“To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.” ― Lao Tzu One of the wonders of the modern world is our access to information. The answer to (or at least someone’s opinion on) every question under the sun is right at our fingertips, just a google search away. But this limitless information and the apparently continuous increase in... Read More
How much can I spend in retirement? For many, that’s the million-dollar question – literally. The first step taken of any retirement planning should be developing a baseline financial plan, and understanding the appropriate withdrawal rate is paramount to this process. During the early stages of plan development for our clients, we often get questions about the 4% withdrawal rule... Read More
“Most lack the courage and stamina to stand apart from the herd and tolerate short-term underperformance to reap long-term rewards.” - Seth Klarman Ask anyone off the street to name a great investor and chances are you'll hear Warren Buffett---often held up as the paragon of investing success. But what if I told you he spent more time underperforming the... Read More
Last time we looked at how to generate a paycheck from your investment accounts. Getting money out of your portfolio is important, but just as important is knowing from which account to pull the funds as most retirees are going to have some mix of taxable, tax-deferred (IRA, 401(k), etc.), and tax-free (Roth IRA) accounts at retirement. The order in... Read More
What are interest rates telling us about the current state of the economy? And, more importantly for investors, what are they telling us about the markets? A few weeks back Ben Carlson had a good post addressing the first question. He asks what interest rates (specifically the spread between 2-year Treasury yields and 10-year Treasury yields) are telling us about... Read More
In a series of articles about factor investing we’ve defined what we mean by factor investing, we listed the factors and examined their performance, and last time we examined how a strategy can still work when everyone knows about it. The next question we get is, if a strategy works, why doesn’t everyone do it? Why doesn’t everyone earn a... Read More
"Avoiding a problem with foresight and good design is a cheap, highly leveraged way to do your work. Extinguishing a problem before it gets expensive and difficult is almost as good, and far better than paying a premium when there's an emergency. Fretting about an impending problem, worrying about it, imagining the implications of it... all of this is worthless.... Read More
“More investors don't copy our model because our model is too simple. Most people believe you can't be an expert if it's too simple." ~Charlie Munger when asked why more investors hadn't copied Berkshire Hathaway's approach to investing* Value and other forms of factor investing aren’t new. They’ve been around for a while now and are widely documented in the... Read More
Investing well, like any significant endeavor, requires some level of pain to succeed. In a recent article Brad Stulberg, a writer for Outside Magazine and Runner’s World shared the advice he received from his marathon coach. To succeed as a marathoner, he “would need to learn how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.” Stulberg says he, “didn’t know it at... Read More
Last time we reviewed the advantages of index funds and introduced the concept that different stocks may have different attributes (called “factors”) which lead to different returns. This time, we will specify the four primary factors identified in the research and look at the differences they make to returns. Then we will discuss some drawbacks or things to be aware of when... Read More
