Is investing in the stock market akin to gambling? It certainly carries a reasonable amount of risk. Yet, done correctly, investing in the market is not remotely gambling. For comparison, consider games of chance. The best one to play is Blackjack. If you play every...
Transparency is a highly valued attribute that is routinely promised—and frequently undelivered. In fact, it often seems that the more loudly transparency is touted, the more opaqueness is practiced. Perhaps Shakespeare’s famous line from Hamlet, “The lady doth...
Encouraging a 20-something friend at my gym to attend a workshop I was giving on investing and financial planning, I quipped, “I’ll teach you how to be a millionaire.” “Really?” she responded. I quickly explained that, if someone her age invested $6,000 a year in...
In two recent columns, I suggested that consuming a politically unbalanced media diet could negatively affect your long-term investment returns. The more strongly people buy into the rhetoric of their political parties, the more difficult it is to be pragmatic about...
Aligning your stated values and your spending is something I encourage as part of financial wellness. It isn’t always easy to do. For example, someone strongly concerned about climate change will likely avoid buying items like bottled water, plastic bags, aerosols,...
I recently asked an investor who had a history of making poor financial decisions to send me a list of his sources for news that impacted his financial decisions. They were all extreme in their political bent, with very low to mixed probability of being factual. There...
