A lot of retirees who prefer spending their time doing things other than investing may have had the happy little accident of simply leaving their money parked in low-cost index ETFs and letting them…
I think more retirees should get comfortable with selling shares to fund portfolio withdrawals. Mathematically, there is not much difference between receiving income through dividends versus generating it yourself by selling shares. When a…
By far, the oldest and longest-standing gold exchange-traded products, or ETPs, generally charge around 0.4% annually in expense ratios. That applies both to closed-ended structures like the Sprott Physical Gold Trust (NYSEARCA: PHYS), which…
I have a soft spot for the iShares U.S. Treasury Bond ETF (BATS: GOVT), and clearly a lot of investors do too given that it now sits at roughly $41 billion in assets under…
If you are looking for investing discussion a little more sophisticated than what you typically find on Reddit, I would suggest checking out the Bogleheads forum. It is populated largely by adherents of John…
I think the Vanguard Information Technology ETF (NYSEARCA: VGT) is the poster child for why investors should let winners run. If you were able to hold this ETF through the sizable volatility that comes…
I have never really been a fan of certificates of deposit (CDs). Yes, the principal is guaranteed and insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), but the lockup period is extremely inflexible. If…
There is an old saying in investing that a portfolio is like a bar of soap: the more you touch it, the smaller it gets. Every time you constantly tweak allocations, chase hot sectors,…
Utility stocks have commanded unusual attention from investors lately, and the driving force is the AI build-out reshaping electricity demand across the country. Data centers require enormous, continuous power, and as hyperscalers accelerate infrastructure…
Most inflation hedges quietly carry equity-like risk underneath, which can devastate a retiree's income at exactly the wrong moment. There is a bond ETF engineered to sidestep that trap, and its yield mechanics work…
I'm Canadian. Our retirement system is built around the Canada Pension Plan, or CPP. Everyone contributes during their working years, employers kick in a matching portion, and at retirement you receive benefits tied to…
A lot of investors tend to think about the S&P 500 index as one giant monolith, but I think it becomes much more interesting once you break it down into its component sectors: technology,…
Today, there’s no denying that the NASDAQ-100 has been a potent vehicle for capital appreciation. For example, the Invesco NASDAQ 100 ETF (NASDAQ: QQQM) has returned 15.39% annualized over the past five years, propelled…
Hindsight is 20/20, but in 1995, going long fixed-income duration really was the correct move. Duration is essentially a measure of a bond portfolio’s sensitivity to changes in interest rates. The longer the duration,…
One of the things that really grinds my gears is when investors looking for a cash management vehicle simply default to whatever money market fund their brokerage platform happens to highlight first.That can be…
Bonds worked really well as a portfolio diversifier for more than four decades, and a huge part of that success came from the long-term trend of falling interest rates. When interest rates fall, the…
I am not the biggest fan of TreasuryDirect. Sure, technically it lets you buy Treasury securities directly from the U.S. government without paying an ETF expense ratio, but using the platform often feels like…
A lot of advisors out there use ETFs, but what gets recommended to retail clients is not always necessarily the best ETF available. There is an entire ecosystem of ETF wholesalers whose job is…
The U.S. inflation print for April 2026 came in at 3.8%, the highest since May 2023 and still well above the Federal Reserve's long-term 2% target. That means one-half of the Fed's dual mandate,…
2022 was a really weird year to be an investor. Even four years later, I still remember what happened. A lot of investors were panicking because their supposedly balanced 60/40 portfolios of 60% stocks…
