via GIPHY Here’s my monthly roundup of the best interest rates on cash as of October 2021, roughly sorted from shortest to longest maturities. I look for lesser-known opportunities earning at least double what most savings accounts and money market funds are earning while still keeping your principal FDIC-insured or equivalent. Check out my Ultimate Rate-Chaser Calculator to see how much extra interest you’d earn by moving money between accounts. Rates listed are available to everyone nationwide. Rates checked as of 10/6/2021. Fintech accounts Available only to individual investors, fintech companies often pay higher-than-market rates in order to achieve fast short-term growth (often using venture capital). I define “fintech” as a software layer on top of a different bank’s… [Read More...]

Here’s a follow-up to my post about the return gap of retail investors due to poor timing. For every seller of a stock share, there is a buyer. Therefore, if the timing of retail investors is reliably a little worse than average, we also know that someone else is on the other side of all those trades. Is there a group of non-retail investors that is reliably making money off the “dumb money” trades of retail investors? Larry Swedroe digs into this question in his Advisor Perspectives article The Suckers at the Investment Table: New research confirms that institutional investors, such as mutual funds, outperform the market before fees, and they do so at the expense of retail investors. That is bad news… [Read More...]

There are many ways to access real estate as an asset class – publicly-traded REITs like Realty Income, diversified REIT ETFs, private funds that hold baskets of individual properties, and many new fintech varieties. This Institutional Investor article discusses a new research article comparing public REITs and closed-end private equity real estate (PERE) funds: In a new study published in the Journal of Portfolio Management’s real estate issue, authors Thomas Arnold, David Ling, and Andy Naranjo found that, when compared side-by-side, real estate investment trusts outperformed U.S. closed-end private equity real estate, or PERE, funds by 165 basis points annually. Here is another Nareit article about the study, where I noticed that the research was actually sponsored by Nareit. Here is a … [Read More...]

Just over 45 years ago on August 31st, 1976, the late Jack Bogle started the first index mutual fund at Vanguard. It nearly didn’t get off the ground, garnering only 7% of the initial funding goal – it wasn’t even enough to buy shares of all the stocks in the S&P 500! Read Bogle’s own take from exactly 10 years ago at this 9/3/2011 WSJ article to better appreciate it took determination and stubbornness to make this happen. Industry leaders mocked “Bogle’s folly”, wondering aloud why anyone would voluntarily agree to be “just average”. Well, Bogle had common sense and simple math on his side. He knew that over time, his fund was guaranteed to be above average due to it’s low costs. Some … [Read More...]

Sometimes, it pays to scratch a little beneath the surface. In 2012, well-known behavioral scientist Dan Ariely published a paper that found that when people signed an honesty declaration at the beginning of a form, rather than the end, they were less likely to lie. It since has been cited in more than 400 other academic papers. Nine years later, a group of anonymous researchers at Data Colada actually looked at the data and found it clearly fudged using copy-and-paste and a random number generator. (They have to be anonymous to avoid retribution.) Dan Ariely and the other authors have since retracted the paper and disavowed any prior knowledge of the fake data. You may have heard that it took 25 years for the stock market… [Read More...]

In 2020, the NPR Planet Money podcast did a series called Summer School that focused on economics concepts. You can still listen to those, but the 2021 Summer School series is about investing. Hardcore personal finance geeks might come away bored, but I enjoy hearing how they try to simplify and and explain these complex topics in an approachable manner. If I remember, I plan to have my kids as teens listen to these episodes. Here are the podcasts so far, which include excerpts from earlier Planet Money episodes: Planet Money Summer School 1: The Stock Market Planet Money Summer School 2: Index Funds & The Bet Planet Money Summer School 3: Smooth Spending & The 401K Planet Money Summer School 4: Bonds & Becky With The Good Yield Planet Money Summer School… [Read More...]

Most people must rely on the power of smaller, regular investments from work income to build up their retirement nest egg. In the latest Sound Investing email, Paul Merriman shared a new Lifetime Investment Calculator that helps you see how these gradual investments (dollar-cost averaging) would have added up during various periods, using actual historical returns from 1970 to 2020. I’ve already tried to illustrate how regular investments of $250 or $500 a month can add up over time. But instead of having to manually gather performance numbers from a Vanguard Target Retirement fund in a spreadsheet, this fancier calculator lets you adjust many more variables. You can choose different asset allocations, stock/bond ratio, investment amounts, and so on. Importantly, the calculator uses actual historical returns… [Read More...]

After finishing up the 4-part CNBC Squawk Podcast containing the full “Wealth of Wisdom” interview with Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, the journalist Becky Quick summed up the essence of their 60-year friendship and partnership (emphasis mine): It’s not a complicated lesson, it’s probably just one we don’t sit on and reflect upon often enough. You should surround yourself with people who inspire you, and people you don’t want to disappoint. That’s what it’s all about, right? Making sure we are all our best selves. It’s such a universal truth. All of us can look at the relationships we’ve had over the years, and what inspires you to do better? It’s really those people who put faith… [Read More...]

The advisor-facing parts of brokerage firms are often of interest to DIY investors. In the June 2021 Market Perspectives article of Vanguard’s advisor site, they included their asset class return projections for the next 10 years: Our 10-year, annualized, nominal return projections, as of March 31, 2021, are shown below. Please note that the figures are based on a 1.0-point range around the rounded 50th percentile of the distribution of return outcomes for equities and a 0.5-point range around the rounded 50th percentile for fixed income. These projections should not be used for market timing! GMO offers similar outlooks. Here’s how well their 7-year projections turned out from 2013-2020: GMO forecast in 2013: US Large Cap equities will have a -2.3% annualized real return from July 2013 to July 2020. Reality today: … [Read More...]

When talking about constructing an investment portfolio, you’ll often hear about diversification and buying low-correlation or non-correlated assets. A positive correlation means that the assets tended to move in the same direction. A value of 1 is perfect positive correlation. A negative correlation means that they tended to move in opposite directions. A value of -1 is perfect negative correlation. A zero correlation means that they had no relationship. Morningstar recently released its 2021 Diversification Landscape Report (free download with e-mail) which includes a lot of great information about the correlations between key asset classes from 2001-2020, including the March 2020 COVID-related market crash. I try not to look too finely at historical numbers, but noticing the overall historical trends can be helpful. The lower the correlation … [Read More...]

Here’s my monthly roundup of the best interest rates on cash as of February 2021, roughly sorted from shortest to longest maturities. I track these rates because I keep 12 months of expenses as a cash cushion and there are many lesser-known opportunities to improve your yield while still being FDIC-insured or equivalent. Check out my Ultimate Rate-Chaser Calculator to see how much extra interest you’d earn by moving money between accounts. Rates listed are available to everyone nationwide. Rates checked as of 2/3/2021. Fintech accounts Available only to individual investors, fintech accounts oftentimes pay higher-than-market rates in order to achieve high short-term growth. I will define “fintech” as an app software layer on top of a different bank’s FDIC … [Read More...]

Updated with multiple new limited-time promos. I have the strange hobby of trying out new fintech apps while also collecting their sign-up incentives. Here are several different brokerage apps that offer some variation of free stock trades, modern user interface, real-time quotes, and social sharing. Many are structured like a free lottery ticket with a minimum payout – the odds are that you’ll get a stock valued on the lower end of the ranges mentioned, but I have gotten a few big shares like AAPL before the recent split. They all require a referral link, which means I can get some free stocks as well. A couple are offering 2X to 4X their usual bonuses right now. WeBull 4 Free Stocks Offer Open a … [Read More...]

Although I avoid daily stock market quotes, I have been reading Jeremy Grantham’s quarterly letters and the GMO 7-Year Asset Class Return Forecasts for over 10 years now. These projections are based on their proprietary models, with a strong focus on historical valuation. Each year, I can now compare their current forward-looking forecast against how their past forecasts have turned out. Here’s the GMO forecast looking forward as of November 2020: Here was their forecast back in July 2013: Using the S&P 500 as US Large Cap, we see that the forecast of -2.1% annualized real return was quite far off. ETFReplay shows that both the IVV and VOO S&P 500 ETFs returned +117% between July 30, 2013 to July 30, 2020. That is an annualized return of 11.7%. SmartAsset shows… [Read More...]