One of my favorite books is Ben Graham’s “The Intelligent Investor”. This page from the fourth revised edition (1973) gives a short but fascinating history of some amazing price swings in the not-too-obscure category of foreign government bonds, interesting in part because the government issuers aren’t around in the same form any more (Cuba had […]
Vanguard is synonymous with low-cost, passive investing. Here I present some charts showing some metrics that can be used to enhance an asset allocation of the top Vanguard mutual funds even among these broadly diversified, passive funds. Despite my disagreements with him, Jack Bogle remains one of the foundational figures of today’s investing world I […]
When considering which asset classes to invest in, it makes sense to ask “what do the wealthy invest in?”. First generation American millionaires tend to earn more of their wealth from their investments than directly from their salaries, and so one guide for deciding which of the many different types of investments best build wealth […]
Over the past week, stock and bond markets around the world have fallen more than many people remember seeing in years. After an amazingly smooth ride up in 2017, when the S&P 500 index rose almost 20% without declining more than 2% on any day that year, investors were suddenly reminded over the past week […]
I am often asked about investing in stocks vs property, as owning physical residential real estate is an understandably popular investment choice in Hong Kong and other major cities. Urban professionals have seen apartment prices, and their rents, rise faster than inflation and almost as quickly as their salaries, and there is a level of […]
In January and February many firms, especially banks, give out annual bonuses to employees, which in some cases make up a large percentage of the employee’s annual earnings. After years like 2017, when the economy and global stock markets have done exceptionally well, I am naturally asked, more than in most years, about how to […]
My latest article describes how to choose the 10 first stocks to buy a 10-year old, and why I think it’s important to start kids investing in individual companies rather than mutual funds from an early age. As I disclose: I bought Coca-cola for my older child and PepsiCo for my younger child because they […]
Hong Kong ETFs are, and are likely to remain, the best way to trade and broadly allocate to China, it is not hard to argue that Hong Kong has the best ETF market in Asia. As a reference, I am posting below a scan of the brochure the HKEX handed out at a recent ETF […]
When investing retirement accounts, we are often told to invest aggressively (mostly in stocks) when saving as young employees, and then rotate more and more of the account towards more conservative investments (bonds and REITs) as retirement approaches. One overly simple rule is to allocate 100 minus your age in stocks, so that a 20 […]
Investors looking to replace index ETFs or more expensive stock mutual funds or closed-end funds with direct positions in blue chip stocks may want to start by owning some of the largest companies in the world by market cap. Market cap is simply the total value of shares outstanding, and most index funds and ETFs […]