Category Archives: General Investing

You’d see these clickbait stories every now and then. They let you dream about the easy riches you would have earned had you wagered on this or that stock. Dreams are great but acting upon them is Chernobyl deadly for your money. Let me explain why. Apple today is a three trillion-dollar business. A one-timeContinue reading “If You’d Bought This Stock 20 Years Ago”

Mary Hunt profiles three types of people in her book 7 Money Rules for Life on how they handle money and how it impacts their well-being and happiness. So, say they all made the same kind of incomes since they started working… Nothing spectacular. Their paychecks rose as the cost of living (inflation) rose. But a bigContinue reading “Adding Fuel To Fire”

William P. Bengen, an aeronautical engineer turned financial advisor, first articulated the 4 percent safe withdrawal rule in a 1994 paper in the Journal of Financial Planning. But to his dismay, that rule transpired to become a widely used hack to guesstimate one’s retirement number. Though more a rule of thumb than a rule, itContinue reading “Your Retirement Number”

Imagine life without smartphones. No Google maps, no Uber and none of those apps that bring the many conveniences into our lives. Imagine life without the internet. Or without personal computers. Or without televisions, microwaves and refrigerators. It is easy to be happy without these things before they were invented and that was the realityContinue reading “A Gradually Rising Standard Of Living”

Post-World War II retirement planning was easy. We had pensions. There was income from Social Security. And we had our own savings. Those three things made up for a sturdy three-legged stool that took us though a worry-free retirement. Pensions have all but gone the way of the dodo bird. The Social Security situation isContinue reading “The Three-Legged Stool”

Bank of America strategist Michael Hartnett coined the term “The Magnificent Seven” or Mag 7 for a group of stocks that have come to dominate the stock market lately1. These stocks are Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla and Meta. Markets are long-term efficient but sometimes they can get short-term nutty. I feel some ofContinue reading “The Magnificent Seven”

We have estate taxes here. That means if you die with too much money, you (your estate) have to pay a wealth tax beyond all the taxes you have already paid while you were alive. The estate tax rates can be as high as 40 percent but why should you care? You’ll be dead. ButContinue reading “How Estate Taxes Work & Why They Are A Good Thing”

Robert Stock earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from Princeton university and a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon. He spent nine years working as a researcher in the Directed Energy Group at MIT’s Lincoln lab where he performed simulations of high-energy laser systems for missile defense. He later switched careers to money management and ran theContinue reading “The More Complex Your Investments, The More Likely They’ll Blow Up”

Millennials have had it rough. Between student loans and an ever rising cost of living, there is nary a chance of having anything leftover to put towards long-term goals like retirement. The struggle is real but try they must. And then there are the lucky few who make great incomes. They are in that catbirdContinue reading “If I Were A Millennial”

The value of an investment today is the sum of all the cash flows that investment is going to generate over the life of that investment, discounted to the present at an appropriate discount rate. That applies to anything that is deemed an investment. And then there is the Efficient Markets Hypothesis that states thatContinue reading “An Investment’s Return vs. An Investor’s Return”