The Morningstar and other fund ratings shouldn’t be used as an occasional guide for fund selection. A more regular and rigorous process should be followed.

We should be thankful for the good stock market environment so far but on the other hand, mindful of their high valuation. 

Retiring near a stock market peak is awful, contrary to popular belief. 

We update our newsletter collection

Bonds are in some critical level. However, strategies remain the same to cope with the uncertainty. 

We give some detailed explanation on our portfolio pages and usages. 

REITs have a long term stock like return and weak correlation with stocks. They can be a good portfolio diversifier. 

We construct tactical conservative portfolios that can outperform one of the best conservative allocation fund Vanguard Wellesley Income by a big margin, both in terms of annualized returns and risk. 

We analyze in more details on what should be used for short term investments and conclude that we prefer using Treasury bills, CDs and total return bond funds in lieu of short term bond funds. 

Cash investments are the final frontier in low cost investing. Banks and/or brokerages, acting as middlemen, have charged extremely high fees traditionally. Roughly speaking,their fees can be from 1% to 3%. This has not come under much public scrutiny. However, with some effort, investors can completely eliminate fees or lower fees considerably. 

Our conservative portfolios continue to outperform, demonstrating it’s possible to derive reasonable returns without incurring much risk. 

We compare returns of  foreign stocks with US stocks. We also look at how global allocation funds have performed and draw some insight from this year’s experience.  

Given the current investment environment, it’s pertinent to revisit the invest and speculate combined strategy. Looking ahead, we will certainly encounter a bear market or a deep correction one day. This strategy presents a sensible, pragmatic and intuitive way to deal with an unruly stock market.

Other than short term cash, total return bond fund portfolios can replace individual holdings of various intermediate bond funds. These portfolios can be treated as the core fixed income holdings in one’s overall investments. 

We use various periods of rolling returns to walk through our representative tactical portfolio and try to experience the feels in the past. This can help us to better understand the nature of a strategy. 

Fidelity recently reduced its sales commission for their buy commission free ETFs. We look at the current list of ETFs.  

We didn’t learn anything as we all know a strategy is not a strategy if we don’t stick to it. 

We summarize our recent AAII article on asset allocations and fund selections. 

We look at the rolling returns of total return bond fund portfolios and discuss the impact on fixed income/cash allocation. 

We offer a simple method to decide asset allocation based on minimum holding periods of assets such as stocks and pointed out that risk is very high for long term retirement investing because of high valuation.