Everyone hates the idea that Congresspeople are using their positions to gain secret information to make investments. Political insider trading has been made illegal several times (usually after a damning CBS 60 Minutes broadcast), but later Congresses have either changed the laws or eliminated the penalties. You may have heard that some plucky entrepreneurs have decided to create ETFs that attempt to mirror the Congresspeople’s … Continue reading Insider Investment
Northwestern Mutual does a nice annual study on the ‘state of retirement’ in the USA. It’s a pretty exhaustive analysis that looks at all aspects of life and our involvement and satisfaction with each dimension. Link: Northwestern Mutual 2025 ‘Planning & Progress’ Study I was surprised by a few of the numbers from this year’s study and thought I’d share them. First, Americans are pretty … Continue reading Retirement Confidence
About once a year, some dusty old post from this site will “pop” and go viral. My post on private label grocery products from May of 2017 is the latest. Link: National vs Store Brands For some reason, it’s the top read post of 2025, after sitting mostly ignored for the last 8 years. After its 2017 debut (with a few hundred views), it fell … Continue reading Store Brands Revisited
I recently saw an interesting thread that discussed “How Can You Tell Someone Is Rich?” That is, what are the signs that someone has money, even if you just met them? It caught my attention because high on the list was “they retired from work in their 40s”. Here are some of the responses that people said suggest someone is rich … In general, these … Continue reading Signs Someone is Rich …
It’s good to see the stock market trending up after the chaos of the initial Trump tariff actions this year. The S&P 500 today sits up +2.6% from where it started the year. Still, I’m not quite sure how to read my portfolio. The bond side of our holdings are flat, but the US Dollar – which all of these investments are enumerated in – … Continue reading Investment Returns vs Dollar Strength
The simplest route to FIRE (being financially independent & retired early) is to spend less than you make. That is, simply put … to SAVE. Unfortunately, Americans have never been good savers. I last lamented on this in April 2020, at the start of the pandemic lockdowns. We were told that Americans were such poor savers that the pandemic required the government to bail everyone … Continue reading Personal Savings Rate Update
If you are a certain age, you might have carried a Franklin Day Planner with you to meetings like I did. Before Smartphones, these zippered, leather-backed, “monarch-sized” portfolios were essential to MegaCorp life. I would get to work early and dutifully plot out my objectives for the day. I especially enjoyed seeing the daily quote that accompanied each page. How long ago that seems now! … Continue reading Quotable Financial Quotes
A few readers / friends sent me this cheeky t-shirt image, celebrating the stock market’s quick bounce-back from the Trump tariffs. Folks thought I was too negative about Trump’s move to correct long-standing “trade imbalances” – even though my official investor position was to “stay the course”. Related: Stay The Course Still, I thought it was important to acknowledge that the S&P 500 has quickly … Continue reading Trump Tariff Bounceback
The stock market was relatively flat over the last week with investors still try to puzzle their way through the Trump/GOP approach to tariffs, taxes, debt, and new statements on inflation & interest rates from the Fed. Our neighborhood investor club members were as puzzled as anyone when we met for the last meeting of the Spring. Everyone had their own take on what was … Continue reading Crystal Ball Predictions: Investor Club Input
Even before Trump “paused” his questionable trade policy yesterday, Wall Street analysts offered updated projections for where they thought the stock market would finish up the year. The S&P 500 started the year at 5,869 and had dipped below 5,000 (-15%) after Trump’s 10% minimum tariff and demand for balancing trade deficits. Still, most investment banks were quite positive in their forecasts for where the … Continue reading Crystal Ball Predictions
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