Bear markets are part of the market lifecycle. Learn more about the history, implications and what to do as an investor.

Are you worried about how the current economic climate will affect your retirement planning? We’re hearing more and more that Gen X and younger need to save more to retire comfortably. And while the market is unpredictable, focusing on long-term planning is more important than short-term market movements.

Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard Group, gave retail investors a big advantage by offering inexpensive index funds from a company that uses its profits to reduce investor fees. Vanguard helped lower fees for everyone, not just Vanguard investors, by creating quality, low-cost mutual fund products with which other firms had to compete. Vanguards impact continues to be enormous, and it has a very devoted community of followers called “Bogleheads”. 

You know risk and reward are linked. You know you can expect additional return from risky stocks. How much extra return do you usually get from stocks and is it worth taking the risk? This is a subject academics have been looking at for decades and have many models.

The asset growth of thematic funds quadrupled and they offer unique, tactical bets on investment opportunities grouped by a subject or motif. Typically, it’s about technology and our changing future. Thematic funds tend to be a bull market phenomenon, possibly a result of investor overconfidence and enthusiasm. (There’s a good line that bull markets make everyone look smart.) It’s an intuitive strategy: “Let’s invest in a handful of really smart innovative companies that people are excited about, the growth potential is incredible”.

If you checked your 401(k) statement for the last quarter, you lost money. (If you didn’t, I want to invest with you!) Even your usually boring and reliable bonds are down a lot. Worse, they are going down at the same time stocks are going down, another rare occurrence. There have been only three years since World War 2 when the 10-year treasury bond had bigger losses than the S&P500. What the hell, bonds? You changed. Not cool.

You are no doubt familiar with the group of mostly anonymous investors who coordinated the leveraged buying of GameStop, AMC, and other stock options, pushing up the price to the point that some hedge funds lost a lot of money. It was a good David and Goliath story and a new development in consumer investing. Out of curiosity, I bought into the frenzy to see what it was like (I’ll cut to the chase; it was terrifying.)

As an investment manager, I watch the market every trading day, but I do so having spent a lot of time studying the history of stock markets. "The investor who is unaware of financial history is irretrievably handicapped.”

Most 401(k) plans offer ‘target date funds,’ one-stop investment portfolios with a mix of US stocks, international stocks and bonds that automatically get more conservative (fewer stocks, more bonds) as we approach retirement. But it’s not that simple. Here are the four most common mistakes I see with target date funds.

One could reasonably take the position that a company better poised to manage the changing environmental future would deserve to be priced higher. But is that the case?