The Range of Annual Returns

At a time when investors have experienced the worst quarter of market returns in perhaps their lifetime it is instructive to review the expectations of long range returns based on various levels of portfolio risk. Vanguard provides the following chart to illustrate...

Active vs. Passive: The Illusory Debate

Every time I read about the “active vs. passive debate” I can feel my blood pressure go up. There is no “debate”.  The only people perpetuating this myth are those who make a living touting active management and those who don’t know the facts. Proponents of...

Bad Times for Active Stock Pickers

Almost no active managed funds have beaten the market/their benchmarks over the past 15 years. Some 66 percent of large-cap active managers failed to top the S&P 500 in 2016. Performance actually got worse over longer time frames, with more than 90 percent missing...

The Happiness Equation

To say that “money isn’t everything” is more than a cliché. Studies in the early 1970s demonstrated that a sense of well-being, or happiness, had not increased commensurately with income over the previous half century.1 That trend continues as the modern world has...