For the 10-year period 2008 through 2017, a very wide dispersion in returns has existed in markets. U.S. stocks far outperformed international stocks, and growth stocks outperformed value stocks.

What type of investor are you? This short video from Investing Made Simple explains what it means to be an Active Investor vs. a Passive Investor and illustrates the pros and cons of both. 

FYI, great summary of a little known aspect of tax reform which allows investors to defer gains (and receive a 15% step up in basis) by rolling all or a portion of the gains into low income community funds, eg Qualified Opportunity Zones.

The New York stock market crash of 1987 happened 30 years ago when, on October 19, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA or the Dow) plunged by a then-record 508 points—a 22% decline in the index.

Successful investing requires overcoming one’s own psychological foibles – but you must identify them first.

Here’s a plus for passive investingover active: lower taxes.

Savvy planners focus most of their time and attention on managing things they can know and control, and work hard to filter much of the noise associated with investing. At TWM we've developed the acronym “ADEPPTS” to help you focus on managing:

The stock market “climbed a wall of worry” in the second quarter, fending off concerns about Brexit and slowing growth patterns. During the quarter there was a sharp downtick within the general labor expansion, but recent evidence indicates that it was an aberration. Finally, the Fed signaled that it will be patient as far as interest rate policy.

Experts and pundits are notoriously bad at forecasting, in part because they aren't punished for bad predictions. Also, they tend to be deeply unscientific. Moreover, most of us engage in constant forecasting without even realizing it, and that can have an important impact on the way we think about investments. This podcast from Freakonomics Radio will help you rethink the subconscious ways in which we all take forecasting risk. The psychologist Philip Tetlock is finally turning prediction into a science -- and now even you could become a super forecaster.

The fiduciary rule will help to ensure that financial institutions act in investors’ best interests when providing retirement advice.

Do you understand what diversification does for your portfolio? While people generally know diversification is a good thing, they’re often not sure exactly how or why. Academic research has shown that investors don’t understand diversification's impact on volatility and expected returns.

by economist John Mauldin

An Open Letter to the Next President, Part 4, Where to Find $1 Trillion of Free Money, Making America Competitive Again, New York, Dallas, and Abu Dhabi

When you invest, it’s good to mix things up.  Diversity applies to many things in life—our friends, our colleagues, food, and sports—but it is most well known in the context of investing, and it’s commonly referred to as being diversified.

The beauty of a well-diversified portfolio is that you can come out ahead by sticking to the middle.

Are you really worse off after the recent drop in stocks?

Sharp increases or decreases in the stock market may have a lower impact on your financial plan than you think. Sometimes when you lose in one aspect of your plan, you gain in another. That’s the “Even Steven” concept.

Since the Federal Reserve recently raised short term interest rates by .25%, there has been a lot of discussion on the impact that will have on the Domestic and International markets. Open this article and examine 7 charts that explains the decision making process of the Federal Reserve that brought the first rate hike since 2006.

Take full advantage of the diversification and return of foreign stocks.  

Commodities and Emerging Markets have performed poorly in the last few years. Should you sell low?

While it would be fun to hold a Portfolio in which all of the asset classes were going up at the same time, it would be a nightmare if they were all moving down at once.

To protect against epic losses, investors seek uncorrelated returns — asset classes that behave dissimilarly so that a portfolio’s ingredients don’t all move in the same direction at the same time.

But diversified portfolios should be built with the knowledge that including uncorrelated assets means always having to endure pain in part of the portfolio. That part will be going down or remaining flat, since it tends to move differently from the uncorrelated part that is going up.