Bob French, CFA

The financial media loves to talk about interest rates. There are a lot of good reasons for this, but two of the big ones are that interest rates are really important, and they’re relatively understandable and have a direct connection to most people’s lives. They are tied to the mortgage rate you can get, the…

Everyone always talks about investing (and planning) for the long term. But they’re usually vague about what the “long term” actually means. Does that mean 5 years? 10 years? More? (Spoiler: the answer is definitely more). And frankly, talking about how you need to focus on the long term can feel like a bit of…

Almost everyone knows that they need to invest their money to help prepare for retirement. It’s one of the keys to getting where you want to go. The markets may (ok, they will) bounce around in the short term, but over the long term, they have done very well for disciplined investors. But why have markets been…

Financial markets are constantly on the move, and those moves can have serious implications for what your retirement will look like. Still, most people don’t really have any clue as to why the markets move the way they do. They see it as some dark alchemy, or at best, essentially random. In the long run, though,…

The 2022 midterm elections are coming up (remember to vote on November 8th). With every election, there’s always a lot of talk about how important it is to vote (true), and that if the other side wins it means the end of the world (potentially less true). There are always important issues at play, and…

How much you save for retirement goes a long way to determining how much you can spend in retirement. The more you save while you’re working, all else equal, the more you can spend in retirement. It sounds straightforward, but it seems to be something that many people forget, or at the very least, seem…

People seem to think commodities (especially gold) are suitable guards against inflation. I want to explain why that’s not true – at least over any useful time frame – and then tell you about some of the much better tools available. Commodities are just things. They don’t produce any value in and of themselves. They’re…

Mass customization is the dream for most industries, and the financial services industry is no different. Everyone’s investing goals are different, so it makes sense that we would want to be able to specifically design the funds that we use to reach our goals. The plethora of mutual funds and ETFs out there give us…