Investing
« Previous EntriesFlawed Thinking (Part 2)
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009After posting Flawed Thinking a couple of days ago, I got to thinking about it. I left out one very important part of the story.
Re-read the commenter’s first sentence and you’ll see what I mean:
Two years ago we stopped investing in our 401k and we began paying thousands against the principal on our home.
The [...]
A Look at S&P 500 Index Returns and Time Horizon
Wednesday, June 10th, 20092008 screwed everything up!
Take a look at the returns for the S&P 500 Index over the last 10, 20, 30 and 40 years:
The last ten years were pretty pathetic and have led to new “research” like this.
Anyway, to get an idea of just how bad 2008 was, I looked at the returns for the same [...]
Flawed Thinking…
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009Check out this comment that was left the other day on one of my old mortgage posts:
Two years ago we stopped investing in our 401k and we began paying thousands against the principal on our home. We only have $1,500.00 left to pay and the property is ours and we didn’t lose our a$$et$ to [...]
AFM Reader Question: “Should I Sell My Stocks Now?”
Thursday, June 4th, 2009I received this email from a reader:
Hi JLP:
I have been a long time reader of AFM and have tried to apply your teachings to my financial health. Despite all that I have read I am still mentally stuck with a problem.
Through various investments that I have made or that have been made on my [...]
SURPRISE!!!!! Our Personal Rate of Return is 11.5% for 2009!
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009I logged into my wife’s 401(k) account this morning to find this:
The definition of personal rate of return (I put together a tutorial here) on Fidelity’s website is:
Your Personal Rate of Return is calculated with a time-weighted formula, widely used by financial analysts to calculate investment earnings. The calculated value reflects the result of your [...]
May Was a Good Month for Stocks
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009May was a pretty good month for the Standard & Poor’s indexes. All three of the indexes I track (the S&P 500, MidCap 400, and SmallCap 600) had total returns of more than 1.50%. The S&P 500 Index was up over 5.5% for the month of May. All three of the indexes [...]
There’s Only So Much an Advisor Can Do…
Thursday, May 28th, 2009This is the introduction to a Kiplinger article titled, Does Your Advisor Make the Grade?
Until last fall, Pam Nintrup thought the financial adviser she had hired two and a half years before was doing a good job. He’d consolidated her and her husband’s scattered accounts onto one statement and run computer scenarios to determine whether [...]
What’s the Point of the Barron’s 500?
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009This week’s Barron’s featured the 11th Annual Barron’s 500. What is the Barron’s 500? Well, I’ll let Barron’s explain it (emphasis mine):
The Barron’s 500, a unique ranking of the 500 largest (by sales) public companies in the U.S. and Canada, is prepared by HOLT, a unit of Credit Suisse. The survey compares companies [...]
The S&P Smallcap 600 Has Fared Better Than the S&P 500 During the New Millenium
Monday, May 11th, 2009Remember my post from last week about how the S&P 500 Index has fared during the New Millenium? Well, I went back and gathered up the numbers for the the S&P Smallcap 600 Index and crunched them for you to come up with this graphic:
The process for getting these numbers was quite tedious. [...]
Why Do We Listen to Analysts?
Monday, May 11th, 2009Okay, I’m reading in the Wall Street Journal this morning about how stocks no longer look cheap. In the article they talk about how, according to most valuation measures, stocks are no longer cheap. The standard measure of a stock’s valuation is usually the P/E ratio, or the price/earnings ratio.
There are [...]