The most uncomfortable fact in professional money management arrived courtesy of S&P Dow Jones Indices: 90% of active fund managers underperformed the S&P 500 over the last 15 years. These are people…
Cody Berman went on The Personal Finance Podcast and described hitting financial independence right before his 26th birthday. He held about $500,000 in a Total Stock Market Index Fund, plus 11 rental…
The Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund Institutional Plus Shares (VSMPX) is one of the largest pooled equity vehicles in the world, but most readers searching for it cannot actually buy it.…
If your equity sleeve has more than two or three funds, Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund Admiral Shares (NASDAQ:VTSAX) is the case for simplifying. VTSAX owns essentially the entire investable U.S.…
Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (NYSEARCA:VTI) and iShares Core S&P Total U.S. Stock Market ETF (NYSEARCA:ITOT) both promise the entire investable US equity market in a single ticker. Yet the index each…
State Street’s 2026 Global ETF Outlook calls for $2.1 trillion of US ETF inflows this year, with the lion’s share flowing into three core funds: Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (NYSEARCA:VOO), iShares Core…
If you opened your brokerage statement this year and noticed your portfolio looked suspiciously like the S&P 500 with a few extra tech names sprinkled in, you are not alone. American investors…
The image of the retail day trader hunched over four monitors, scalping options between Slack messages, has dominated financial media since the meme stock era. The reality inside the average 401(k) plan…
David Beren There is an ongoing study from Hendrik Bessembinder at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University that I’ve followed closely. It’s titled 100 Years in the U.S. Stock…
Most retail portfolios have quietly become single-country bets, a byproduct of years of U.S. equity dominance that left international allocations as an afterthought. Vanguard Total International Stock Index Fund ETF Shares (NASDAQ:VXUS)…
Cynthia from Missouri asked a question that probably crosses the mind of every investor who has ever looked at their fund’s expense ratio and winced. She told Wes Moss on a recent…
Carl Sullivan At 45, you have roughly 20 years until traditional retirement. That's not a lot of time to waste, but it's not a crisis either. A $50,000 inheritance at this stage is genuinely…
Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (NYSEARCA:VTI) holds roughly $2.1 trillion in assets and has earned its place in millions of retirement portfolios. The appeal is straightforward: one fund, the entire U.S. equity…
Tech workers who receive restricted stock units face an income recognition problem that most financial planning frameworks underestimate. RSUs vest as ordinary income at the full market value on the vesting date,…
Most index investors own the S&P 500 and think they own “the market.” They don’t. The S&P 500 covers roughly 500 of the largest U.S. companies, leaving out several thousand mid-, small-,…
