Retirement Insights

How To Make Sense Of Bond Pricing

By McLean Asset Management

As a bond provides a contractual right to a series of future payments received at specified points of time, the price for a bond is simply the present discounted value of the future cash flows. The face value of a bond will be repaid at maturity. A zero-coupon bond provides only a bond’s face value,…

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Your Retirement Number Is Meaningless

By McLean Asset Management

A lot of ad money has been spent trying to make people worry about their “retirement number.” It’s pretty brilliant marketing, actually. Retirement is this big unknown for so many folks, if someone offers to nail it down to a concrete number, of course people will line up. The only problem is, it’s meaningless. It’s…

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Review: Markets Are Right More Often Than You Think

By McLean Asset Management

This article let’s me get on my soapbox about one of my favorite topics: markets don’t need to be right to be efficient. Oftentimes, people equate market efficiency with “right” or “perfect” market prices. That’s simply not true, and in fact, it doesn’t even mean anything. The folks who are advancing these arguments are either misinformed or…

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Review: Legendary investor Jack Bogle’s advice for Trump: 7 reforms investors need now

By McLean Asset Management

Jack Bogle has done more for investors than almost anyone. He popularized passive investing, and founded Vanguard. Everything he has done hasn’t happened by accident. When he talks about the financial services industry people should listen, and think carefully about what he says. He isn’t always right about everything, but he knows what he’s talking…

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Do You Need to Diversify Your Bonds?

By McLean Asset Management

We spend a lot of time talking about the importance of diversification. When it comes to stocks, it’s foundational to our investment approach. Investing in a stock portfolio that isn’t properly diversified is like swimming with sharks without a shark cage. You can do it, but there are safer ways. But that’s stocks. Bonds are…

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Do You Understand How Bonds Work?

By McLean Asset Management

Before we can discuss bonds in depth, it is important that we establish a common understanding of what bonds are and how they work. As a starting point, a bond is a contractual obligation to make a series of specific payments on specific dates. Typically, this includes interest payments made on a semi-annual basis until…

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3 Ways To Incorporate Bonds Into Your Retirement Strategy

By McLean Asset Management

Bonds can be incorporated directly into a retirement strategy in three broad ways: An assets-only approach to build a total returns investment portfolio, Matching the duration of bond funds to the duration of the retirement liability, and Holding individual bonds to maturity to generate the desired cash flows to fund expenses on an ongoing basis…

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Occam’s Razor: Understanding Bond Returns

By McLean Asset Management

WHAT IS OCCAM’S RAZOR? Occam’s Razor is a principle attributed to William Occam, a 14th century philosopher. He stressed that explanations must not be multiplied beyond what is necessary. Thus, Occam’s Razor is a term used to “shave off” or dismiss superfluous explanations for a given event. This concept is largely ignored within the investment…

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2016 – Q4 Quarterly Market Review

By McLean Asset Management

This report features world capital market performance and a timeline of events for the last quarter. It begins with a global overview, then features the returns of stock and bond asset classes in the US and international markets. The report also illustrates the performance of globally diversified portfolios and features a topic of the quarter.…

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