Comments on: What Matters In Investing

By: 41 Bloggers Share Their Best Money Advice | Squawkfox

41 Bloggers Share Their Best Money Advice | Squawkfox — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 04:51:25 +0000

[...] What Matters In Investing | Amateur Asset Allocator [...]

By: How To Pick A Money Market Mutual Fund - Amateur Asset Allocator

How To Pick A Money Market Mutual Fund - Amateur Asset Allocator — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:01:56 +0000

[...] Ratio Expenses matter when choosing investments, and money market funds are no exception. Expenses come directly out of [...]

By: Vanguard Star Fund (VGSTX): The Ultimate Fund For Beginners? - Amateur Asset Allocator

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:01:30 +0000

[...] price to pay for quality active management. Since expenses are one of the few things that really matter in investing, it pays to keep them low. Sure, 0.32% isn’t quite as low as most index funds, but the Star [...]

By: Weekend Link Love And Carnival Roundup - Amateur Asset Allocator

Weekend Link Love And Carnival Roundup - Amateur Asset Allocator — Sun, 03 May 2009 20:56:35 +0000

[...] thanks to FIRE Finance for including my post What Matters In Investing in this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance, Lao Tzu edition (love the theme). Following [...]

By: Weekend Linkage: Investing, Debit Cards and Your Bank — Automatic Finances

Weekend Linkage: Investing, Debit Cards and Your Bank — Automatic Finances — Sat, 02 May 2009 12:12:26 +0000

[...] Asset Allocator describes What Matters In Investing: diversification and expenses. He advocates using index funds and having assets in Large Cap U.S. [...]

By: Harrison

Harrison — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:08:33 +0000

You have done a good job by showing us the easiest and simple way to invest. Yeah, I have to admit that I really confuse and think that investing is very complicated. But after reading your post, I understand that investing can be simple too. As long as we know what we want and invest accordingly, I think things will be better.

By: MoneyEnergy

MoneyEnergy — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:05:18 +0000

Good summary, but where are the ETFs instead of mutual funds? If you can make a good lump-sum payment into an ETF it’s going to be cheaper than funds. Also, considering that commodities are the basis of real production I don’t think I would call them or even real estate esoteric – they’re pretty fundamental, at least they are for me. I can appreciate the idea of the “least diversification you need,” in terms of keeping it simple, but the downside to that of course if it you’re all in indexes then when a September 2008 happens, your whole portfolio goes down. It does require much more work to pick individual stocks, but I liked seeing that some of my consumer and health care stocks barely got scratched during the downturn.

By: PT Money

PT Money — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:48:56 +0000

I suspect this will be your last blog post since you let the cat out of the bag?

Just kidding. Nice article. I’m off to sign up for that free account and test my expense ratio. Thanks for the tip!

By: ObliviousInvestor

ObliviousInvestor — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:40:29 +0000

Hi Kyle. Thank you for the mention.

And thank you for being willing to “tell it like it is,” so to speak. I suspect that many bloggers are afraid to take a stand out of a desire to avoid any sort of liability.

For example, instead of keeping it simple and saying “The lower your portfolio’s combined expense ratio, the higher your future returns are likely to be” they’ll qualify the statement in so many ways that it’s no longer saying anything at all.