Last week, I wrote that from a modern portfolio theory perspective, stocks actually become more risky with time (Obi-Wan Kenobi was right).  Because even small differences in returns can have monumental consequences to the eventual size of your nest egg, every little bit counts.  Mutual funds with high expense ratios are an unnecessary and outright harmful [...]

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First off, let me announce that apparently I’m a “known spammer”.  A few weeks ago, a spammer sent out tens of thousands of spam emails from bogus email accounts using my domain.  Consequently, it looks like I’ve been placed on Akismet’s “spammer” list even though I had nothing to do with it and no way to prevent [...]

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Do stocks get less risky with time?  That’s actually an interesting question and the answer, as with most things, is “it depends.”  For most of our investing lives, it’s been beat into our head by the more responsible financial gurus that stocks are for the long term.  That is, if you value your wealth you [...]

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Doing my usual rounds reading various personal finance blogs yesterday, I discovered the IRS has raised the business mileage deduction to 58.5 cents per mile, up 8 cents per gallon over the past year.   Obviously, as a small business owner or somebody who spends a lot of time driving for work, you’d be a fool [...]

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Legendary value investor Benjamin Graham once said “You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right.”  Now more than ever, Benjamin Graham’s wise words must be remembered.  Just because a stock goes down after you buy it doesn’t mean you made a [...]

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According to the aptly named logicalfallacies.info, a logical fallacy is, quite simply, an error of reasoning.  Logical fallacies abound in everyday life:  everybody from college professors to politicians, businessmen, and scientists unknowingly commit these errors of reasoning on a daily basis.  The financial media is not exempt from this.  Following are logical errors the financial [...]

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Some of you may have heard of the Permanent Portfolio (PRPFX), an unorthodox mutual fund that bears more resemblance to a modern university endowment (such as the famous Yale endownment) than a traditional retail mutual fund.  What’s so unusual about it?  For starters, the fund has only half its assets in traditional mutual fund asset [...]

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The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was the Pièce de résistance of the Clinton presidency and is likely to form the major part of his legacy.  While I have my problems with it (is it REALLY a free trade agreement?), it did represent a symbolic step forward in the drift towards globalization.  I say [...]

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Government stimulus packages are big business, apparently.  Everybody wants a piece of that $50 billion pie and prostitutes are no exception.  The Moonlight Bunny Ranch in Carson City is offering the first 100 customers who show up with their stimulus rebate check a two-for-one deal, according to CNBC.  It’s called, you guessed it, “more bang [...]

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Before the Fair Tax advocates attack me as being uninformed, first let me tell you I am actually for the Fair Tax, or at least some form of consumption tax instead of the current income tax system.  Unfortunately, the Fair Tax proposal in its current incarnation has a few serious flaws, some of them unintentionally [...]

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