Retirement Watch Weekly
December 2013
December 20, 2013 04:50 p.m. Your Retirement Finance Week in Review We’ll be on a reduced schedule the next couple of weeks. I won’t send a letter next Friday, December 27, and probably won’t send one on January 3, 2014. I hope everyone has a good holiday season. I look forward to meeting you at […]
Taking a Financial Health Day
Most of you are familiar with the concept of a mental health day, when a person takes a day off from work to relax and recharge. Most of us need a financial health day to increase our financial independence and well-being. There are many relatively simple, easy steps people need to take to improve their […]
Explaining the Bubble in Commodity Prices
Commodity prices soared for several years until collapsing over the last couple of years. The puzzle has been why prices soared. Was it manipulation? Cartels? Insiders and speculators? There’s an interesting paper digested in FTAlphaville blog that makes a good case. It says the price signals of the commodity markets were distorted. Investors in other […]
Estimating Retirement Spending
The estimate of retirement spending is the linchpin of most retirement plans. You have to determine the cost of the lifestyle you want and use that to assess how much money you need from then nest egg each year. If your nest egg can’t sustain that level of spending, you need to modify the expected […]
Tarnishing the Efficient Market Theory
You’ll find lots of entertaining and enlightening things in the latest quarterly shareholder letter from GMO, the large institutional investment manager. Co-Founder of the firm, Jeremy Grantham, enjoys criticizing this year’s co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, Eugene Fama, for the efficient market theory and all that follows from it. Grantham says the theory […]
The Tax-Exempt Bond Opportunity
Tax-exempt bonds crashed earlier in 2013. First there was all the talk of the Fed reducing its bond buying, known as tapering. Then, there was the bankruptcy of Detroit. I said in Retirement Watch that the crash created opportunities and recommended a portfolio position to capture them. Now, James Tisch, CEO of Loewe’s, said he […]
The Best Stock Index Valuation Indicator
After the stock surge of 2013, stocks suddenly aren’t cheap and a lot of people are wondering if they are overvalued or in bubble territory. There are a number of indicators of stock market valuation, but they aren’t infallible. Stock markets can stay undervalued or overvalued for a long time after the indicators trigger an […]
Is Your Investment Portfolio Really Diversified?
In recent years a number of investors realized they weren’t really diversified with a traditional stock and bond portfolio. So, they started to add other assets and strategies. But once the Fed started manipulating markets with quantitative easing, the diversification of many of these investments disappeared. Morningstar recently revisited some of the more popular diversifiers […]
