income-oriented investors not to pile into dividend-paying stocks to boost portfolio income. The Wall Street Journal has a recent article on this topic titled, “Why Dividend Stocks Aren’t the New Bonds.”  This article is motivated by the fact that [...]

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Well-known financial columnist Robert Powell has a recent article in MarketWatch titled, “Retirement in America is ‘Endangered.” The motivation for this piece, he writes, is that retirement preparedness is a crucially important topic that was missed in the recent State of The Union address by President Obama. Powell goes on to list the key problems [...]

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The recently-published book by Zvi Bodie and Rachelle Taqqu, Risk Less and Prosper: Your Guide to Safer Investing, provides a unique perspective on how to meet the challenge of long-term financial planning.  The book is well-organized into a number of steps required for identifying and organizing long-term goals and thinking through how to meet these [...]

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Guest Blog from Quicken.com. Only one thing always happens in the financial markets: Values fluctuate. Before investing in any market, at any price, in any climate, prudent investors think about how much fluctuation they can handle. In other words, how much can your portfolio go down before you start to lose sleep? We all have [...]

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Guest blog by Daniel Solin, Mint.com. The evidence showing that most individual investors significantly underperform the market is compelling. A study done by Dalbar, a leading financial services market research firm, found that, during the 20 years from 1991 through 2010, the average stock fund investor earned returns of only 3.83% per year, while the [...]

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Burton Malkiel, Princeton professor and author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street, had an Op Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal on December 7th that advocates rethinking simple indexed portfolios.  While Vanguard has recently published research asserting the superiority of a simple asset allocation made up of 50% allocation in a stock index [...]

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With ten-year Treasury bonds yielding around 2%, many investors are looking for investments that can provide higher levels of yield. Barron’s just ran a cover story on this topic, titled: “How to Get Safe Annual Payouts of 7%: Despite rock-bottom interest rates, you can still earn investment income of 7%-plus per year. How to keep [...]

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Guest Blog by Kip Robbins, CFA, Zacks.com. This past Sunday it was 71 degrees and dry in Chicago.  If you’ve ever lived here in November, you know that’s an anomaly.  At this time of year, it’s usually 44 and wet.  I felt so warm, I decided to have a glass of lemonade which is usually [...]

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This is the second article in a series. The first is titled The Five Biggest Financial Issues for Pre-Retirees. The years in which you are raising children are among the most important in your life, and financial choices and decisions are no small part.  First, you are managing the widest range of financial demands.  You [...]

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