As of today, I am sitting at about 17% in my brokerage/retirement accounts. Why? Outperformance Much to my joy, my accounts had some fantastic performance in January. Rather than get greedy, I decided to take some off the table. I sold completely out of my Travelers (TRV) position. This stock was one of the best…
It’s been approximately six months since i wrote my article on T-bills. Since then T-bills rates have went up considerably. The six month T-bill was yielding 3.22%. Today the T-bill is yielding 5.08%. That is a whopping 58% increase! I am still purchasing short-term T-bills as my old ones mature. Here are the current T-bill…
One thing I’ve seen a lot online are people bragging about how much dividend income they have coming in or how they are beating the market. I think it is always good to keep a historical perspective. Something that’s escaping confident investors: Over the long-term, the majority of stocks underperform T-bills as an investment. A…
It’s been a bit since I’ve added any new stock positions. 2022 was largely a year of adding to my Index Funds and selling off positions that had ran too far or those I wanted to get rid of. This year I wanted to increase the yield of my portfolio slightly and add a new…
For the last year, people have been screaming RECESSION RECESSION! This led to many going for the sidelines, taking their money out of stocks and bonds both. In some cases, this meant selling at the bottom or in the red. I think staying out of the market for too long can be a SERIOUS detriment…
2022 turned out to be a really good year for me, not with just investing, but learning new skills. I spent a lot of time learning new digital marketing and SEO techniques. This started to help my sales towards the later half of the year. I don’t have the numbers on hand but my music…
Many investors like or prefer dividends. Beyond dividends, they specifically like DIVIDEND GROWTH stocks. What is a dividend growth stock? They are are stocks that have been regularly growing their dividends. Preferably at a level above inflation. Normally above 3%. If you had one stock with a dividend growth of 8% and another with a…
One day I was doing some ETF screens, seeing what ETFs were having a good year in this market. I came across VAMO, Cambria Value and Momentum ETF, it caught my eye. I was particularly intrigued because it hasn’t performed all that great compared to the market since it’s inception. However, for the last two…
We are going to look at some consumer staple ETFs. Not all of these ETFs offer the same strategy. Some of them are passive and track an index. Some use quantitative strategies like momentum and factor investing. Lastly, some offer market-cap weightings and others are more equal weighting ETFs. None of these ETFs are presented…
Why I’m doing more Index Investing I’ve always known the odds of beating the market were slim, at least long-term. I’m talking 10 years or more. However, this article by John Rekenthaler entitled, “How many stocks beat the index.” really was the final nail in the coffin for me. By the way, he writes some…
What does Beta mean in Investing? Beta β measures the volatility of a stock in relation to the total market’s volatility. The total market is assigned a beta of 1.0 as a reference. Stocks with a beta greater than 1.0 are said to possess greater volatility than the market. Stocks with beta’s under 1.0 have…
What are the pros of a Mutual Fund? What are the advantages of an ETF? Do either have serious disadvantages? Mutual Funds are older than ETF’s or Exchange Traded funds. Mutual funds started to first appear in the 1920’s, whereas ETF’s have only existed since the 1990’s. Both of these investment vehicles are bundles of…
Treasury Inflation Protected Securities, or TIPS for short, are used to protect investors against unexpected inflation. The typical TIPS bond yield is made up of two portions: 1) A fixed rate plus another 2)A portion that’s determined by the current inflation rate. The fixed rate portion is currently above 1.5% on TIPS, this has led…
When you first look at a bond or bond fund they have all of these terms. Maturity, Yield to Maturity, Duration, Yield to Call, etc. These bond terms are confusing to the new investor. Today we are going to look at the terms Maturity and Duration. What are the differences? Why they don’t mean what…
The Total market is down 21.5% and the S&P 500 is down almost 16% Year to date. The total market is in a BEAR MARKET. Bear markets – KEEP INVESTING! A bear market is when one of the indices falls greater than 20% over an extended period of time. Bear markets are often wrapped with…