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Welcome to the end of the week! Just sit back, relax, and enjoy this weeks roundup in another edition of Happy Hour.
Staying closer to home seems to be an unwritten rule. By only picking U.S. stocks you ignore the rest of the world. You’re also betting that the U.S. will outperform the rest of the world year after year. The table of asset class returns shows it doesn’t work. That should be enough to broaden your investments. Continue Reading…
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Tables comparing investment returns are nothing new. Fund companies and other financial institutions have used them for years to argue for or against different investing ideas. Though, the problem is most tables are either stuck inside a PDF file or quickly become a giant mess of colored tiles that make it hard to read. I thought I’d take the concept, clean it up, and take it a step further.
The idea started about a month ago with an article about contrarian investing. The article took a contrarian look at past performance across three areas – asset class, sectors, and countries. Continue Reading…
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Welcome to the end of the week! Just sit back, relax, and enjoy this weeks roundup in another edition of Happy Hour.
If you’re a fan of TED Talks, take a look at the Talks at Google channel on Youtube. Google brings in authors, musicians, and other speakers to talk about their books and other topics. There’s been a couple recent videos worth watching on investing. Continue Reading…
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When you invest in funds, knowing the different stock market indexes is key to building a portfolio and tracking its performance. There are two basic reasons why you should know what each index measures:
This is because you’re either invested in index funds or picking mutual funds that try to beat an index.
The first point is fairly straight forward. To better understand how an index fund works, just research the index it tracks.
The index tells you the type of stocks in the fund and how the fund invests based on the rules laid out. Just knowing those two things should give you a good idea if it fits in your portfolio or not. Continue Reading…
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Welcome to the end of the week! Just sit back, relax, and enjoy this weeks roundup in another edition of Happy Hour.
It’s been a bad week for Comcast. It started when a customer released a recording of his experience with customer service. It’s worth a listen. Despite Comcast’s apologies blaming their customer rep went rogue, news broke that this is par for the course. To add to that PR mess, a video repair agent fessed up to more problems to the Consumerist. Continue Reading…
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There is no denying the popularity of ETFs. As we watch this market continue to grow, it’s only natural to see the unsuccessful funds fail along the way. This leads to ETF liquidation and investors worried about their money.
When an ETF closes, it’s not a guarantee you’ll lose money. The good news is there are steps you can take to avoid these unsuccessful ETFs and ways to deal with the liquidation process if it happens to you.
So why does an ETF get shut down? The same reason any fund does – a lack of invested money. There are several reasons for this, which happen to be the same reasons to avoid suspect ETFs: Continue Reading…