“We are living in a world of money printing. … That is why I have to recommend gold again. … Once gold surpasses $1,800 an ounce, it will run to the low-to-mid $2,000s.” Quotation attributed to Felix Zuelauf, Zuelauf Asset Management. “Here’s What’s Cooking for 2013,” Barron’s, January 21, 2013. “Investors can choose between artificially priced financial assets or real assets like […]

The perception that day-to-day stock market volatility has increased may convince some investors that they should be trading within their portfolios frequently. Indeed, lots of stock market commentators love to talk about “the action this afternoon” and “what investors should be doing right now.” How about just sitting on their hands? It may come as a surprise but some of […]

Periodic arguments that long-term stock market returns are a thing of the past have cropped up again, with noted bond investment manager Bill Gross calling the stock market a “Ponzi scheme.” He argues that U.S. stocks returned 6.6 percent per year over inflation during the last century, while gross domestic product, a measure of changes in the country’s production of […]

There are two ways of learning: You can be taught how to do something correctly, or you can be shown the consequences of doing it wrong. In the world of investment, it’s a lot cheaper to learn from others’ mistakes. A recent edition of a television current affairs program1 detailed how elderly Australians, many of them with only modest nest eggs, […]

It’s New Year’s Day 2012. In addition to overdosing on televised college football, you’re spending part of the holiday working on the family finances. Armed with a laptop and various online financial tools, you’re on the hunt for appealing stock market opportunities. To prune the list of candidates to a manageable size, you decide to focus on firms that are […]

Much research has supported the benefits of regularly rebalancing a portfolio. It suggests that an investor should start with a target asset allocation and then regularly sell or buy individual holdings in order to keep that allocation steady. For instance, suppose the investor starts with 50 percent in stocks and 50 percent in bonds. A year later the stock market […]

One of the oldest tricks in the investment book is dollar-cost averaging (DCA). This technique suggests that investors will do well over time by slowly investing fixed sums of money into the markets at regular periods. By doing so they will take advantage of the low buying points while not putting too much money in at any one market top. […]