Retirement Investing

Bob Carlson offers his expert opinion on where to invest your money so that you can get through retirement safely and securely

Found 896 Articles.
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Risk Management

Why Risk Management in Investing is Critical

June 29, 2012

Publication: Retirement Watch Weekly

I often encounter people who expect my investment advice should focus on at least one of two things: identifying the investments that will earn the highest returns in the next short-term, and forecasting the returns of different investments, but especially the stock indexes. Instead, I focus on risk management. The returns will take care of […]

ETFs

How Leveraged ETFs Work

June 20, 2012

Publication: Retirement Watch Weekly

I’ve pointed out from time to time that ETFs, especially leveraged ETFs, don’t work the way many investors expect or think they will. Another example of that is the performance of some leveraged natural gas ETFs from Direxion. With index funds, investors generally are used to the idea that their returns won’t exactly match an […]

Risk Management

Lower Risk = Higher Returns

June 13, 2012

Publication: Retirement Watch Weekly

One of our enduring themes at Retirement Watch is that investors need to manage risks and they’ll earn higher return long-term if they take lower risks. The academic world finally is catching up with this thinking, and it’s moving fairly rapidly into the professional investment world. Take a look at this paper from GMO, a […]

ETFs

Little-Noticed Qualities of ETFs

June 13, 2012

Publication: Retirement Watch Weekly

Exchange-traded funds are perhaps the fastest-growing investment innovation ever. Assets rolled into them in recent years, and there were some forecasts for a while that they would wipe out traditional mutual funds and other forms of investing. That’s not likely to happen. While ETFs have many good features, there are some negative features and potential […]

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Bob's Journal, Retirement Investing, Stock Markets and the Economy

June 2012

June 1, 2012

Publication: Retirement Watch, Retirement Watch Weekly

June 29, 2012 04:30 p.m. Your Retirement Finance Week in Review European leaders delivered a pleasant surprise to the financial world by agreeing to a couple of things at their latest summit. But don’t get too excited by the developments. Afterwards the leaders didn’t seem to agree on what they’d done, and the developments still […]

Dividend Investing

The High Dividend Fallacy

May 14, 2012

Publication: Retirement Watch Weekly

For the last few years a number of analysts urged income-seeking investors to buy high-yielding stocks instead of different types of bonds. I haven’t done that, because there’s a risk-return trade off that’s ignored in this advice. The trade off became obvious last Friday when JPMorgan announced a large hedging loss and its stock declined […]

Gold and Silver

Today’s Best Investment – Gold?

May 4, 2012

Publication: Retirement Watch Weekly

A plurality of Americans believe gold is today’s safest investment, and by a surprisingly wide margin, according to a Gallup poll. This is the second consecutive year the poll had this result, though the number in favor of gold declined from 34% to 28%. The poll leaves a lot of questions unanswered. How do Americans […]

Investing Strategies

A Margin of Safety Primer

May 2, 2012

Publication: Retirement Watch Weekly

I almost always recommend a reading of the quarterly shareholder letter from Martin Whitman of Third Avenue funds. The first quarter of 2012 is no exception. In fact, it’s a special letter because Whitman recently stepped down as manager of the Third Avenue Value fund. The latest letter is a primer on Whitman’s version of […]