According to legend, a pharmacist by the name of John Pemberton was looking for a cure for the headache when he first tried blending Coca leaves with Cola nuts. Pemberton couldn’t have known this recipe would eventually reach the heights of fame, even though Coca-Cola® never ended up achieving his original goal. This story…

Attempting to sustain a fixed living standard using distributions from a portfolio of volatile assets is an inefficient retirement income strategy. This is a unique source of sequence risk. Four general techniques for managing sequence risk in retirement are highlighted in Exhibit 1. Exhibit 1 Approaches for Managing Sequence of Returns Risk in Retirement (1)…

Looks like certain hedge funds are back in style now. With the constant conveyor belt of hot new investments, as soon as something starts to lose its luster, there’s always something ready to take its place. This time, at least according to the article, it’s macro hedge funds. Macro hedge funds are basically hedge funds that…

Hopefully you’ve been able to close the books on last year’s taxes by now. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore them for another year. Now’s the time to make sure that you are doing everything you can to minimize your taxes in the future. This article has some suggestions on how to make sure…

The stock market is confusing. When you talk about it, people tend to nod their heads sagely and make bland comments, like they do with most things relating to the economy. We know it’s important, and most of us hope it will provide us the retirement we want – but we don’t actually understand it,…

Remember when the financial media was positively giddy over the fact that the Dow Jones hit 20,000 points earlier this year (and we weren’t so impressed)? In part one of this series, we looked at what exactly the “points” measure in market indexes (not always what you might expect, as it turns out). Today, I…

Individual investors are vulnerable to the sequence of market returns experienced over their investing lifetimes. Individuals who behave in exactly the same way over their careers—saving the same percentage of the same salary for the same number of years—can experience disparate outcomes based solely upon the specific sequence of investment returns that accompanies their career…

The financial markets are interesting things. Their direction is largely determined by emotion, yet everyone pretends they are based on cold, hard numbers. Past market behavior is easily quantified, so people feel like if they just study the numbers enough or use the right models, they’ll be able to figure out what will happen next.…

This is one of the best retirement “tips” articles I’ve read in a long time. Retirement is generally pretty straightforward. It’s a lot like losing weight and living a healthier lifestyle. Everyone kind of knows what they need to do to reach their goals, at least in a general way, but very few people actually want…