The mutual fund as we know it today is almost 100 years old, and following important steps in 1934 and 1940 and then in 1974, mutual funds can be thanked for helping a large percentage of average working individuals save trillions of dollars for retirement in ways pre 20th century history might not have imagined. […]
Bloomberg recently published another article titled “Where to Invest $1,000,000 right now“, where six different experts provided six different opinions on where they would invest the million. Not surprisingly, the experts they asked tended to recommend investing in assets their companies sold or serviced (for example, the one who said investing in Vietnamese property was […]
Just noticed my book “Invest Outside the Box” has finally appeared on Amazon with an available date of August 14th – looking forward to seeing it on shelves and on the desks of practitioners!
529 plans are one of the best US tax-advantaged vehicles for college savings. While 529 plans are sponsored by a US state, you do not need to be resident in a state to participate in that state’s 529 plans, nor will investing in a state’s 529 plan limit you to that state’s schools. In […]
Many Americans living outside the US have visited their local bank to be told that they are not allowed to purchase investment products outside the US, often without being told any more details as to why not. While Americans can and should directly own investments outside the US (I personally own and buy for US […]
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 […]