The Intersection of Personal Finance, Economics, and Politics.
Today was the all time high closing price for the dividend reinvested, inflation adjusted S&P 500. I know that much of the financial world has been rambling about the continual new highs in the stock market. You haven’t been, though… you read my post earlier this year (or read my Tweet this morning) where I [...]
Editor: On May 8, 2013 there was a new dividend adjusted closing high in the S&P 500. Retained for posterity: On March 28, 2013 the S&P 500 Nominal Closing price ‘broke’ the record, so I updated the article. Sorry, folks – based on my daily CPI adjusted total return data, we’re still 3.9% off the [...]
Editor: We’ve since put our S&P 500 trailing returns calculations into a tool you can use. Dave Ramsey is a controversial figure in the Finance realm, at least in blogs (and blog comments), discussion boards, and other mediums where personal financial mathematics are discussed. However, Ramsey’s controversy doesn’t generally come about from his investment advice [...]
You may have heard of ‘theta’ or ‘time-value’ decay, but in this article we’re going to play it close to the vest with an illustrated example. I recently showed you the results of a “failed” model based on implied prices for an S&P 500 ETF, SPY. We’re going to dedicate a few more precious time [...]
Wow, we haven’t done one of these for a while. And what are these, you may ask? A weird little property of options pricing, actually – you can back out predicted prices of a stock on a particular day by simply looking at options prices. The ‘most likely’ price, at least dictated by the market, [...]
It may be hard to recall now, but in 2004 a President won his election while promising to reform Social Security to allow private accounts. George Bush ultimately failed at that goal, but with Social Security again in the limelight during the whole “Fiscal Cliff” overreaction, we wanted to toss some facts out there to [...]
“Oh, I don’t invest in stocks. They’re too risky” said a young (urban) professional friend of mine. Five minutes later he was reconsidering that statement, and you’ll be happy to know he’s now the proud owner of some stock (well, at least some stock mutual funds).
In a case of great timing, DQYDJ’s article guessing how Mitt Romney has so much money in his IRA is now the third most popular article on the site! While I hold no belief that this situation will continue past November of this year, I think that, in the moment, it’s interesting to ask how a retail investor (read: the rest of us) might have fared had we contributed as much as the Romney family must have during Mitt’s 24 year stint in the public sector (whew). So, how much out-performance did Mr. Romney achieve?
If you read my recent article on my returns as an active investor, you’ll note that for years I invested in mutual funds before ever putting a single dollar into an individual stock.
I mean, what gives? At what point did your confidence (ego?) allow you to make the leap from a passive investor to an active investor?
